Amazon-backed company buys more than $100 million worth of single-family homes amid deteriorating U.S. real estate market

Many news headlines have been predicting a real estate market crash for nearly a year, but prices are still rising in many parts of the U.S.

According to data from Redfin, the median sales price is up more than 9.38% since January and down just 3.4% from its peak in May 2022.

Despite rising mortgage interest rates, buyers are finding little relief from home prices due to a huge supply shortage.

According to an analysis from Realtor.com, the gap between single-family home construction and household creation has grown to 6.5 million homes in 2022.

Nearly before housing prices began skyrocketing in 2021, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos bet on a Seattle-based startup that had a mission to make''Real estate investment more accessible to retail investors.

This year, Arrived Homes became the first company to legally sell shares of individual rental homes to non-qualified investors. Investors on the platform have already accumulated more than 294 single-family homes totaling more than $109 million. Bezos' investment in this real estate start-up proved timely, as a surge in home prices and then rising mortgage rates served to push U.S. homeownership down to its lowest level since 1970.

The billionaire entrepreneur isn't the only one betting that the U.S.

While some people blame investors like Bezos for contributing to the housing shortage, others see shared ownership through platforms like Arrived as the only way to invest in real estate in today's market.