In the two years since private-equity firm Blackstone Group launched its suburban home management service, Invitation Homes, the company's stock has gone up by over 26%. 

During that same time, homeownership has fallen to its lowest levels since the mid-1990s, rents have edged upward in the nation's biggest metro areas, and an increasing number of Americans have become long-term tenants of Wall Street-based investment firms. 

Simply put: Owning rental housing is a booming business that, increasingly, is seeing profits flow into fewer and fewer hands. The phenomenon is due in large part to Obama-era policies enacted at the height of the Great Recession, when credit was scarce, demand was low, and the government moved to incentivize private investors into buying up flailing suburban properties. Nearly a decade later, following years of under-building in the housing sector, those policies and investments have begun bring in juicy dividends for the investment firms and their shareholders.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Blackstone Group, which now owns over 80,000 homes across the country, has "reaped roughly $2 billion from its two share sales this year. It also has received a $682.5 million payout from Invitation before the company was public and about $197 million in dividends paid out on the firm’s shares since the IPO."

The lesson? Buy low...and hold.