This longtime Phoenix realtor is quitting as investors take over neighborhoods

There was a lot Ken Clark liked about being a realtor.

He liked his clients, especially the first-time home buyers. He liked that he could be flexible, especially when he was serving in the state Legislature as a Democratic representative.

But none of it was enough to keep Clark in the business.

He has built another career in clean energy public policy, but as he told The Show, he’s letting his license expire as he has watched Wall Street turn Phoenix neighborhoods into commodity markets.

Full conversation

Ken Clark

KEN CLARK: I became a realtor in 2008, because I had a terrible sense of timing. It was right during the recession. And I learned a bunch about the market and historic properties where I specialized and how to be scrappy and work very hard. And I really enjoyed working for my clients, especially first-time homebuyers, because that means you are helping them make a really good decision with their first house, and that has echoes throughout the rest of their lives.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.

CLARK: But, starting at about, I'd say about 2019, I really noticed that the number of homes going to investors was increasing dramatically. We started to see the number of homes being purchased away from regular buyers, from institutional investors. They were really closing. Sometimes 30% or 40% of all homes in any given month were going to institutional investors rather than regular homebuyers.

GILGER: Right, so let me ask you about that and the implications there. I mean, affordable housing has been such an important topic, as a state lawmaker, I'm sure you're aware of that. But also just in the fact that most people today can't afford a starter home.

As a realtor, like, what did that look like in your everyday practice, having this many people who are not real people who are kind of investment firms buying up all the housing stock?

CLARK: Yeah, I wanna start by saying I've never been one of those realtors that says, you know, everybody must own a home, right? Sometimes I think that's driven by a desire to sell a lot of houses, but I do believe that it is a really great way to start your savings and invest in your own future.

What's a little discouraging about this whole discussion is that all I see are conversations about how to build more houses or more apartments, but not like address the problems that we have in the market right now.

So let me give you an example. In the 2024 presidential election, both candidates had plans for dealing with the housing crisis. I didn't see either of them address this issue, and frankly, it's a very bipartisan issue. I talk to people all the time who are concerned about what's happening to their neighborhoods.

There's fewer people in the neighborhood who have a connection to the neighborhood, who are personally invested in the neighborhood, and that has an effect on the direction of the neighborhood. It's a bipartisan issue. I would think, I feel, and I wrote in my article, that it is a winner for both parties.

GILGER: So politically, you see this as an opportunity, but you're critical of the kind of major real estate organization, the National Association of Realtors, you say isn't serving homeowners, but Wall Street.

CLARK: Yeah, you know, it was drilled into me when I first got my license that we have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients and the customers. Those are considered two different things. Clients are our clients, customers are basically homebuyers at large. And to me, a fiduciary responsibility means looking into the future a little bit and making sure that we are protecting customers from trends that could be harmful to their ability to buy a home in the future or sell their home to somebody.

I think a healthy community has a nice mix of homeowners and renters, all of whom feel connected to that community and that they have an investment in that community. And I think it is harder to do that when you have large institutional investors on the other side of the country who don't really have that connection.

GILGER: So what do you think this should look like? Like you, you argue in your piece that the National Association of Realtors should be lobbying against this kind of thing, should be lobbying for the, the regular homeowner.

But how do they do that? What should that look like?

CLARK: So I will say first that there are a lot of great things that the National Association of Realtors does, and I mentioned that in the article. Over the years, they were upfront in protecting property rights for same-sex couples. But when it comes to this, I just haven't seen the kind of advocacy that I had hoped I would see. And I could be proven wrong, but I just haven't seen that kind of standing up.

So you asked what it should look like. It's simply that I think that the National Association of Realtors should be helping at the federal level and the state level, craft laws that protect our neighborhoods from being turned into a commodity. If you assume the number that 24% of all homes in the country are owned by investors, that's also 24% fewer homes that realtors are allowed to go out and represent regular homeowners on, right? So their business is shrinking. I feel like they want to get in the game as well.

GILGER: You talk in the piece about how you view your role as a realtor in terms of creating equity, maybe writing some historical wrongs when it comes to things like same-sex couples or redlining, things like that. You say that this, you think we will look back at as another blight on the profession like the Great Recession or the years of redlining. Tell us why.

CLARK: Oh, I really do believe that. I believe it's because it's easy to not see this if you don't want to see it. It's just one of those things that's clear in the rearview mirror, and hopefully we get it in the rearview mirror.

Let's just talk about how problematic it is, and fewer people buy homes who want to buy homes because they're pushed out of the market by very wealthy, large institutional investors. That means they're gonna rent, which is fine, except we also have a rental situation where rents are going up.

So that means that they may find themselves in this weird rental spiral where they're less and less able to save money for the future. They don't forget, this 24%, I think was probably made up of both long term rentals, but also short term rentals. A lot of those homes are sitting empty for a lot of the time.

So it's unused available housing that somebody could be using rather than, you know, letting go of their money every month, not reinvesting that into their own future.

GILGER: There are long term economic implications to this, right?

CLARK: I believe so. Sure, if you don't have intergenerational wealth transfer, then it is harder for people to get their kids through college. It's harder for people to plan for their own retirement, and I don't want to make the case — I am not making the case — that this is a panacea. There are all kinds of things that need to happen to solve the housing problem.

This is one of the things, and I argue the thing that people have not been talking enough about, so it needs to be combined with those other conversations about how can we build houses more quickly, how can we build homes, owner-occupied homes, more densely in urban areas. We need to address all of those things.

The Show also reached out to the National Association of Realtors. They did not send a response.