Private equity investment is gobbling up an increasing share of apartment units, now accounting for at least a tenth of all ownership in the United States, with most of it concentrated in the Sun Belt region.
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Private equity firms own about 8,200 apartment buildings comprised of over 2.2 million units, according to a Private Equity Stakeholder Project report. Of the 121 big private equity firms PESP tracked, the 10 largest apartment owners collectively share 41% of them, a total of 900,000 units across the country.
Blackstone is the largest private equity owner of apartments in the U.S. with over 230,000 units. Greystar follows with 138,000 units. Other major firms owning vast swaths of units include Starwood Capital, Related Cos., Cortland and Brookfield.
Sixty-two percent of these units, or 1.4 million, were purchased since 2018, and almost 930,000 since 2021.
Blackstone picked up 58% of its units in or after 2021, and more than 75% were acquired since 2018. Starwood bought 53% of its portfolio in or after 2021 and 77% since 2018.
More than half of all units are located in five states: Texas, Florida, California, Georgia and North Carolina. Texas has the largest share of private equity-owned units at over 440,000 units across 1,500 properties.
Four of the top five — Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina — also saw the largest population growth from 2020 to 2024.
The top 10 metropolitan areas with the largest private equity investment are Dallas; Atlanta; Houston; Denver; Austin; Phoenix; Orlando, Florida; Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina; and Tampa, Florida.
Those metros are home to 860,000 units owned by private equity, with Dallas seeing the largest share at 191,431 units and 598 properties, followed by Atlanta, where private equity owns 141,500 units and 466 properties.
The report also tracked the cost-burden impact of the private equity sector on these markets.
The Tampa, Florida, metro, where 23.4% of apartments are owned by private equity, saw a 20.8% increase in households spending 30% or more of their income on housing between 2019 and 2023. The percentage of households exceeding that spending figure rose from 53% to 64% over those four years.
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