Updated May 18 at 2:24 p.m.

Christine Thompson lived in a cozy three-bedroom, single-family house on a quiet residential street in Springfield for more than 50 years.

But in January, the 72-year-old widow was forced to move out after the unexpected death of her husband left her in financial ruin, leading to a foreclosure auction.

Now the house is owned by a limited liability company called Ruby Realty, LLC, whose owners manage hundreds of rental units in western Massachusetts. Thompson lives about 20 miles away in a rental unit, still hurt over how she was treated by new owners.

“I know people are out to make money. I understand that,” she told GBH News. “The worst thing was how I felt and how I was treated. We are human.”

The change of ownership from a local resident to a group of investors is increasingly common across Massachusetts — from the cash-strapped neighborhoods of Springfield to tony neighborhoods in Newton and Nantucket, the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

In 2021, business entities purchased nearly 6,600 single-family homes across the state, more than 9 percent of all single-family homes sold. That’s nearly double the rate of such purchases a decade ago, according to a GBH News analysis of data provided by the Warren Group, a real estate data analysis firm.

Investors and other businesses — the majority of them limited liability companies — spent more than $5.6 billion last year in Massachusetts purchasing these properties, the majority in cash, to rent or flip as the state’s housing market rises. Rates of investor purchases in two and three-family homes are even higher.

Business entities purchasing single- to three-family homes in Massachusetts, 2016-2021

Investors — whether buying with cash or backed with bank loans — are playing an increasingly large role in Massachusetts’ housing market. Data courtesy of The Warren Group.

“It’s becoming more prevalent in Massachusetts and everywhere,” said Adam Travis, a Harvard doctoral candidate studying rental housing and the private market. “More and more rental properties are coming to be owned not by individuals, but by companies, by business entities.’’

Investors are spurred by high demand for housing, rising rents and soaring home values, making it a lucrative business. But housing advocates say the trend is making it harder for individual homeowners to buy, and driving up rents so renters get priced out.

Further issues arise with the model of using LLCs to buy homes. The shell companies tend to be worse landlords than individual owners, research shows. And the business structure obscures and protects its individual owners, a corporate veil that creates additional headaches for housing advocates and government officials seeking accountability from landlords.

“It’s crazy the amount of time that we would spend trying to unravel, find someone to serve,” said Lisa C. deSousa, deputy city solicitor for the City of Springfield Law Department, recalling cases where there’s a problem with a rental property. “We can clearly see who’s protected by it, but who is harmed by it? It’s poor tenants in poor cities.”

Seeing profit

In sheer numbers, no Massachusetts city has seen a bigger proliferation of investor owners in single-family homes over the last several years than Springfield, where business entities purchased more than 1,200 properties between 2016 and 2021, the Warren Group data shows. The true figures are even higher since the data provided to GBH News doesn’t include investor purchases of foreclosed properties.

Speculators from nearby towns and far-flung states are attracted by profits they see in the western Massachusetts city, where property values are still significantly lower than those closer to Boston. Last year, the cost of a median single-family home in downtown Boston rose to almost $3.5 million while Springfield homes hovered around $225,000, the Warren Group data shows.

Rose Webster-Smith, executive director of the housing nonprofit Springfield No One Leaves, says investors also buy in the hopes that home prices will be driven up by the recently opened MGM casino and talks of a possible new passenger rail connecting eastern and western Mass. Speculators are increasingly purchasing foreclosed homes, she said, and pushing out homeowners, inflating property values and rents in a city where about a quarter of people live in poverty.

While a $225,000 price tag for a house may appear to be a steal compared with other cities in Massachusetts, it’s more than double the median cost of a single-family house in Springfield a decade ago.

GBH