The United States federal government should ban corporate acquisition of single-family residences.

Takeout - Corporations take homes off the market, reducing supply for buyers.

HUD 23 [US HUD, "Institutional Investors Outbid Individual Homebuyers", 12/1/2023, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, https://www.huduser.gov/archives/portal/periodicals/em/winter23/highlight1.html, Accessed 03/15/2026] //Yadavi

Winter 2023 IN THIS ISSUE: Institutional Investors Outbid Individual Homebuyers Institutional Investors: A Local Perspective Investments in Affordable Housing Institutional Investors Outbid Individual Homebuyers Highlights Institutional and other large corporate investors own an increasing share of single-family homes, taking properties off the market for individual homebuyers and putting upward pressure on home prices and rents. Institutional investors have concentrated their purchases regionally (in the Sun Belt) and in particular neighborhoods (typically low-income, historically nonwhite and disinvested areas). Federal, state, and local governments can combat the negative impacts of institutional investors, often in partnership with nonprofit and other social-purpose organizations that can purchase single-family homes for individual buyers or help those buyers purchase them directly. Institutional and large corporate investors represent a growing percentage of owners of single-family homes. Institutional investors are single, nonindividual entities such as limited liability companies (LLCs), limited liability partnerships (LLPs), and real estate investment trusts (REITs) that have portfolios of 1,000 or more housing units. Unlike traditional, smaller-scale "mom and pop" landlords, these investors often can outbid prospective individual homeowners with all-cash offers and fast-track their purchases by waiving common steps in the buying process that would be too risky for individual buyers to skip. Institutional investors have various motivations; some may seek to hold onto the home as a rental unit and maximize its profitability; others may be interested primarily in capital gains from home value appreciation in the medium term; and still others, referred to as trading platforms, may seek to scale purchases in markets where they can profit from quickly reselling properties without investing in improving them. When institutional and other large corporate investors concentrate their activity in a local market — particularly within a specific neighborhood — the effects can be significant. In addition to preventing individual buyers from purchasing homes, investor activity lowers the overall availability of homes for purchase and raises prices for the remaining homes in the market. And these practices can have material impacts for renters in investor-owned properties, including additional costs and fees and issues related to unit conditions and maintenance. Investor activity in the single-family rental market increased rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Photo courtesy of Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority Institutional Investors in the Single-Family Market An estimated 39 percent of rental housing units in the United States are single-family dwellings.1 Because larger households tend to prefer the size of single-family homes, roughly 41 percent of the renter population lives in single-family homes.2 In recent years, institutional and other large investors have been actively expanding their share of the single-family rental market. Between 2011 and 2017, these investors purchased more than 200,000 single-family homes at a total cost of $36 billion.3 Investor purchases surged again during the COVID-19 pandemic: in the first quarter of 2022, investor purchases of single-family homes averaged 28 percent per month, compared with 19 percent the previous year and the average of 16 percent between 2017 and 2019.4 This rate is much higher in certain areas of the country, reaching up to 67 percent in Lincoln County, Mississippi; 63 percent in Van Buren County, Iowa; and 52 percent in Tarrant County, Texas, in 2021.5 Large portfolio investors (those holding more than 100 properties) drove this growth.6 According to CoreLogic, institutional investors purchased 3 percent of homes sold in 2021, three times their typical share in prior years.7 Research by MetLife Investment Management suggests that, as of August 2022, institutions owned approximately 700,000 single-family rental homes.8 The increase in institutional investors began during the Great Recession, when housing prices dropped precipitously and credit tightened.9 During the financial crisis, investors bought foreclosed properties, often at a discount, with institutional buyers joining the usual cash investors.10As hundreds of thousands of homes went into foreclosure, the federal government sought to stabilize housing prices by increasing demand for the homes, which it accomplished largely by creating incentives for private investors to make bulk purchases.11 In his study of Atlanta, Immergluck notes that in 2012, "a combination of public policy and Wall Street financialization" accelerated the rise of activity by institutional private-equity investors in the single-family rental market.12 Banks and other lenders, as well as the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), had amassed large numbers of foreclosures on their portfolios that they wanted to offload. In addition, because the foreclosure crisis left many potential homebuyers wrestling with lower credit scores and tighter lending standards, private households were less likely to qualify to buy homes even at lower price points, thereby increasing the demand for rentals.13 Immergluck documents how federal policymakers argued that foreclosed properties should be converted to rentals.14 Noting the large number of foreclosed properties and the nation’s growing demand for rentals, a Federal Reserve white paper stated, "Reducing some of the barriers to converting foreclosed properties to rental units will help redeploy the existing stock of houses in a more efficient way."15 Notably, says Immergluck, this approach represented a missed opportunity to help homebuyers purchase homes while prices were low.16 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both held pilot sales in 2012 to facilitate the sale of real estate owned properties and mortgage notes to investors who would operate them as rentals.17 The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) also expanded its sales of distressed mortgage notes to investors through its Single-Family Loan Sales Program, also known as the Distressed Asset Sales Program.18

Corporations raise rents, targeting vulnerable neighborhoods and increasing evictions.

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Institutional investors, particularly large ones, raise rents—likely using their scale to extract markups—and disproportionately target neighborhoods with declining incomes and high minority shares (Ferrer, 2025; Lee, 2024; Gorback et. al, 2023; Hanson, 2024). Risk is offloaded to low- and middle-income households, while returns are concentrated to investors. Nearly half of renters in the U.S. are rent-burdened. When households devote an unsustainable share of income to rent, wealth accumulation becomes impossible, and unexpected cash shortfall leaves them vulnerable to eviction. Research finds that institutional investors and large-scale landlords are more likely to file for eviction for non-paying tenants (Raymond et al., (2016), Immergluck et al., 2019, Gomory, 2021). At the neighborhood level, institutional owners can contribute to worsening living conditions and community disinvestment, especially through poor maintenance of amenities and neglect (Billings and Soliman 2024).

Corporations inflate rents, making housing unaffordable for individuals.

Brand 25 [Garrett Brand, Henry A. Wallace Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; 9-2-2025; "Wall Street Is Killing the Housing Market"; Inequality.org; https://inequality.org/article/wall-street-killing-housing-market/; accessed 2-24-2026] cai

Take Blackstone. The trillion dollar private equity giant owns over 300,000 U.S. residential units, making it the largest corporate landlord in the world. The company has hiked rents in its properties by as much as 64 percent over just two years. While Blackstone’s tenants often can’t make rent, CEO Stephen Schwarzman now enjoys a net worth north of $50 billion. I’ve seen the impacts of Wall Street’s assault on our homes firsthand. According to a Georgia State study, my hometown of Atlanta has the highest concentration of Wall Street-owned single family homes in the country. In the past 15 years, mega-corporations have purchased over 70,000 homes in Atlanta, accounting for over 30 percent of all single family rental properties in the city. In some districts, as much as 99.6 percent of the market is owned by corporate investors! As a result, longtime residents have been pushed out, housing costs have soared, and inequality has multiplied.

Banning corporate buying shrinks future rental supply and raises rents.

Glaeser 2-23 [Joe Gyourko Edward Glaeser; Joe Gyourko is the Martin Bucksbaum Professor of Real Estate, Finance and Business & Public Policy at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.; 2-23-2026; "The ripple effects of banning institutional purchases of single-family rentals"; Brookings; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-ripple-effects-of-banning-institutional-purchases-of-single-family-rentals/; DOA: 3-11-2026] cheoleng

Spillover effects between owner-occupied and rental housing markets Owner-occupied and rental markets must be considered in tandem when analyzing changes to the single-family rental market, as any shift in supply in the owner-occupied market will have attendant impacts on the rental market and vice versa. Since institutional investors are suppliers of rental housing, limiting their ability to purchase homes will decrease the future supply of rental units as it expands the supply of owner-occupied homes. Both Barbieri & Dobbels (2026) and Coven (2025) found that while big institutional investors did lead to higher home prices in their most concentrated geographies, institutional investment also led to lower rents.2 Importantly, both price effects were modest economically, at least partially due to accompanying supply changes.

Large investors own a tiny share of single-family rentals nationwide.

Srikant 25 [Keshav Srikant, "Do private equity firms own 20% of single family homes?", 10/06/2025, ctmirror, https://ctmirror.org/2025/10/06/private-equity-firms-own-single-family-homes, Accessed 03/16/2026] //Yadavi

Large institutional investors, defined as those owning over 100 homes (which includes private equity firms), own 3 percent of the single-family rental stock nationwide according to Brookings. This share is higher in some local markets — in the 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas where these investors are most present, they own 12.4 percent — but they still own far less than 20 percent nationwide. The Urban Institute similarly finds they own just 3.8 percent of nationwide single-family rental stock. Considering purchases rather than holdings, investors (those buying non-primary residences) bought nearly 27 percent of all homes sold in the first quarter of 2025. However, most of these purchases are likely by small investors (those who own less than 5 properties), as they own 85 percent of all investor-owned residential properties. Research by John Burns Research and Consulting found institutional investors are buying less than 2 percent of all homes.

Corporate acquisition is too small to impact housing affordability.

Macan-Markar ’26 [Shaista Macan-Markar, ; 1-20-2026; "Insights Into Institutional Ownership of Single Family Housing"; Global; https://www.ubs.com/us/en/wealth-management/insights/market-news/article.3017504.html; accessed 2-26-2026] baybay

Market Share: When looking across the US, institutional holdings of single-family homes remain at about 0.35% of the housing stock and institutional investors only account for about 3.0% of single-family rentals (SFR), according to BofA. Large institutional players such as Blackstone only hold about 0.06% of single-family homes, and the majority of SFRs are actually held by local mom-and-pop landlords. It is our takeaway that preventing or limiting institutional buyers from the single family market is unlikely to move the needle on the rental market. And while there is higher institutional ownership for SFR's in cities such as Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Nashville, the percent of institutional ownership is still quite negligible at only 3-5% of the local housing market, according to BofA.