So back in the day, call it 2007 or so, I used to follow IrvineHousingBlog. It was a savvy developer who basically predicted the apocalyptic housing bubble that hit in 2008/2009. About 2009 he started putting forth the idea that the best solution was for large investors to buy foreclosures and sell them back to their owners as rentals. I'm not sure how far he got, but...
Well, as it turns out, Citigroup and others thought it'd be a dandy idea to buy up a bunch of single family homes and turn them into rentals (about 1/3 of the original idea). For some reason, nobody thought to point out that Citigroup et.al had been demonstrably shitty property managers so far and that maybe they might not know what they were getting into.
Lo and behold.