President Donald Trump signed an executive order this week designed to limit the ability of large institutional investors to purchase single-family homes that would otherwise be available to actual families, framing it as an effort to protect housing affordability and uphold the “American Dream". Rather than imposing a single outright ban, the order works through multiple federal touchpoints. Agencies are instructed to issue guidance preventing federal programs from approving, insuring, guaranteeing, securitising, or otherwise facilitating institutional purchases of single-family homes. The order also expands “first-look” preferences that give individual and non-institutional buyers priority access to certain properties, particularly those moving through foreclosure or distressed pipelines. The Treasury is directed to review rules that may affect institutional acquisition or long-term holding, while the DOJ and FTC are instructed to scrutinise large acquisitions and prioritise antitrust enforcement against practices such as coordinated vacancy or pricing strategies in local single-family rental markets. The White House also calls for legislative recommendations to codify the policy, implicitly acknowledging that durable limits likely require Congress and that investors could attempt to route around definitions through affiliates or smaller entities.
Wall Street’s grip on single-family housing is not insignificant but large enough to affect price. A 2024 Government Accountability Office review found that investors owning 1,000 or more single-family rentals collectively held nearly 450,000 homes nationally as of June 2022, roughly 3% of all single-family rental homes. That average masks sharp regional concentration, particularly in Sun Belt metros. In Atlanta, institutional investors accounted for roughly 25% of single-family rentals, compared with about 20.5% in Jacksonville and 18.3% in Charlotte. Invitation Homes reports ownership of roughly 80,000 to 84,000 homes and argues this represents less than 0.5% of the roughly 16 million single-family rentals nationwide. Research estimates place Progress Residential and its parent, Pretium, at around 97,000 homes, while American Homes 4 Rent reported ownership of more than 61,000 single-family properties as of September 30, 2025.
The political anger behind the order is rooted in post-2008 memory, when millions of households lost homes through foreclosure during the financial crisis, and the GAO notes that large institutions expanded their single-family portfolios by bulk-buying foreclosed homes at auction when mortgage credit tightened for ordinary buyers. That resentment has at times boiled beyond politics. In 2025, a Midtown Manhattan office-building shooting killed four people, including a senior Blackstone executive, showing how financial-industry symbolism can become a target even when motives in such tragedies are complex and not reducible to housing policy alone.
If the order has real bite, its most immediate effects would likely be felt in markets where institutional ownership is already concentrated and where federal levers matter most, such as foreclosure channels, agency-backed financing, securitisation, and federally assisted housing programmes. In the short term, fewer deep-pocket bidders could modestly improve a household’s odds of winning a starter home, particularly in metros dominated by large landlords. However, the GAO’s literature review cautions that the effects on prices and rents are contested. Some studies find institutional ownership raises prices and rents, while others find mixed or even stabilising effects after housing crises, with outcomes highly dependent on local supply constraints.
Over the longer term, the central question is substitution. If large institutional landlords are constrained, smaller investors and LLCs may step in, or developers may expand build-to-rent projects as a workaround. That makes definitions, anti-circumvention rules, and enforcement posture as important as the headline restriction itself. Historically, this is not a common executive-branch approach. Past efforts to restrict institutional ownership have largely been legislative or regulatory, including Democratic proposals such as the “End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act", which failed to become law. The notable difference here is a Republican White House attempting to use federal programme plumbing and antitrust scrutiny to impose similar constraints without waiting for Congress.
Sources: Reuters, Yahoo Finance, GAO, New York Times
Photos: Unsplash
Written by: Ariff Azraei Bin Mohammed Kamal
