A Hedge Fund That Bet Against Housing Becomes an Ohio Landlord

Thousands of brick houses line the streets of Huber Heights, a leafy suburb of Dayton named for Charles Huber, the builder who developed it in the 1950s. Until this year, his family was the Ohio town’s biggest landlord, owning one-third of all rental housing. Now the tenants’ payments are being routed to a $9 billion hedge fund.

In February, Magnetar Capital, a hedge fund known for its controversial housing bets leading up to the property crash, acquired a company that owns about 1,900 rental properties—about 1,500 of them in Huber Heights—from Huber’s widow, Teresa. The purchase makes Magnetar the owner of one in every 11 homes in the town. One of its first moves as landlord was to ask for a tax break. On April 1, VineBrook Partners, the company Magnetar hired to manage the properties, filed to have the assessed value on 1,218 of the homes cut by 49 percent, to $50 million from $98.6 million, according to Karl Keith, the Montgomery County auditor.