In an aerial photo, two-story single-family homes line the streets on January 14, 2026 in Thousand Oaks, California.
Kevin Carter | Getty Images
A law banning institutional investors from buying single-family rental homes is making its way through Congress, but many of them are already selling thousands of homes — and have been doing so for two years.
Research from real estate data and analytics firm Parcl Labs shows that the biggest investors are now net sellers of homes.
In every major urban housing market, investors account for a larger share of the listings for sale than of the total housing stock. Some cities like Dallas, Philadelphia and Houston sell most aggressively. Dallas investors own 9.2% of the real estate inventory but account for 22.8% of new listings for sale.
According to Parcl, FirstKey Homes appears to be the most motivated, with more than twice as many listings as its competitors. It also offers much deeper price cuts, an average of 10% off original list prices, and drops prices approximately every 20 days.
“It’s a volatile real estate market and people are trying to take risk off the table,” said Jason Lewris, co-founder of Parcl Labs. He noted that rents do not hold up relative to what investors could receive in a sale.
“So it’s better to just get the money and see how things turn out,” he said.
In its latest quarterly earnings release for the fourth quarter of 2025, the company said: Invitation housesone of the largest listed landlords, reported that all 368 of its wholly owned acquisitions were newly built homes purchased from various home builders. It was reported that 315 existing homes were sold.
For full-year 2025, Invitation reported that “almost all” of its 2,410 wholly-owned acquisitions were purchased through relationships with homebuilders, while the company sold 1,356 wholly-owned homes, “often to families purchasing for their own use.”
In an effort to make housing affordable, President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late January that would ban large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes for rental purposes. He made an exception for the purchase of new buildings built specifically for rental purposes.
The White House later sent proposed legislation to Congress saying that investors who own more than 100 single-family homes would be barred from purchasing additional single-family homes but would not have to sell what they own. The Senate and House bills have different volume thresholds for large investors, but they are not far apart.
To put this in perspective, according to a Bank of America analysis, single-family homes make up about 10% of the U.S. housing stock, and the vast majority, 80%, are owned by so-called mom-and-pop operators with fewer than ten homes each. Smaller investors who own between 10 and 1,000 apartments make up 17% of landlords. Large institutional investors who own more than 1,000 homes make up just 3% of the single-family home rental market.
However, the numbers are declining.
After the subprime mortgage crash that led to the Great Recession, investors initially flooded the market. In some markets, home prices fell by half and foreclosures increased. Investors bought the houses at bargain prices and turned them into lucrative rental properties.
As markets recovered, there were fewer entry-level homes for sale to owner-occupiers as investors focused on this segment. In some cities like Atlanta, regular buyers couldn’t compete with investors who usually carried cash. Some districts are almost entirely owned by investors.
But in 2022, even before Trump took office for the second time, investors were already retreating and buying fewer homes, according to Parcl. Sales accelerated in late 2024 as Atlanta investors now sell nearly two properties for every property purchase.
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The next frontier
Investors are now switching to rental properties.
According to Rick Palacios, research director at John Burns Research and Consulting, much of the net sales shift in recent years has been a natural process of capital recycling.
“After 2020, real estate prices increased, and many single-family rental investors sold assets in a rising real estate price environment and then invested their capital in higher-yielding rental properties rather than purchasing them upon resale at these very high prices, also increasing borrowing costs for investors,” Palacios said.
Builders also adjust their prices in real time, while resellers do not, he noted.
“This provided an opportunity for investors to buy from developers at discounts,” he added.
Invitation Homes has bought homes from developers such as Lennar, but in January announced its acquisition of Atlanta-based ResiBuilt Homes, a build-to-rent developer in high-growth markets in the Southeast. ResiBuilt delivered about 1,000 homes per year, but Invitation Homes expects to expand.
“One of the most constructive ways we can help is by adding more homes to the markets we serve,” Invitation Homes CEO Dallas Tanner said on a conference call with analysts last month. “While our partnerships with homebuilders have supported these efforts for years, our acquisition of ResiBuilt extends them even further and improves our control over costs, product quality and speed of delivery.”
AMHFormerly known as American Homes 4 Rent, it has been building entire rental apartments for several years now. In its latest fourth quarter earnings release, CEO Bryan Smith said: “Since beginning our ground-up development program, we have contributed over 14,000 new-build homes to the country’s housing stock. Our 2025 results and our 2026 outlook reflect the continued focus on expanding the country’s housing supply, improving the living experience and creating value for all our stakeholders.”
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