I an going off the most recent stuff.More correctly, some of the houses BlackRock built were new construction. They also purchased scads of foreclosures.
A $60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street (Published 2020)
Hundreds of thousands of single-family homes are now in the hands of giant companies — squeezing renters for revenue and putting the American dream even further out of reach.www.nytimes.com
By 2016, 95 percent of the distressed mortgages on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s books were auctioned off to Wall Street investors without any meaningful stipulations, and private-equity firms had acquired more than 200,000 homes in desirable cities and middle-class suburban neighborhoods
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Throughout the country, the firms created special real estate investment trusts, or REITs, to pool funds to buy bundles of foreclosed properties.
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as chief executive and chairman, renamed the bank OneWest and then foreclosed on more than 35,000 Californians, reaping government subsidies on nearly every one.
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And so, having bought the bulk of foreclosed homes in certain desirable neighborhoods — many of which didn’t have rental inventory before the crisis — these companies now have what Suzanne Lanyi Charles, a professor of urban planning at Cornell, characterizes as oligopolistic power over some local housing markets.
And buying foreclosures is them buying from the bank.
They arnt buying people out as people seem to claim, going to places and offering 50% markup in cash.