Starwood Real Estate Income Trust is considering a sale of about 2,000 single-family rental houses, which the investor acquired about two years ago as part of a portfolio from Pretium Partners, Bloomberg reports, citing an anonymous source with knowledge of the potential deal.

In 2021, Starwood bought 2,300 houses from Pretium for a reported $1B, upping its bet on single-family rentals. Pretium plans to buy about 100 of those houses back from Starwood this year, the source said, though not at a discount.

All together, Starwood REIT holds more than 3,200 single-family rental houses.

“Single-family and multifamily is doing fine,” Starwood Chairman and CEO Barry Sternlicht said during the company's most recent earnings call in May. “The only issue is office. Office is a story.”

The deal comes at a time when nervous investors are making heightened redemption requests of Starwood REIT. The company reported redemption requests in April of about 4.2% of its net asset value, and met about half of the requests.

Pretium recently inked a deal to buy about 4,000 completed and partially completed houses from homebuilder D.R. Horton, paying about $1.5B. Pretium holds about 100,000 houses nationwide.

Overall, investors have been keen to buy into single-family rentals in recent years, though their ardor has cooled a little in recent months, as annualized single-family rent growth dropped down to 4.3% in March, marking nearly a year of slowing gains, CoreLogic reports.