Lakewood and its surrounding communities are facing a problem that anyone paying attention has seen coming for years: investors are buying up affordable houses and renting them out indiscriminately, often to tenants who have no connection to the neighborhood and no investment in its character. This upsets frum and non-frum neighbors alike. It drives up prices. And it locks young frum families – the very families trying to do the responsible thing by saving up and buying a home – out of the communities they hoped to build.

We all know these investors aren’t going to listen to appeals to conscience. They’re not interested in the character of a neighborhood or the needs of a growing community. They want a return on their money, and that’s the end of the conversation. So let’s stop wasting breath trying to shame investors into caring, and instead focus on something we can actually fix: information.

Here is the piece that’s broken. Realtors work in this industry. They have access to listings the moment they go up. They know the market better than any buyer scrambling to make a decision in a matter of days. And yet, when a frum family asks a realtor the two most basic questions relevant to their home search – is there an eruv here, and how many shuls are in the area – realtors routinely cannot answer. That’s not a small gap. That’s the one piece of specialized knowledge a family actually needs from them, and it’s the one piece they don’t have.

Meanwhile, families are left to search Zillow like everyone else, guessing at which listings are even realistic options for a frum family. We don’t need someone to forward us a Zillow link. We need real data: which neighborhoods have an eruv, how many shuls or minyanim exist nearby, and as close an approximation as reasonably possible – how many frum families already live there.

I’ll explain why that last piece matters so much, because it’s the reason I’m writing this at all. I live in a small, growing community of about seventeen families. For a stretch of time, we literally had to poll each other every week: “whose home for Shabbos?”, just to make sure we’d have a minyan. We’ve stabilized since then B”H, but it’s still tight, and every single family that joins us makes a real difference. When a house in our neighborhood goes up for sale, we hold our breath hoping a frum family buys it and not an investor. But here’s the cruel irony: because we’re small, almost nobody outside the neighborhood knows we exist – despite having a genuinely lovely basement shul and a working eruv.

It gets worse. A neighbor of mine who is selling their house watched, via their Ring doorbell, a frum realtor tell a prospective frum buyer standing on the porch: “There are five frum families here.” Five. Not seventeen. Just wrong, and wrong in exactly the direction that sends a family walking away. That family will conclude the neighborhood can’t support them, and the house will end up right back in an investor’s hands, who will then look around and say, “Well, no family wanted it, what am I doing wrong?” Meanwhile the realtor who fed that family bad information moves on to the next listing, no worse for it.

So to every realtor who markets themselves as the “friendliest” agent in town, who claims to genuinely want to help buyers find the right home, I’d ask directly: what are you actually doing with the market knowledge you claim to have? While the buyer may not be a paying client, you make your living selling houses. Doesn’t it serve your own interest, not just ours, to have accurate data on who’s buying where, so you can match buyers to homes that will actually work for them and close deals faster?

Here’s a concrete idea. Someone (maybe it needs to be me) should build a simple, public database. It doesn’t need to compromise anyone’s privacy. We don’t need addresses or names. We just need basics: this neighborhood has an eruv, this neighborhood has a shul, this neighborhood has an approximate number of frum families. Even communities with basement shuls that prefer to keep the exact location of the shul private can still be represented honestly: “this general area has a shul and roughly X families,” without pinpointing anyone’s home.

This isn’t a call to stop investors from being investors, that ship had sadly sailed. It’s a call for realtors – who are already positioned, already paid, and already claim to want to help – to start doing the one part of their job that actually requires local knowledge. And it’s a call to our own communities to start building the information infrastructure ourselves, so that small, growing neighborhoods like mine don’t stay invisible simply because nobody bothered to write down that we’re here.

If anyone has any ideas or has started working on a database like this, feel free to reach out via the Lakewood Scoop.

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