Homeownership? For Whom?

You’ve been sold a picture: a tiny house, a tiny yard, a tiny garden. Two kids, a dog, a cat.

Reality check

No pets. No yard. No garden. No deed. 

Just a lease from a company you’ll never meet—at prices set by algorithms and “hands-off” managers who don’t live here and don’t have to. Whole neighborhoods drift into the control of faceless enterprises that send drones to inspect, bots to bill, and contractors to do the bare minimum.

The new landlord: an app that slices your home into “shares”

Arrived-style platforms turn homes—the base of family life—into bite-sized financial products anyone can trade. They take a single house, wrap it in a special corporate shell (a “series LLC”), and sell pieces of it to thousands of small investors who collect the rent and future profits.¹ ³ In 2022, Arrived also pushed into vacation rentals as a formal asset class.²

Sounds clever. On islands with fixed land and already brutal prices, it’s gasoline on a fire.

Why Hawaiʻi is different (and why this matters)

Hawaiʻi isn’t a big, elastic market. It’s a tight island system with chronic underbuilding and wage-price mismatch. UHERO calls it a “severe housing crisis.” Short-term rentals already take up about 6% of statewide housing (2024), and out-of-state buyers account for ~20% of single-family and 31% of condo purchases.⁴ ⁵ When platforms make it easy for thousands of nonresidents to buy tiny slices of local houses, that adds demand without adding roofs—and pushes prices even farther from what local families earn.

This isn’t just Hawaiʻi. Nationally, investors bought about 47,000 homes in Q1 2025, with market share staying elevated for two years.⁶ ⁷ Federal analysts warn that institutional buying can raise prices and rents—a risk Hawaiʻi can’t absorb.⁸ Arrived’s “innovation” isn’t being huge; it’s scaling nonlocal demand by letting anyone buy a piece of your future house.³ That aggregate pressure is what locks first-time buyers out.

Vacation-rental gravity: from family homes to short-stay profit

Platform incentives lean toward short-term yield, not long-term neighbors. Arrived’s own materials walk through its vacation-rental playbook and partnerships; a separate company—Arrived Vacation Rentals—actively markets and manages STRs, including on Kauaʻi.² ⁹ Meanwhile, counties are moving the other way: Maui’s Bill 9 (2025) advances a phase-out of STRs in apartment districts to free homes for residents after the Lahaina fires.¹⁰ ¹¹ Platforms that monetize STRs pull in the opposite direction.

“But big investors aren’t the majority.” That misses the point.

Fractional platforms multiply many tiny out-of-state investors into one cash-ready buying machine, bidding on the same single-family homes local families need. UHERO’s numbers show how sensitive Hawaiʻi is to nonresident demand; in thin markets, even small increases ripple into lower homeownership and higher rents.⁴ And as Wired put it, lowering the dollar bar to invest in rentals expands the investor pool competing with would-be homeowners.¹²

The enforcement headache nobody asked for

Hawaiʻi’s timeshare law (HRS 514E) looks at how a property is used, not what a platform calls it. If a “fractional” product rotates stays under 60 days among multiple owners, it can count as a time share plan—with registration and strict geographic limits that generally confine such use to resort/hotel areas.¹³ ¹⁴ Translation: already-stretched county staff now have to police Airbnb + securities wrappers + timeshare rules at once. That’s regulatory whack-a-mole.

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What we should do (and why it’s fair)

• Draw a bright line. Prohibit fractional securitization of single-family/duplex homes for non-owner occupants statewide—or allow it only in resort/hotel zones via county opt-ins.
• Put locals first. Give counties or nonprofit housing trusts a right of first refusal when platforms try to buy in residential districts.
• Tax the behavior, not the branding. Add a conveyance surcharge for pooled-investment home purchases; earmark it for down-payment help for first-time local buyers.
• Protect neighborhoods. Keep STRs inside resort areas and accelerate Maui-style conversions of STRs back to long-term homes with clear timelines and help for compliant owners.¹¹
• Radical transparency. Require platforms to disclose parcel-level listings, use type (LT vs. STR), ownership structure, and beneficial owners to counties and DCCA so we can actually enforce the rules.¹³

Summary

Arrived-style platforms are optimized to financialize the scarcest thing we have: homes. In a market UHERO already tags as severely unaffordable—with STR drag and heavy out-of-state demand—inviting fractional investment vehicles into our single-family stock will deepen the crisis for Hawaiʻi families. Keep primary-residential neighborhoods off-limits to these models, keep STRs in resort zones, and turn housing back into homes.

1. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Arrived Homes, LLC, Offering Circular (Form 253G1), May 17, 2022, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1821720/000182172022000002/arrivedhomes253g1.htm (accessed September 3, 2025).
2. Taylor Soper, “Real estate investment startup Arrived adds vacation-rental properties to platform,” GeekWire, September 7, 2022, https://www.geekwire.com/2022/arrived-vacation-rentals/ (accessed September 3, 2025).
3. Arrived, “Easily Invest in Real Estate,” https://arrived.com/ (accessed September 3, 2025); Amanda Hoover, “Your Next Landlord Could Be 100 Random People,” Wired, August 25, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/fractional-real-estate-homes-fractions-crowdfunding/ (accessed September 3, 2025).
4. University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization (UHERO), Hawaiʻi Housing Factbook 2025, 2025, https://uhero.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Hawai%CA%BBi-Housing-Factbook-2025.pdf (accessed September 3, 2025).
5. “Hawaiʻi Housing Factbook 2025: Modest improvements amid ongoing crisis,” University of Hawaiʻi System News, May 14, 2025, https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/05/14/hawaii-housing-factbook-2025/ (accessed September 3, 2025).
6. Redfin, “Investors’ Home Purchases Rose 2% as the Housing Market Shows Signs of Recovery,” Redfin News, May 15, 2025, https://www.redfin.com/news/investor-home-purchases-q1-2025/ (accessed September 3, 2025).
7. “Redfin Reports Investor Purchases of U.S. Homes Rose 2% in Q1,” Yahoo! Finance (press release), May 15, 2025, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/redfin-reports-investor-purchases-u-120000974.html (accessed September 3, 2025).
8. U.S. Government Accountability Office, Rental Housing: Information on Institutional Investment in Single-Family Homes (GAO-24-106643), May 22, 2024, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106643 (accessed September 3, 2025).
9. Arrived Vacation Rentals, “Management Services,” https://arrivednow.com/management-services/ (accessed September 3, 2025); Arrived Vacation Rentals, “Why Arrived’s Rentals Are Better Than Hotel Rooms,” blog noting Oʻahu and Kauaʻi, https://arrivednow.com/blog/why-arriveds-rentals-are-better-than-hotel-rooms/ (accessed September 3, 2025).
10. Maui County Council, “Bill 9 (2025) overview,” https://mauicounty.us/bill-9-2025-overview/ (accessed September 3, 2025).
11. Audrey McAvoy, “Maui panel passes bill to curb vacation rentals and boost housing supply after Lahaina wildfire,” AP News, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/hawaii-maui-vacation-rentals-lahaina-wildfire-2f73c657e2fb40b65d707889bac56b63 (accessed September 3, 2025).
12. Hoover, “Your Next Landlord Could Be 100 Random People.”
13. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes, Chapter 514E—Time Sharing Plans, §514E-1 (definition of “time share plan”), Hawaiʻi Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, https://cca.hawaii.gov/pvl/files/2013/08/hrs_pvl_514e.pdf(accessed September 3, 2025).
14. Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes §514E-5, “Geographic limitations,” Justia Law, https://law.justia.com/codes/hawaii/2022/title-28/chapter-514e/section-514e-5/ (accessed September 3, 2025).