Wall Street Is Buying Up Entire Neighborhoods

For Rebecca Harris, the little house she rented in Huntersville, North Carolina, in 2020 represented her escape from a toxic marriage, the beginning of a new life for herself and her children.

Until the ceiling started caving in.

Harris’s landlord was FirstKey Homes — one of a relatively new, and growing, class of single-family rental companies. FirstKey had bought the house in Huntersville in 2019, and leased it to Harris the following February. Over the next four years, the home was plagued by innumerable problems: a sewage leak that flooded...