The corporate ownership is pervasive. There are subdivisions built or being built for the renter market. Lots of Chinese money. Lots of companies involved.
Saw this this morning. Some enlightening items included
America’s housing problem has the wrong scapegoat. President’s pledge this week to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes jolted markets, briefly sending Invitation Homes ($AMH) and Blackstone ($BX) tumbling as much as 10%. The catch is that corporate landlords own less than 1% of America’s single-family housing stock, so forcing them out won’t meaningfully move prices. The real culprit is the web of zoning restrictions, land-use regulations, and construction bottlenecks that have left the country short 3M to 4M homes.
Scapegoating the wrong villain: The proposed ban would prevent large institutional players from acquiring additional properties — but institutional purchases have already plunged since mid-2022, as rising interest rates drove up the cost of owning these properties. The top 24 owners of single-family rentals combined hold just over 520K homes — equal to roughly 3.5% of the 15M rental homes in the US and only a fraction of the total single-family housing stock.
- Institutional buyers served as buyers of last resort in late 2022, stepping in as individual demand dried up after the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes.
- Homebuilders face higher risk with fewer buyers, while Blackstone has been a net seller for years, cutting its housing portfolio by over 20%.
The Real Supply Crisis Nobody Wants to Fix
America’s affordability crisis traces back to a long failure to build enough homes. Median mortgage payments now eat up more than 30% of buyer income, up from under 20% pre-pandemic, while rent-to-income ratios are at their highest since 1980. Vacancy rates for both rentals and for-sale homes sit below pre-2008 levels, leaving inventory tight. According to Goldman Sachs Research, restoring 1990s-era affordability would require up to 4M extra homes beyond normal construction — about 2.6% of today’s housing stock. And regulations have become the biggest roadblock.
- Height restrictions limit construction to two or three stories on ~60% of residential land in the 240 largest metro areas, with buildings allowed to rise five stories or higher on just 7% of land.
- Local government regulations now add $93.9K to the price of a new single-family home — a 45% increase over the past decade that gets passed directly to buyers.
Forever renters: The median age of a first-time homebuyer hit 40 years old for the first time on record, with new buyers making up only 21% of purchases — another sign of how badly affordability has slipped. Compared to first-time buyers in 2007, the decade-long delay in buying a typical first home can mean losing more than $150K in potential equity growth. Yet instead of tackling zoning laws, construction labor shortages, and regulatory costs that actually constrain supply, policymakers are targeting a convenient scapegoat that controls less market share than rounding errors. As Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel bluntly put it. “The affordability crisis is fundamentally a supply problem. Large corporate ownership is a red herring in the broader supply debate.”