President Donald Trump put big investors who own single-family rental homes in the spotlight this week by announcing he wants to ban “large institutional investors” from buying more of this type of housing.
Overall, major investors own only about 2 to 3% of the country’s single-family rental housing stock, researchers have found. But they control a much larger share of the single-family rental industry in certain markets, particularly in the Sun Belt. Cities like Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Charlotte, and Tampa have especially high concentrations of mega landlords.
A 2023 report by The Hamilton Project, which is part of the Brookings Institution, found that mega investors — defined as those who own more than 1,000 homes — owned nearly 10% of total rental units in the Atlanta metro area and 27% of all single-family home rentals. They owned 22% of the single-family rental stock in Jacksonville, and nearly 20% in Charlotte.
The map below shows the cities with the highest concentration of institutional investors in the SFR market:
The report found that 354,000 of the total 446,000 single-family homes owned by mega-investors were located in 20 markets, primarily in the Southeast and Southwest.
While Trump says he wants to make homeownership more affordable for individual buyers by blocking mega landlords, industry watchers say the move wouldn’t address the root cause of high home prices: a shortage of homes.
Jenny Schuetz, vice president of housing at Arnold Ventures, said the lack of homes in markets across the country is “number one, two, and three on the list of problems.” She called a potential ban “a red herring” that “distracts attention from things that actually could be helpful in improving affordability and increasing supply.”
But she said that having a handful of landlords that own a large part of any rental market could create problems, including higher rents.
“You don’t really want to have highly concentrated ownership of the rental market with a couple of landlords who have market power,” she said. “And if you get to a small enough area of geography, it’s certainly possible that a big institutional investor could wind up kind of having a quasi monopoly.”
She said that the appropriate response to that concentration would be, first, keeping an inventory of who owns a lot of real estate in any city or county, and, second, tracking complaints from tenants regarding their landlords.
“Figure out whether this is a problem first, and where it’s a problem, before you decide what the solutions are,” Schuetz said.
