The move to bar investors from buying single-family houses is on … and so are investors.
Though the White House’s proposed ban is still in the talking stage — as are several bills in Congress that would do the same — some investors are heading for the exits, according to Parcl Labs, a real-time analytics and research firm.
In 13 of the top 20 metro areas, investors are listing at more than 1.5 times their ownership share, the company found. Purchase activity has been declining since rates rose in 2022.
“The White House proposal targets a behavior the market has been pulling back on its own for years,” the report says. “Therefore, the policy may accelerate what’s already in motion.”
In every major market, investors’ share of listings exceed their share of ownership. Dallas has the largest spread, with owners there holding 9.2% of the housing stock, but account for 22.8% of all the houses for sale.
The retreat started before President Trump offered the proposal as a way to boost the number of houses for sale to owner-occupants, and long before the idea was refined to define investors as those with 100 or more units in their portfolios, the company found.
“Investor listing share has surged since late 2024, and net selling is accelerating,” the company found. In Atlanta, for every home investors buy, they now sell nearly two.
“When selling pressure concentrates in markets where investors hold a material share of supply, it has the potential to move local home prices for all sellers, not just institutional ones,” Parcl Labs says.
Most of the largest Wall Street landlords are sitting tight. But one appears to be looking to get out of the business altogether.
The outlier is FirstKey Homes (Cerberus). It has 301 active listings, and nearly every one is “highly motivated, with an average of a nearly 20% price cut from their original list prices. Otherwise, outfits like Invitation Homes, AMH, and Progress Residential show small for-sale counts relative to their portfolios.
But the 100-plus-unit segment the proposed ban targets is “starting to move,” Parcl Labs found.
The firm tracked 11,221 active listings from 714 portfolios at that 100-plus level. Of those, 4,142 properties — 37% were “fire sales” which investors are aggressively cutting prices to get out. Motivated sellers are largely concentrated in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, and Tampa.
“Listing volume tells one part of the story. The other part is pricing behavior,” the company reported. “An investor listing a property at market rate and waiting patiently is managing a portfolio. An investor slashing prices repeatedly over months is trying to get out of a position.”
