Legislators and the administration have been furthering plans to prevent large investors from snapping up residential property. Indeed, on Jan. 20, 2026, the first anniversary of his inauguration, the president signed an executive order seeking to limit such purchases.
"The administration’s emphasis on lowering housing costs is welcome amid rising concerns about affordability," said the Urban Institute soon after the order was signed.
And, earlier this month, the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan bill ("the largest housing bill in decades," says NPR) that, if enacted, would prevent excessive purchases of homes by large investors, among other measures.
Is Change Coming Too Late?
However, a new report, published Mar. 23, finds that large investors are already selling more single-family homes than they're buying.
"The largest investors — those owning 1,000 or more homes — continued to shed properties, selling 5,970 in Q4 while buying only 4,336, marking the eighth consecutive quarter as net sellers," says the Q4 2025 Investor Pulse Report from BatchData. "For the year, these large investors sold 20% more homes than they purchased. In total, investors own roughly 18% of the 86 million single-family residential homes in the country."
Small, Medium, and Large Investors
It's important to distinguish between large investors and small ones. All landlords are investors, even if they own only one home in addition to their own. And the vast majority of the 18% of homes owned by investors belong to small- and medium-sized investors.
BatchData's new report says that 92% of rental units are owned by small landlords who own 1-5 homes, while 5% are owned by medium-sized investors with 6-50 homes.
And the entire rental sector of the housing market would ultimately collapse if small- and medium-sized landlords were prevented from buying more homes. So, legislators are targeting only large, aka institutional, investors.
But the Urban Institute surmises, "Large institutional investors ... own just 3% of single-family rentals, less than 0.5% of the total single-family housing stock."
A Mixed Picture Across the Nation
In some parts of the country, large investors own virtually no homes. But in others, they own a lot.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) identifies the cities where large investors owned particularly high shares of the single-family rental market in 2022:
- Atlanta, GA — 25%
- Jacksonville, FL — 21%
- Charlotte, NC — 18%
- Tampa, FL — 15%
- Phoenix, AZ — 14%
- Raleigh, NC — 13%
- Orlando, FL — 13%
- Indianapolis, IN — 12%
- Nashville, TN — 11%
- Memphis, TN — 11%
Remember, those figures are large investors' shares of each city's rental market. Most homes are owned by their occupiers or smaller landlords.
As the Urban Institute said, large investors own only one in two hundred homes nationwide. And that share has been dropping this year, according to BatchData.
It's not hard to find anecdotes of ordinary people being outbid by institutional investors. But, while buyers in housing markets such as Atlanta and Jacksonville may have been affected by large investors at some point in the past, they're unlikely to be suffering now.
Why Did Large Investors Get Into the Rental Sector?
Large investors entered the 21st-century residential housing market in two waves: First, reacting to the 2007 credit crunch and the subsequent Great Recession, and secondly, in response to the pandemic.
Back in June 2022, Freddie Mac offered this analysis:
"In short, overall investor share of home purchases has risen only marginally since before the pandemic, and most investor purchases were for deeply discounted homes priced below the typical home bought by first-time homebuyers. Although investors are certainly contributing to the affordable housing shortage, they are not the driver of the tight supply of homes available for purchase."
Freddie argues that investors, both large and small, were a net good for local housing markets because they typically bought homes that were too run-down for first-time buyers to cope with. The investors then improved the homes, quickly releasing them for rental. That enhanced both the local housing stock and the availability of units for renters.
Will Housing Affordability Improve?
People who were outbid for homes by large investors may understandably not accept Freddie's arguments. But it does seem that large investors have been consistently shedding their stock of homes in recent years.
So, legislators and the administration may be too late for their proposed changes to the law to make an immediate difference. However, it could prevent large investors from skewing local housing markets if another economic shock makes that an attractive option.
None of this detracts from the Senate bill's overall value. "If we want to bring down the cost of housing, we've got to build a lot more," said one of the bill's co-sponsors, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., quoted by NPR. "And what I love about this bill is that it has more than 40 different provisions in it, all of which aim in the same direction, which is to give a push toward building more housing."
Let's hope it becomes law soon.
