Institutional investors own a tiny share of U.S. homes. Cracking down on them could reduce housing supply and drive up costs
In the latest development in horseshoe theory, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that his administration would ban large institutional investors from owning single-family homes.
« People live in homes, not corporations », said Trump in a Truth Social post. He promised his administration would unilaterally ban large investors from buying homes and ask Congress to codify the restriction.
????President Trump will immediately take steps to ban big institutional investors from buying more single family homes and he will be calling on Congress to codify it. pic.twitter.com/Rq77lfs8Vi
James Blair (@JamesBlairUSA) January 7, 2026
The notion that the president could enact such a ban on his own authority seems dubious in the extreme. Still, the proposal is popular with wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties, and Trump is likely to find several allies in Congress who would support passing such a law.
Large institutional investors have gone from buying effectively zero single-family homes before the Great Recession to being responsible for a small but non-negligible percentage of home purchasers in recent years.
As investors’ activity has grown, so too have complaints from politicians of both parties that they are outbidding would-be owner-occupier families, who are then condemned to a life of perpetual renting.
Democrats in Congress have repeatedly introduced legislation that would levy prohibitively high excise taxes on single-family homes owned in excess of 100 by investors.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul have both criticized institutional home investors. One of the few things that J.D. Vance and Tim Walz were able to agree on in the 2024 vice presidential debate was the need to stop Wall Street from buying single-family homes.
Mostly Democratic state legislators from California to Nebraska have proposed complete bans on single-family home purchases by large investors and out-of-state corporations, although none of the most far-reaching proposals have become law.
While Trump offered no details on his proposed ban, these proposals provide hints at what a federal crackdown might look like in practice.
Whatever the specifics, any real federal effort to squeeze institutional investors out of the single-family housing market is bound to make shelter more expensive and less plentiful.
For all the political attention paid to larger institutional investors, they make up a small percentage of home purchasers and own an even smaller share of the country’s single-family homes.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s parsing of the data, investors were responsible for about 25 percent of single-family home purchases in the first quarter of 2024. That is up from 20 percent in 2016, and the increase is almost totally driven by larger investors who own upward of 100 homes.
Over the past few years, companies owning 1,000 or more homes have accounted for only about 1 percent of all single-family purchases, but in 2024, their purchases appear to have dropped to effectively zero.
