March 11, 2026 – “People live in homes, not corporations,” President Donald Trump emphasized in his Jan. 20 executive order “Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers.”

The executive order signals an end to federal support for institutional investment in single-family homes – and possibly an end to legislative inertia.

As the season for home buying and selling ramps up this spring, higher sales prices added to interest rate hikes have transformed a rite of passage into a distant dream. Many blame large-scale purchases by corporate investors for devouring supply.

Other experts dispute that institutional ownership, estimated at 1% to 3% nationwide^[1] but much higher in some cities, affects affordability.

Great Recession Hangover

Homeownership peaked in the early 2000s at 70% while the complementary renting rate reached its lowest rate ever in 2004 at 33%, according to a 2024 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.^[2]

The report, which surveyed 74 studies, responded to Congress’ worry in 2023 about the effect of investors on the single-family housing market.^[3]

The “2007-2009 financial crisis” resulted in “an estimated 3.8 million households [losing] their homes to foreclosure.”^[4]

New home construction declined sharply beginning in 2006. Seven years later, the U.S. had lost 1.2 million owner-occupied units – including many foreclosed houses converted to rentals.^[5]

With federal government encouragement and loans, institutional investors – usually defined as owning 1,000 or more single-family houses – bought in bulk.^[6]

“By 2015, institutional investors that entered the market during the financial crisis owned an estimated 170,000-300,000 single-family housing units” – 1% to 2% of single-family housing rental stock.^[7]

Houses then comprised nearly 40% of occupied rental units. Six years later, it “had fallen back to 34.6[%].”^[8]

Geography matters. Large investors owned about a fifth of the single-family house rental market in some North Carolina and Florida cities. Atlanta alone had 25% of its homes for rent from institutional investors.^[9]

Wisconsin didn’t draw the big players, but smaller entities affected local markets.

Between 2005 and 2020, Milwaukee’s percentage of owner-occupied homes fell from 80% to 69%.

“Parts of the north and west sides saw declines double that,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported from the Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.

Economic headwinds sidelined individuals: higher credit scores to qualify for mortgages, “the steady loss of American jobs to outsourcing,” and the COVID-19 pandemic that under historically low interest rates created a hot seller’s market.^[10]

Investor house purchases rose again from 17% of total purchases in 2019 to 28% in 2022.^[11]

Meanwhile, interest rates on a standard 30-year mortgage went from less than 3% in 2021 to about 8% in 2023, and prices increased from a home price index of below 150 in 2012 to 300 in 2022-23.^[12]

‘Life, Liberty, and Property’

American home ownership is personal and emotional, a natural right from the Declaration of Independence’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”^[13]

John Locke was more blunt: “life, liberty, and property.”^[14]

In Nashville, Tennessee, where large investors held 11% of the single-family house rental market in 2022, attorney Scott Weiss described the worries of his homeowner and condominium association clients.^[15]

Whether buying existing homes or new homes as fast as they were built, “corporate investors,” Weiss said, will own those homes “forever. They’re always off the residential real estate market, and they’ll always be leased.”^[16]

Investors target properties in associations, Weiss said, because the associations take care of the property – creating risks for his clients.^[17]

Each house or condominium unit a corporation owns adds another vote in the association. A distant investor who owns enough homes or units can control the association. It will have the votes to change the documents governing the neighborhood.

Individual homeowners would have no voice. The corporation will outnumber its individual votes.^[18]

A “corporate investor” bought nearly all of the lots in a 120- to 150-home subdivision, leaving 11 individual homeowners “who basically have no say as to what happens to their homes anymore,” Weiss said.^[19]

Weiss drafts amendments to association governing documents that require a property purchaser to live in the house for one or two years before the owner can lease it.^[20]

A Public Good?

Other studies argue institutional investors have little effect nationally, and where they do, the effect helps housing.

Investors buy houses in locations with anticipated demand that they can more efficiently repair, provide larger rentals desired by families with children, make better schools accessible, and increase racial diversity in the suburbs while offering better organized and potentially more responsive maintenance.^[21]

The available capital from institutional investors broke the fall of house prices in neighborhoods hardest hit by foreclosures. Home renovations, including security systems and pressure on municipalities to improve street lighting, made neighborhoods safer.^[22]

Rent-to-own business models offer potential homeownership, and investors sell as well as buy houses.^[23]

Concentrated ownership also offers governments opportunities to improve renter conditions. Rental registries can identify out-of-state owners. Requirements to accept housing choice vouchers and rental security insurance promise to increase accessibility.^[24]

If new homeowners could more easily obtain financing for renovations, they and not institutional investors would more likely purchase houses needing repair.^[25]

These advocates point elsewhere to the problem of affordable housing. “[R]estrictive land-use and zoning regulations, discretionary approvals, and high regulatory costs” make it too hard to build.^[26]

The United States needs between 6 and 7 million more houses to end the shortage.^[27]

Presidential Mobilization

President Trump’s executive order mobilizes the Executive Branch to fashion regulations to prevent “large institutional investors” from buying “single-family homes that could otherwise be purchased by families.”

Department secretaries will devise means that increase individual opportunities to buy federally owned single-family homes and to end support of large institutional investor acquisitions.

The Attorney General and the chair of the Federal Trade Commission “shall review substantial acquisitions” of single-family homes by institutional investors.

The executive order’s loopholes aren’t so evident.

Large institutional investors own a small slice of houses. Local landlords own more.^[28]

“Build-to-rent properties” – houses and subdivisions built purposely for rental – are exempted. Build-to-rent has become the prevalent model for the institutional investor.^[29]

Legislation codifying the executive order would make it durable, but many attempts have failed.

Legislative ‘Groundhog Day’

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) last August tallied 22 states “with often bipartisan bills” to restrict institutional investors from 2023 to 2025. The AEI list missed two other states included in a 2024 Wall Street Journal article.^[30]

AEI’s list shows six states, including Wisconsin, with legislation pending and New York enacting a law.^[31]

Wisconsin’s 2025 Assembly Bill 213 and 2025 Senate Bill 208 both would prohibit hedge funds from owning a single-family house. They haven’t moved out of committee with the legislative session all but done.

For years, it’s been legislative “Groundhog Day” in Congress. Focused bills attempted to curtail institutional investors. None passed.^[32]

In the past month, Congress may have changed its mind.^[33]

The Housing for the 21st Century Act (H.R. 6644), passed the House on Feb. 9 on a 390-9 vote.

Renamed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the Senate is considering a bipartisan amendment entered March 4 to regulate “large institutional investors,” which it defined as owning at least 350 houses.

The bill wouldn’t force sales of existing institutional investor houses, but after enactment prohibits institutional investors from buying single-family houses with penalties of more than $1 million per violation or three times the property’s purchase price.

The amendment contains several exceptions, including houses pending sale, renovate-to-rent, rent-to-own, and build-to-rent.

The bill remains under debate in the Senate, but were the amended version to pass, the House would need to approve the amended version before going to the president.

Endnotes

[1] Laurie Goodman, et al., A Profile of Institutional Investor-Owned Single-Family Rental Properties 3 (Urban Institute, April 2023), https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/2023-04/A%20Profile%20of%20Institutional%20Investor%E2%80%93Owned%20Single-Family%20Rental%20Properties_0.pdf (last visited Mar. 5, 2026) (3%); Sissi Li, Tobias Peter & Edward Pinto, Institutional Investors in the US Housing Market 1, 3 (American Enterprise Institute, AEI Housing Center, Aug. 2025), https://aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Reevaluating-the-Role-of-Institutional-Investors-in-U.S.-Housing-Market-final-v2.pdf?x85095 (last visited Mar. 5, 2026) (less than 1%).

[2] Jill Naamane, et al., Rental Housing, 2-3 (U.S. Gov’t Accountability Office, May 2024), https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106643.pdf (last visited Mar. 5, 2026).

[3] Id. at 1, 2.

[4] Id. at 4; cf. Stephen George, Not for Sale: Why Congress Should Act to Counter the Trend of Massive Corporate Acquisitions of Real Estate, 6 Bus. Entrepreneurship & Tax L. Rev. 97, 105 (2022) (stating, “Between 2007 and 2016, nearly 8 million households lost their homes to foreclosure.”).

[5] Naamane, supra note 2, at 6; see Li, supra note 1, at 10 (explaining “a shortage of starter homes combined with rising home prices and mortgage rates have made homeownership an increasingly difficult hurdle for younger households”).

[6] Naamane, supra note 2, at 8-10; see George, supra note 4, at 106 (pinpointing start of trend from 2011 when “Morgan Stanley issued a report titled ‘A Rentership Society’, and within the next year, investment firms raised over one billion dollars to purchase foreclosed homes and convert them into rental properties”); Ingrid Gould Ellen & Laurie Goodman, Single-Family Rentals 9 (The Hamilton Project, Nov. 2023), https://www.hamiltonproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/20231103_THP_SingleFamilyRentals_Proposal.pdf (last visited Mar. 5, 2026) (“Indeed, the institutional single-family rental market did not exist prior to 2012. In that year, Invitation Homes, originally funded by Blackstone, was the first institutional investor to buy portfolios of distressed single-family homes with the aim to hold and operate them as rentals.”)

[7] Naamane, supra note 2, at 10-11.

[8] Ellen, supra note 6, at 3.

[9] Naamane, supra note 2, at 14, 16 (providing evidence of areas with concentrated investors contrasted with areas hard hit by foreclosures that lack institutional investors); see also Ellen, supra note 6, at 3, 5, 9-10 (showing percentage of single-family rentals in 20 largest metropolitan statistical areas); Goodman, supra note 1, at 7-11 (describing concentration of institutional single-family rental owners); Li, supra note 1, at 4-5, 15-17 (mapping out and graphing percentage of institutional investors by county and noting concentrations in Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston).

[10] George, supra note 4, at 105; Naamane, supra note 2, at 5 (contrasting borrower creditor score at mortgage origination in 2007 at 719 to above 750 between 2012 and 2023).

[11] Ellen, supra note 6, at 10.

[12] Naamane, supra note 2, at 6-7.

[13] George, supra note 4, at 97-98.

[14] Id. at 98.

[15] Alex Dickerson, et al., Shifting Landscapes: 21st Century Property Law, 10 Belmont L. Rev. 421, 421-22, 425 (2023); Naamane, supra note 2, at 16 (providing percentage in 2022).

[16] Dickerson, supra note 15, at 425; cf. Jack Wroldsen, 1031 Offramps: Incentives for Small Investors to Sell Single-Family Rental Homes, 27 N.Y.U. J. Legis. & Pub. Pol’y 773 (2024-25) (arguing that Section 1031 tax-free exchanges permanently lock properties into rentals and proposing alternatives).

[17] Dickerson, supra note 15, at 427.

[18] Id.

[19] Id. at 428.

[20] Id. at 429.

[21] Ellen, supra note 6, at 3, 5, 7, 12-13, 16; Goodman, supra note 1, at 19-20; Li, supra note 1, at 9 (describing institutional investors repairing, and thus upgrading, housing); Naamane, supra note 2, at 21-24.

[22] Ellen, supra note 6, at 8, 14; Li, supra note 1, at 7 (summarizing that “[t]his large-scale acquisition and rehabilitation of properties had helped stabilize distressed housing markets.”); Naamane, supra note 2, at 8-9 (explaining that federal government’s encouragement of institutional investors served to prop up the real estate market).

[23] Ellen, supra note 6, at 9 (rent-to-own); Goodman, supra note 1, at 3 (rent-to-own); Li, supra note 1, at 3 (citing data that “investors do not just buy homes, but they also sell homes at the same time”).

[24] Ellen, supra note 6, at 17-20 (outlining policy proposals).

[25] Id. at 20 (outlining policy proposals).

[26] Li, supra note 1, at 5, 11-12 (describing effect as “a self-inflicted wound, the product of decades of government regulatory failure” and suggesting remedies); cf. Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works (2025) 213-37 (offering a liberal analysis showing stifling effects of environmental appeals reaching the same conclusion and suggesting remedies).

[27] George, supra note 4, at 110 (citing a National Low Income Housing Coalition study of affordable housing); Li, supra note 1, at 5 (estimating a “severe housing shortage” of 6 million houses).

[28] Ellen, supra note 6, at 8, 9 (finding 76% “of single-family rentals are owned by individual investors,” and in the top 20 markets, institutional investors own only 12.4% of all single-family rentals); Li, supra note 1, at 2 (finding “small and medium-sized investors accounted for over 90% of all investor home purchases” and while investors purchased 25% of houses in the first quarter of 2024, institutional investors purchased only 1%).

[29] Ellen, supra note 6, at 9; Li, supra note 1, at 10 (quantifying build-to-rent houses at 140,000 new homes between 2015 and 2024 and another 110,000 units under development in summer 2025); Naamane, supra note 2, at 13 (stating that industry says build-to-rent fills the need for housing contrasted with the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s position that the houses could have been built for owner-occupants).

[30] Li, supra note 1, at 1, 13-14; Will Parker, Wall Street Has Spent Billions Buying Homes. A Crackdown Is Looming, Wall St. J., Apr. 30, 2024, available at https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/wall-street-has-spent-billions-buying-homes-a-crackdown-is-looming/?msockid=246f26c1a2d46f9f0df9337ba3b56e70 (last visited Mar. 5, 2026).

[31] Li, supra note 1, at 13-14.

[32] See, e.g., Stop Wall Street Landlords Act (H.R. 7138) (in committee), previously introduced as H.R. 10028 (118th Congress) and H.R. 9246 (117th Congress) (prohibiting single-family home deductions for mortgage interest and depreciation for large investors who have assets exceeding $100 million); End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act (S. 3402) (in committee), previously introduced as H.R. 6608 (118th Congress) and as S. 5151 (117th Congress) (discouraging purchases through excise taxes); Affordable Housing and Homeownership Protection Act of 2026 (S. 3754) (in committee), introduced in last Congress as S. 3673 (excise taxes); Stop Predatory Investing Act (S. 969) (in committee), introduced in the last Congress as H.R. 9937 and S. 2224 (regulating any owner of 50 or more single-family residential rental properties); Houses Over Middle-Class Exploitation Schemes Act (HOMES Act) (H.R. 4352) (in committee) (regulating any owner of 50 or more single-family residential rental properties).

[33] See Rebecca Picciotto, Proposed Ban on Investors in the Housing Market Hits a Wall in Congress, Wall St. J., Feb. 9, 2026, available at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/proposed-ban-on-investors-in-the-housing-market-hits-a-wall-in-congress/ar-AA1W06W6?ocid=BingNewsSerp (last visited Mar. 5, 2026) (reporting congressional disinterest in the issue of investor-owned houses).