In an announcement that’s left the corporate real estate industry reeling, President Donald Trump claimed yesterday he will take “immediate steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” blaming Democrats for making “the American Dream . . . increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans.”
The president is acknowledging that corporate greed is a primary driver of America’s housing crisis. If he follows through on his announcement, the resulting shift in policy could prove a major thorn in the side of the home-buying industry, including Blackstone, the country’s largest landlord.
In response to Trump’s post, shares in Blackstone — a trillion-dollar private equity and real estate fund that owns 350,000 rental units nationwide — dropped 5.6 percent on Wednesday. As did Invitation Homes, a corporate homebuyer with a portfolio of more than 85,000 homes, which saw its market value drop nearly 7 percent in a day.
Collectively, corporations own 9 percent of all residential real estate in the United States. In some metro areas, institutional investors own double-digit shares of the housing market. That includes Atlanta, where, as of 2022, at least 25 percent of single-family homes were owned by an investor with more than a thousand properties — pushing homebuyers out of the housing market and jacking up rents for tenants.
Trump’s announcement, which he promised to provide more details about during his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, has been met with skepticism by advocates and officials who have long warned that institutional real estate investors are exacerbating the housing crisis.
“Positive step,” wrote Laurel Kilgour, a policy official at the American Economic Liberties Project. “But sounds limited to stopping institutional investors from ‘buying more’? Can investors in Atlanta . . . [continue to] keep that supply…
Auteur: David Sirota
