Trump Seeks To Ban Institutional Investors From Buying Houses
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would immediately begin taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes.
In a social media post, the president said the American dream of buying and owning a home is increasingly out of reach for too many people, including younger Americans. He said he will discuss this topic and further housing and affordability proposals at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, later this month.
"People live in homes, not corporations," Trump wrote in the post.
The Trump administration couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on further details of the proposal.
It is unclear which companies would be impacted, what restrictions would be in place or how Trump would attempt to implement a policy that he said he will call on Congress to codify.
A few major companies involved with single-family rentals saw their stocks dip in the aftermath of the news. At the time of publication, Invitation Homes was down about 5%, American Homes 4 Rent dipped about 3% and Blackstone saw its shares decline about 5%.
On average, renting a home was cheaper than paying a mortgage in all of the top 50 U.S. metros in 2025, according to Bankrate. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate today is 6.01%, up significantly from 2.65% at the beginning of 2021.
As of November, the share of first-time homebuyers dropped to an all-time low of 21%, while the median age of first-time buyers climbed to a record high of 40 years, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Rental housing economist Jay Parsons said in a social media post that the root issue behind unaffordable housing is a lack of supply and that a potential ban wouldn't solve the problem.
"It is disappointing because it's in no way grounded in reality and will in no way improve housing affordability or availability," he said in the post. "Everyone wants someone to blame, a boogeyman. And 'Wall Street' makes for a convenient target for people across both political parties."
47 million rental units in the US, of which 14 million are single-family rentals. If you define ‘institutional’ as owning 1,000+ homes, they are 3.4% of the 14 million. If your threshold for ‘institutional’ is 100+ homes, it’s 7.2% ownership of all single-family rentals. pic.twitter.com/3V6l5LksmT
— Rick Palacios Jr. (@RickPalaciosJr) January 7, 2026
Jeff Holzmann, chief operating officer of RREAF Holdings, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm with more than $5B in assets, told Bisnow in an email that the president is acting on an issue that most real estate professionals have known about for a long time.
"When a large number of homes (and sometimes apartments) are bought up by a single investor, they are essentially 'commoditized' and treated as a product coming off a production line," Holzmann said. "Quality and prices are set to match corporate budgets which drives up prices by competing with regular families trying to save up towards buying a home."
The U.S. government has explored steps to regulate large single-family rental firms in the past.
In the final days of President Joe Biden's term in 2025, former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan sought to probe more than 30 firms that each own at least 1,000 rental units to determine their impact on the market. It is unclear if those efforts persisted during the Trump administration.
Democrats in Congress also introduced a bill in 2023 aimed at forcing institutional investors to sell off single-family homes, titled the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act of 2023, but it stalled in Congress.
