In an announcement that’s left the corporate real estate industry reeling, President Donald Trump claimed yesterday he will take “immediate steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” blaming Democrats for making “the American Dream . . . increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans.”
The president is acknowledging that corporate greed is a primary driver of America’s housing crisis. If he follows through on his announcement, the resulting shift in policy could prove a major thorn in the side of the home-buying industry, including Blackstone, the country’s largest landlord.
In response to Trump’s post, shares in Blackstone — a trillion-dollar private equity and real estate fund that owns 350,000 rental units nationwide — dropped 5.6 percent on Wednesday. As did Invitation Homes, a corporate homebuyer with a portfolio of more than 85,000 homes, which saw its market value drop nearly 7 percent in a day.
Collectively, corporations own 9 percent of all residential real estate in the United States. In some metro areas, institutional investors own double-digit shares of the housing market. That includes Atlanta, where, as of 2022, at least 25 percent of single-family homes were owned by an investor with more than a thousand properties — pushing homebuyers out of the housing market and jacking up rents for tenants.
Trump’s announcement, which he promised to provide more details about during his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos next week, has been met with skepticism by advocates and officials who have long warned that institutional real estate investors are exacerbating the housing crisis.
“Positive step,” wrote Laurel Kilgour, a policy official at the American Economic Liberties Project. “But sounds limited to stopping institutional investors from ‘buying more’? Can investors in Atlanta . . . [continue to] keep that supply off-market from family buyers?”
“Donald Trump has not yet lifted a finger to bring down housing costs for Americans,” wrote Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on X in the hours after Trump shared these new plans. “Enough talk . . . Congress should work on legislation to stop corporate investors from buying up homes.”
Coincidentally, Trump’s announcement comes the same day Warren and Senate Democrats published a scathing report called “Broken Promises,” detailing the ways that Trump’s deregulatory agenda has undermined the president’s pledge to cut “the cost of a new home in half.”
His administration also declined to support the Humans Over Private Equity (HOPE) for Homeownership Act, introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) last February. The legislation — doggedly opposed by the corporate real estate industry — would eliminate homeownership-related tax breaks for institutional investors, levy a new 15 percent tax penalty on hedge fund purchases of single-family homes, and force hedge funds to divest from their current portfolio of single-family homes over the next ten years or face a $5,000 per-home penalty.
If Trump’s plans have any such teeth, they could prove a game changer. The evidence is clear: corporate landlords are contributing to rising housing costs. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve in 2024 found that institutional investors in housing “raise rents at 60 percent higher rates than the average increase when first acquiring the property, and higher investor share in a neighborhood is correlated with faster rent increases.”
Stanford University researcher Sebastian Hanson’s recent study examined the post–financial crisis era’s “unprecedented rise in rental purchases by institutional investors.” The study shows that “after entry of these investors into a market, house prices and rents grow 2 percent and 1.2 percent faster per year,” respectively. The study also notes that “faster rental growth cannot be accounted for by market timing, suggesting that institutional investors use their size to extract markups.”
A Biden White House study of real estate–focused tech giants like RealPage found that “anticompetitive pricing costs renters in algorithm-utilizing buildings an average of $70 a month. In total, we estimate the costs to renters in 2023 was $3.8 billion. This estimate is likely a lower bound on the true costs.”
Home prices are similarly affected by real estate consolidation. University of North Carolina researchers showed a “causal impact of [corporate landlords’] market share on local house prices,” and that “increases in [these firms’] share growth leads to an annual additional house price growth of 2.1 percent.”
In the last year of his term, President Joe Biden’s administration sued a number of institutional landlords, along with real estate software giant RealPage, accusing them of illegally colluding to artificially inflate rents nationwide. The Trump administration has since settled a number of these cases.
That includes a December settlement in a Justice Department case against LivCor, a Blackstone subsidiary accused of anticompetitive rent-fixing.
Blackstone, through its massive network of investments, has had an alleged role in the student housing crisis, skyrocketing evictions, child labor exploitation, climate change, and has reportedly bankrolled insurrectionists and fascists.
Blackstone’s cofounder, chairman, and CEO Stephen Schwarzman is a GOP megadonor who served as an economic advisor to the first Trump administration and endorsed Trump in the 2024 election, spending $40 million to elect Republicans.
Last year — amid pass-through tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act benefiting billionaire financiers like the Blackstone CEO — Schwarzman contributed $5 million to the president’s super PAC, making him one of MAGA, Inc.’s top individual donors of 2025.
Blackstone did not respond to the Lever’s request for comment.
Great Job David Sirota & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
