Build-To-Rent Firms Are Acting Like The Senate-Passed Housing Bill Won't Stick

Congress is weighing a housing bill that industry groups warn would “effectively shut down” build‑to‑rent development, but the sector’s biggest public operators are acting like the threat won’t stick.

Invitation Homes and AMH poured a combined $554M into stock buybacks in the first quarter in a show of confidence that legislators will respond to lobbying efforts and ultimately soften rules that critics say amount to a ban on the business model.

“There's so many unanswered questions and ambiguous directives within that original bill that it just makes it very hard for us to understand how they could actually implement it,” Southern Impression Homes CEO Chris Funk said. “I don't think it's so much that people aren’t nervous, it's just that they know that there's going to have to be changes.”

The 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which would force the sale of rental homes by corporate owners after seven years and constrain the development of new BTR housing, is stuck in reconciliation between the House of Representatives and the Senate. 

BTR executives are using the time to lobby Congress to drop the provisions and project self-assurance by getting board authorization for a combined $1.2B in additional buybacks. 

That confidence was bolstered by a Politico report last week indicating that President Donald Trump is souring on the bill, specifically the forced-sale provision.

“In recent months, I've spent a lot of time working with other industry leaders in Washington, D.C., to advocate on behalf of our industry and our residents,” Invitation Homes CEO Dallas Tanner told analysts on the BTR operator’s first-quarter earnings call April 30. “I'm encouraged by the constructive dialogue and confident we're moving in the right direction for our industry.”

Tanner’s comments have been echoed by executives and analysts across the industry, with corporate leaders convinced that the current legislation will be amended to accommodate BTR operations. Part of the reason for the optimism is an April 22 letter signed by 76 members of the House that called for the restrictions to be stripped from the Senate-passed version of the bill.

“People who rent are voters and residents, and they matter,” Tanner said on Invitation Homes' earnings call. “That message has resonated well on the Hill.” 

BTR construction volume exploded by 455% from 2019 through 2024 and accounted for 7.2% of single-family home starts in the year that ended in September 2025, with roughly 69,000 units under construction. The vacancy rate for the sector sat at 8.8% at the end of 2025, up 20 basis points from the prior year driven by the arrival of new inventory, according to Northmarq.

AMH reported Thursday a 95.1% same-home occupied days rate for the first quarter and blended rent growth at 2.2%, with rent hikes on renewals offsetting the 0.8% reduction in new lease pricing. Net income, at $127.8M, was up roughly 16% from the prior year, helped by rent growth outpacing expenses and the sale of 710 properties for $199M.

A week earlier, Invitation Homes reported that its portfolio of 85,970 homes was 96.3% occupied. Blended rent growth for the firm came in at 1.6% — 3.7% higher on renewals and 3% lower on new leases — but net income slipped 3.5% year-over-year to $251M.  

Executives from both public firms sounded positive notes on leasing momentum, but they acknowledged that new construction was stalling amid regulatory uncertainty. 

“It definitely has affected supply,” with less capital coming into the space for new BTR development, AMH CEO Bryan Smith said of the pending legislation on his company’s first-quarter earnings call Thursday. “Things might be a little bit on pause in the transaction market, but we're optimistic that that'll change eventually.”

Stock sell-offs for both firms started last May and carried into 2026 after Trump signed an executive order in January signaling his administration’s plan to restrict corporate ownership of single-family homes. As the uncertainty lingers, both firms have signaled conviction in their business models with major share buybacks. 

Invitation Homes spent $439M on share repurchases in the first quarter, exhausting a $500M buyback authorization from October, and secured board approval in late April for another $500M in buybacks.

AMH spent $115M buying back shares in the first quarter, fully leveraging a repurchase agreement authorized in 2018. In February, the BTR operator authorized another $750M buyback program and used it to retire 3.2 million shares in April for $94M. 

“The companies have bought back a ton of stock, which has been good to see not only because it shows them putting their money where their mouth is, but that was the best capital allocation option on the table,” said Haendel St. Juste, managing director and senior REIT analyst at Mizuho Americas. 

Share prices had fallen to the point where the firms could achieve better yields through buybacks than through new development, he said. Still, Mizuho cut its ratings on the two BTR REITs from outperform to neutral on Jan. 8, the day after Trump posted on social media that “people live in homes, not corporations” and pledged new restrictions on institutional ownership. 

Analysts at Mizuho had already been tracking a slowdown in core BTR performance metrics, and the regulatory uncertainty nudged their rating over the edge, St. Juste said. 

“We had some concerns about the slowing fundamentals, the supply, and concern that this year's growth would be decelerating from last year. But then, out of left field, the big surprise to everyone was that Trump, a Republican administration, would propose banning institutions from promoting home construction,” he said.

The bill under consideration in the House is an updated version of the bill that easily cleared the House in February without any restrictions on single-family rental ownership as the Housing for the 21st Century Act. 

Progressive firebrand Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Trump ally Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, added the BTR regulations once the House bill came over to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, which the two senators chair.

The Senate passed the updated legislation, which also included new adjustments to community bank and digital currency regulations, in a 89-10 vote on March 12 and sent it back to the House for approval, where it currently sits.

Analysts for JPMorgan Chase similarly have a neutral rating for AMH but are overweight on Invitation Homes, in large part because of the public valuation discount to the firm's net asset value. The BTR operator sold 483 homes in the first quarter for a combined $206M, or $427K per home, while its market capitalization implies each home in its portfolio is only worth $290K. 

Invitation Homes’ buybacks reflect conviction that they’ll be able to keep growing regardless of whether a ban on corporate ownership clears the president’s desk.

“We think this is a positive surprise and very important to the story,” the analysts wrote of the buybacks. “For some time now the stock has been trading at an outsized discount, and INVH has had the financial wherewithal to buy back shares.”

Operators initially shrugged off the January executive order because it included an exception for BTR projects. But industry groups rushed to lobby on the Hill when the Senate added restrictions on corporate ownership of homes to its housing bill without including an exception for BTR operators. 

The Mortgage Bankers Association aimed this month to up the pressure on Congress, putting out a call to members to contact their local House representative to urge them to drop the BTR restrictions. 

But even if the provisions survive, BTR executives say they’ll be able to adjust operations to stay in business. One notable feature of the legislation is it defines a single-family home as having two or fewer dwellings, Southern Impression Homes' Funk said. 

“If it were to pass in its current form, the easiest solution is to build structures that have more than two units,” he said. “That solves the problem, which would lean a lot more towards townhomes.”