The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether bonds backed by single-family rental homes are using overvalued property assessments, an article in Bloomberg by Matt Scully stated.
According to the article, which cited a person familiar to the matter, the agency has been looking at whether BPOs, broker price opinions, were wrongly inflated, potentially serving as a starting point for an industrywide probe.
From the article:
Radian Group Inc.’s Green River Capital unit is one of the market participants that received a request for information from the Securities and Exchange Commission in March about broker price opinions, or BPOs, the company said in a regulatory filing late Friday. Green River provides BPOs that are used to value real estate in securitizations.
Despite the probe, Radian stated in the article that it routinely gets such requests from regulators, and the disclosure didn’t indicate that Green River was the focus of the agency’s inquiry.
The news comes amid growing demand in the single-family rental securitization market. Earlier this year, Invitation Homes, Blackstone Group’s single-family rental operator, went public and raised more than $1.5 billion in its initial public offering. The news marked the largest by a U.S real estate investment trust since Paramount Group.
