The CEO of Invitation Homes, the nation’s largest single-family rental landlord, said he believes the recently passed housing bill that bans investors like him from buying existing homes will eventually lower home prices, but not in the short-term.
“I believe in the medium- to long-term, it definitely will,” said Invitation Homes chief executive Dallas Tanner. “I think 90% of the bill focuses on deregulation. How do we simplify capital coming into housing? Are there ways that we can spur up the supply side challenges that we have? I think overnight in the immediate term, it’s a bit trickier because there’s more to the story than just what the bill addresses.”
Tanner pointed to mortgage rate volatility, high construction costs, and zoning and regulatory imbalances.
In early January, President Donald Trump called for a ban on large-scale investors buying single-family homes to rent. He posted on social media that, “People live in homes, not corporations.” This was part of a larger push to tackle the affordability crisis in housing. Some argued that institutional investors were pushing owner-occupants out of the market and inflating home prices.
The ban became law in July, preventing investors who own more than 350 homes from purchasing any more existing units. They can, however, buy new single-family homes specifically built for rent. That is where Invitation Homes is leaning in.
“Our focus as an industry and as a company has been, how do we create new supply and bring that into the housing system today? We built or acquired, in our partnerships with builders, over 6,000 new homes in the last five years,” said Tanner.
In January, just weeks after Trump’s post, Invitation Homes purchase a homebuilder, ResiBuilt. It has also purchased homes from large public builders like Pulte Homes and Lennar to use as rentals.
“We found through trial and error … that this new product, this beta product, the product that we do amongst these master planned developments — it works really, really well for our families. And so we were indexing on that, and that is part of our growth strategy,” said Tanner, adding that the company has been selling off hundreds of its older rental properties.
The largest investors, those owning more than 1,000 homes, represent less than 3% of the single-family rental market, according to various sources. They do, however, have an outsized footprint in certain metropolitan markets, like Atlanta (representing 25% of single-family homes there), Jacksonville (21%) and Charlotte (18%), according to the Urban institute.
Invitation Homes reported better-than-expected earnings at the end of July, even though rents and demand are not as healthy as they were in the first few years of the pandemic.
“We’ve seen sort of fundamentals reset. We talked about it on our last earnings call. We’re starting to see actual pretty positive green shoots in several of our markets,” said Tanner. “But we’re really focused on — how do we navigate this and what does this mean?”
