Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert staked out a blunt position on corporate homebuying, posting on X that Wall Street investment firms should be shut out of the market for single-family houses.
Boebert wrote: “Let me make this crystal clear: Big hedge funds should not be able to buy up single family homes.”
Her post comes after Congress enacted the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The law bars any for-profit entity with direct or indirect investment control over 350 or more single-family homes from buying more. The provision sits in Section 901, which lawmakers titled “Homes are for people not corporations.”
The restriction applies to future purchases only. Large investors keep the houses they owned when the law took effect and face no requirement to sell, according to an analysis by the law firm Morgan Lewis.
Congress also wrote in several exceptions. Covered investors may still buy newly constructed homes to operate as rentals, a model known as build-to-rent. They may buy homes that need major rehabilitation to meet structural or core-system standards. They may also buy from another large investor that owned the property at enactment or bought it in compliance with the law, according to a summary from the firm Latham & Watkins. Manufactured homes fall outside the law’s definition of a single-family home.
The legislation followed Executive Order 14376. In that order, President Donald Trump declared it administration policy that large institutional investors should not acquire single-family homes that families could otherwise purchase.
National figures show a smaller footprint than the debate often implies. Institutional buyers account for roughly 1 percent of all single-family purchases, Newsweek reported. Data firm BatchData found that investors holding 1,000 or more properties have been net sellers for ten consecutive quarters. Small landlords with one to 10 homes own about 96 percent of investor-held single-family houses, according to the same data.
The selling has picked up speed. Eight major institutional landlords tracked by Parcl Labs shed a net 3,011 single-family homes in the second quarter. In the same quarter a year earlier, the figure was 593.
Those national figures leave out sharp regional concentrations. Government Accountability Office figures put institutional ownership at about one-quarter of single-family rentals in Atlanta, 21 percent in Jacksonville, 18 percent in Charlotte and 15 percent in Tampa. Newsweek’s analysis found that competition for entry-level housing persists in affordable Midwest and Sun Belt markets, even as the largest firms pull back.
Federal regulators still have to write the rules that put the ban into practice. Morgan Lewis wrote that those final regulations will decide whether institutional investment in scattered-site single-family rentals is merely limited or severely curtailed.
