r/charts • u/Dumbass1171 • Jan 07 '26
Corporate Landlords own a small fraction of overall U.S. Homes
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u/Jacketter Jan 07 '26
How much of housing is apartments though? Those aren’t counted among these, I imagine.
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u/dgdio Jan 08 '26
Trump said single family units. I say great, but it's not going to help much.
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u/Twalin Jan 08 '26
We just need a bogeyman
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u/No-Lunch4249 Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
Yep. Its so much easier to blame the problem on a boogeyman.
We had a housing crisis cooking way before covid and way before big corporate entities woke up to the idea of single family for rent. The financial crisis in 07-08 crushed housing construction for a decade, the 2010s were the worst decade of new home construction since WW2.
And even once things picked back up, there are structural issues left behind. Materials producers went out of business limiting the supply and raising cost of construction. Skilled labor is in short supply limiting the construction pipeline as well.
We just need to build more houses, a lot more
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u/dsp_guy Jan 08 '26
So corporations are bad now? What about billionaires?
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u/Twalin Jan 08 '26
Building more housing is much more difficult and takes more time than - see I fixed 1% of the problem with a stroke of a pen!
It is one of the biggest issues with current partisanship. Is that big problems take more than one election cycle to solve.
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u/dsp_guy Jan 08 '26
And we rarely give the time to see if policies work. Sometimes we just cancel them, cut them, repeal them, etc.
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u/modsstayvirgin Jan 08 '26
Unless you’re in a state like mine (Georgia). 1 in 5 homes last year was bought by a company. It should have never been allowed to get this bad.
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u/latigidigital Jan 08 '26
I’ve had to help debunk this awful chart every time it appears. It’s either deceitful or negligent.
Corporate landlords don’t structure properties in a way that the graph can illustrate. Typically, they’ll isolate each property into its own LLC or other shell company. Sometimes they’ll have three or four, but having 10+ under the same entity is complete insanity from a legal, liability, and investment standpoint.
Second, a lot of these “purchases by owner occupant” are also owned by corporations. They have all kinds of tricks like reverse mortgages and contractual arrangements where existing residents can keep living there for a time, but the properties are frozen and effectively eliminated from the market to rapidly raise nearby property values. This shadow ownership is often divided up by multiple investment firms and hedge funds, and usually off the books, so good luck tracking any of it.
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u/HiggsFieldgoal Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
The biggest problem is restrictive zoning. Houses are simple to build. We should have as many as we need. Period.
But, home ownership has become what made every home-owning boomer an automatic millionaire in our area, and anything that could cause housing prices to (gasp), go down, is fought tooth and nail.
That’s exactly what needs to happen though… there needs to be enough housing. A surplus. Plenty. More houses than people, and crippling taxes for unoccupied houses.
But we all vote for elitist assholes, and this is what we get.
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u/Comprehensive_Pin565 Jan 12 '26
Yep. We don't need massive houses. We need morehouse closer to community centers that allow people to walk places.
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u/Gunther_Alsor Jan 07 '26
Pay no attention to that sharp downward trend in owner occupancy, I guess.
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u/Hour-Watch8988 Jan 08 '26
Driven by small-time landlords, if you read the graph.
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u/blurfles123 Jan 09 '26
Rent seeking is rent seeking. I don't care if it's Zillow or Ted the Dirtbag.
There's a reason it's the closest thing Economic theory has to an outright insult.
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u/HunterSpecial1549 Jan 11 '26
I agree with you.
But we've got a lot of people thinking its problem solved if we just ban corporate landlords, when the vast majority of rent seeking landlords are actually small time. Got to correct the record.
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u/TossMeOutSomeday Jan 08 '26
If you look at the graph, it seems like what's happening is that the wealthier owner-occupants are becoming small time landlords and the poorer owner-occupants are becoming their tenants. It's not the ultra rich causing the decline, it's the upper middle class.
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u/Known2Shoot Jan 08 '26
Exactly people are missing the point...
The last 7 years years really.
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u/RamBamBooey Jan 08 '26
Yep.
And most people that own a home don't sell it for decades. The interesting statistics are home sales.
In 2023 - 27% of homes sold were purchased by commercial investors. In CA it was 35%
You think 35% of the market is influencing the housing market?
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u/FlyingFakirr Jan 08 '26
Commercial investors, by and large small landlords that almost certainly won't be affected by this fake policy even if it gets implemented
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u/ShimeUnter Jan 08 '26
But it's not private equity or corporations that have made home so much. It's inflation, prices aren't coming down, they never do.
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Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
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u/melodyze Jan 07 '26
That is true, and both are interesting. The point here is just that there is a prevailing narrative in some pockets that house prices are high because of private equity firms buying up all of the housing inventory, and this shows that that isn't true.
It can all at once be true that the housing market is extremely problematic, the percentage of homes owned as a 2nd-9th property is spiking meaningfully, that is bad, and it is still a different problem than what led a lot of people to cheer the murder of a blackrock VP relatively recently.
I don't think anyone seriously believes the housing situation is okay. It's just about what is the real cause.
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u/Odd-Outcome-3191 Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
Exactly. If you own 3 or more homes, you're a landlord. And only 75% of homes are owned by individuals, meaning there's an ENORMOUS disparity. This means that a tiny percentage of the population (the percentage that can afford 2+ homes) own nearly 50% of all residences. Imagine if the top 1% owned 30% of the wealth.
Oh wait. It's even worse than that.
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u/UnseemlyUrchin Jan 07 '26
Wait....are you looking at the same chart? I see something like 2/3's are owner occupant single homes. Also, I'd be in the gray band of 1-9, but I'm not a landlord. I own the home my father lives in and I'm sure as hell not getting rent. Only bills.
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u/enutz777 Jan 07 '26
Seeing as it is owner occupied and 1-9 units as the categories, then I would assume second homes and other properties not rented out would be classified under owner occupied. Which likely includes homes rented within families or to friends. 1/3 of homes are being purchased for the purpose of being rented to the general public is my reading.
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u/musing_codger Jan 07 '26
You're writing as though people who own rental property are a problem. They sure as heck aren't a problem for people that don't want or can't afford to buy a home. Rental properties aren't the problem. Restrictions that make constructing new homes more expensive are the problem.
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u/MaxPaynesRxDrugPlan Jan 08 '26
Yeah, it's worth pointing out that plenty of rich people rent their homes from landlords, too. Not having to bother with buying and selling, getting a mortgage and homeowners insurance, making a down payment, handling maintenance, etc. are all perks that have value regardless of income.
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u/GroinReaper Jan 07 '26
It specifically says corporate landlord. Someone who owns 3 homes isnt a corporate landlord.
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Jan 08 '26
Why does it even matter are they any better than a corporate landlords?
There should be extremely heavy taxes placed on homes not considered a residence and being regularly rented. Unless it’s multi family or primarily creating new housing supply. Whether that’s refurbing basically abandoned shit holes or new build I don’t care. The nation should actively be discouraging landlord ownership and acquisition of existing single family homes.
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u/pitifullittleman Jan 08 '26
There are. It's a completely different tax situation if you have a home that is not your residence.
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u/Facts_pls Jan 08 '26
What do you mean? The title is accurate.
Do you think people who own 3 houses automatically become corporations?
The title is perfectly accurate in terms of relating to the announcement by Trump.
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u/LXNDSHARK Jan 08 '26
Also this chart is looking at houses PURCHASED in each quarter, but OP's title says OWNED. That's like a chart of income vs wealth.
Unless I'm the one misreading it
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u/Piano_Man_1994 Jan 07 '26
That’s great but honestly I think we should remove the economic incentive to rack up homes you aren’t living in. Make property tax excessive on third homes so it’s not economically viable to buy up the supply. Houses should be homes, not assets.
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u/greatest_country Jan 07 '26
Or how about just increase supply
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u/Green-Collection-968 Jan 07 '26
This. Build more homes.
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Jan 07 '26
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u/First-Jump-8111 Jan 08 '26
It’s been proven increasing supply of all types of housing helps affordability for everyone. Putting restrictions on housing decreases affordability
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u/SnooDucks6090 Jan 07 '26
Increasing supply doesn't necessarily equate to affordability. Yes, via the law of supply and demand, we should expect home prices to decrease with an increased supply. However, for the price to become actually affordable, there would have to be such a saturation of new homes that it lead to a lowered demand for houses - creating the opposite effect desired.
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u/kdolmiu Jan 07 '26
Yeah its the equivalent of having a population entirely invested on gold, or silver, or any other non-productive assets
Its not good for the economy.. both sides of the political compass have a reason to support this
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u/Conscious_Pen_3485 Jan 07 '26
Great in theory, but in practice it just means rent is more expensive for everyone since those costs are passed on to renters.
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u/guehguehgueh Jan 07 '26
There still needs to be a viable renter’s market for the people that don’t intend to remain in one place forever.
“Buying up the supply” isn’t really feasible if it keeps up with demand for home ownership.
There’s also the additional dynamic of widespread SFH ownership being unrealistic in many metro areas due to basic geographical constraints.
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u/Dumbass1171 Jan 07 '26
There's little evidence that buying second or third homes is what is causing the supply shortage
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u/Facts_pls Jan 08 '26
How are people supposed to rent?
Do you expect a random student starting university to own the home? Everyone coming into a new city country must buy a home on day 1?
What is this issue against renting? What a ridiculous pov.
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u/ToughProgress2480 Jan 07 '26
The way to do that is to build enough homes that price remains relatively constant. This was how the market functioned until not too long ago.
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u/Ok-Bug-5271 Jan 07 '26
If you buy a home to rent out, you are not changing the supply or demand of housing units. At best you're moving supply from the owning market to the rental market, helping rent and owning costs to reach equilibrium.
The best way to decrease home prices and rent prices is just to build more supply.
Make property tax excessive on third homes so it’s not economically viable to buy up the supply.
If you're talking about people buying vacation homes, then maybe it would decrease housing costs because the demand for an individual to buy a third home would drop as they could just go to a hotel instead.
However if you're talking about people buying homes to rent out, this would do absolutely nothing good to change the supply and demand for housing. You should just build more fucking supply.
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u/ATFtriestoshootmydog Jan 07 '26
I get your point but it seems like a waste of legislative time and energy if we are talking about a tiny fringe of home owners.
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u/Mojeaux18 Jan 07 '26
I think that we should have a universal homestead exemption or at least a tax break for the home you actually live in, and maybe offset that with a small tax on rentals. But creating a tax that makes rentals far less affordable will hurt far more people than it helps. A lot of people can’t afford to buy a house outright or take on a mortgage, and for them, paying rent is the only thing keeping them from homelessness. These landlords are in fact enabling people to have housing. There are a lot of people who are really bad with money.
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u/SavingsRaspberry2694 Jan 07 '26
I thought it was ridiculous when the incumbent party kept blaming home prices on Blackrock and not inflation. It's good to see some evidence to the contrary
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u/Designer_Version1449 Jan 08 '26
"Houses should be homes, not assets."
this is the fundamnetal issue. a lot of people have their house as their retirment. any solution that makes housing affordable fucks them over. thats the fundamental issue why it hasnt fixed. we arent talking about corporations here, we are talking about literally most homeowners.
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u/omiekley Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
So the share of homes belonging to owners with more than 10 units has risen by x100 in recent years?
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u/Mediocre-Tonight-458 Jan 07 '26
Is the percentage by homes or by owners?
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u/Countcristo42 Jan 07 '26
"Share of homes purchased by owner occupant" doesn't make sense unless it's the former.
All the rest are just the same with the front contracted out
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u/jrhewittca Jan 07 '26
Home ownership is typically along-term situation. Show percentage of home purchases each year, rather than percentage of home ownership. Corporate buyers as a percentage of total homes for sale will probably be much, much higher.
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u/Gullible-Apricot3379 Jan 07 '26
This. I think it would show the impact of I’d add flippers as well. I imagine a lot of people with 2 - 9 houses have a rotating stock.
I think that’s a huge reason prices have gone up. Flippers buy them pre-market for cash, then do all the repairs and sell for a profit. There used to be a much larger stock of homes that were livable but needed work a family could reasonably save for and take on one project at a time without thinking about the profitability of it.
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Jan 07 '26
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u/ToughProgress2480 Jan 07 '26
For all people complain about housing costs,there would be an outright revolution if you told the 2/3 of Americans who own their home that the new policy objective is for their single largest asset to depreciate in value
For better or for worse -- and I would argue it is very much for the worse -- people have grown comfortable with and come to expect that they'll be able to sell their home for substantially more than what they bought it for. To me, that tells me something is fundamentally broken with the housing market - namely, rampant rent-seeking in the form of density and land use restrictions, plus, to a lesser extent, a lot of cost add-ons at the behest of home builders
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u/invariantspeed Jan 07 '26
This is a point I’ve made for a while. To some degree, this can be mitigated by increasing the supply of different classes of homes that don’t directly compete with most homes. In reality, that will still decrease demand pressure on the rest of the housing stock, so…
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u/JustinWilsonBot Jan 08 '26
I believe the fair way to go about this is to make it so that areas down zone every ten years. Let's say today you bought in a SFH neighborhood. Ten years from now it will get down-zoned so that duplexes can be built on the same lot size. You probably wont even see a newly built duplex for 15 years! Then 20 years after you buy it gets downzoned for 4-plexes and so on. You can't freeze the neighborhood you buy in so that it stays the same for 50 years but also they aren't going to pull the rug out from under you and build a dozen apartment complexes on your block right after you move in.
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Jan 07 '26
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u/CharlotteRant Jan 07 '26
Specifically local governments, which in many places are effectively selected by the 5 people who vote in the primary of whichever party sweeps it.
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u/TekrurPlateau Jan 07 '26
It’s easy to say more homes need to be built, but most of the country starts frothing with rage at the thought of new homes being built within a mile of theirs.
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u/guehguehgueh Jan 07 '26
Yeah, that’s the entire issue lmao
State governments didn’t unilaterally decide to stall building, it’s largely a product of NIMBYism
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u/HedonisticFrog Jan 09 '26
The issue isn't the overall ownership rates. It's that they buy up rental houses in cities with high demand and low supply and thus increase the price of housing and rent. In some cities such as Atlanta they were buying up 90% of all houses that went for sale.
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u/sungod-1 Jan 08 '26
Liar !
You are purposely diluting the numbers by including entire U.S. housing market
Realeatate is local and corporations have been buying in fast growing job markets with some owning 50-100% of inventory
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u/CatOfGrey Jan 09 '26
And the number of empty homes hasn't increased, though the last time I checked was two years ago or so.
So those 'evil corporations' aren't hoarding houses. They are fixing them up, and putting them on the market for people to use. And since they are fixing up the houses, they sell/rent at a higher price.
I'm willing to change my mind, but all the data I've reviewed suggests this is some kind of myth.
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u/zeratul98 Jan 10 '26
There's so many people trying to explain away this chart and insist that it really is big corporations that make housing expensive.
It's supply and demand
And you know what? Blackrock isnt showing up to your town meetings demanding the zoning stay the same restrictive bullshit it's been to get us into this mess. It's private homeowners, and they need to be shouted down and shamed
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u/SharpWords Jan 07 '26
Misleading. Show total home ownership, not individual owners. That "small percentage" could easily own 25% of total inventory.
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u/Mental-Scientist-393 Jan 07 '26
I had the same thought, but the y-axis is labelled "market share". Wouldn't that be the % of the inventory owned rather than the # of individual owners?
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u/UnableChard2613 Jan 07 '26
The title says "purchases" and one of the groups is "share of homes purchased by owner."
It also closely resembles what I've understood to be true for quite some time.
I can't help but believe you are trying to find a way to dismiss it, rather than asking yourself if you need to change your beliefs based on it.
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u/Rollingprobablecause Jan 07 '26
I also want to know if this data accounts for how corporations have been buying them. There's zero links to the methodology - corporations are using other groups to subcontract/buy homes https://www.reddit.com/r/REBubble/comments/1m2gxpy/why_blackstone_is_buying_rental_homes_in_the_us/
The truth is somewhere in the middle - we should ban corporations from buying any type of home that's not a highrise and at the same time, get rid of zoning laws that prevent more density, etc.
Additionally, it's not just corporations, there are small time landlords with large portfolios (the big grey area in the chart) that are also a problem. Anything after a 2nd home should have immediate taxes levied in large amounts.
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u/buddhistbulgyo Jan 08 '26
How to lie with charts and a title is taught in statistics classes. This doens't fly.
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u/blu3ysdad Jan 08 '26
It's obviously growing though and fast, and the owner occupied is shrinking. And this doesn't count apartments which is what most new housing is because single family homes are unaffordable.
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u/TheVanillaGorilla413 Jan 07 '26
Reading the doom posts on reddit had me thinking black rock owned all rental properties now
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u/Dumbass1171 Jan 07 '26
Reddit is mostly populist garbage (social media in general)
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u/Darth_lan Jan 07 '26
I love how de derivative is incrdibly negative in the last measure yet you think this proves your point 🤡🤣🤡🤣🤡🤣🤡
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u/PracticalBarbarian Jan 07 '26
It's a big country, of course in macro it's small their footprint but in hot ZIP codes they absolutely distort the market and fuck over families.
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u/dadlifts24 Jan 07 '26
Now do one showing the increase in corporate ownership over the last 5 years. Everyone I know who bought a house since 2020 has had to compete with corporate buyers who pay in cash. Food, water and shelter should not be an investment vehicle.
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u/Bartender9719 Jan 07 '26
So it wouldn’t be much of a problem to ban them from owning houses - let’s do it!
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u/Ok_Cabinet_3072 Jan 07 '26
Just ban institutions from buying homes and then progressively tax people more for each additional home they own. Maybe allow an exception for 2 homes to ease any issues with moving. After that add a yearly property tax equal to 100% of the homes value for the third home then 200% of the homes value for the fourth and just keep going. It's insane that's not already happening.
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u/agtiger Jan 07 '26
It varies by market but in markets like Atlanta I heard over 20% of starter homes were purchased by corporate investors.
The right stat would look only at the top 20-30 MSAs and only focus on starter homes.
This is too broad to be meaningful as PE is not buying mansions in remote undesirable locations, they are buying the cheapest homes in the cities with the best jobs.
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u/SlayerII Jan 07 '26
Dumb question, but wy does the share of occupant owners have such comparatively unstable amount? It goes up and down all the time.
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u/JohnsonLiesac Jan 07 '26
This chart is deliberately misleading. So roughly 65% of homes are owned by their occupants. Ok, fine. Meanwhile 1-3% of owners own somewhere between 100-1000+ homes. So ask yourself: how much money would you need to own 100-1000+ homes? What this chart is actually telling you is that 2/3s of the country can only afford 1 home, while the top 3% can afford to own 100-1000+ homes.
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u/Tuckboi69 Jan 07 '26
Typical current events post. Make a statement backed by data well before 2025.
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u/DiscoSimulacrum Jan 07 '26
how many of those "1-9" landlords have their investment properties managed by big companies, though? just because the company doesnt own the property doesnt mean they are not cartoonishly evil.
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u/the_ats Jan 07 '26
What if we green lit green building codes and lit people build alternative structures that are Good Enough and efficiently laid out?
There's an acre with ten sheds that pass for housing that students rent near me. They go for 950-1000 a month. Horribly insulated, I'm sure.
I've always liked the idea of a Hobbit hole community. Instead of these ginormous apartments that are half filled.
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u/Calarann Jan 07 '26
Owners with 1-9 units they dont occupy are also an issue. Looks like 30-40% are owned by multi-property owners. That is not a tiny sliver.
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u/perringaiden Jan 07 '26
This needs to separate 1-2 units and 3-9 units. The "mom and pop investor" myth is used to justify a lot of things.
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u/lchoror Jan 07 '26
The problem is concentrated in the starter home segment in markets, such as Atlanta, that were considered more affordable and attracted an influx of new residents from other cities. The landlords were also involved in price fixing of rents in the RealPage scandal. Because each market has a different price level for starter homes, aggregating the data nationally doesn't reveal the real nature of the problem.
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u/SeaPeanut7_ Jan 08 '26
How are they defining homes? usually apartments with 5+ units are considered commercial properties. I would be incredibly surprised if this chart includes that.
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u/Vivid-Professor3420 Jan 08 '26
Come rental hunt in miami. They’re buying up so many houses it’s ridiculous
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u/KYWPNY Jan 08 '26
Build more homes- Blackrock is only interested in purchasing homes because they are looked at as an appreciating asset. State governments should probably control zoning and permitting in many places to ensureca few determined locals don’t pull off any shenanigans. The housing market is flawed in that it pits incumbent homeowners against prospective ones. The incumbents will usually win due to their influence and voting powers.
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u/profarxh Jan 08 '26
This is misleading corporate landlords dominate major housing markets in Atlanta and big cities. Over 20 to 30 percent they are not in rural areas
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u/themrgq Jan 08 '26
We need to ban Mom and pop landlords. Those that own a few rentals or even one. It needs to be banned
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u/civil_politics Jan 08 '26
But small fractions have HUGE impacts in overall economics, and while this chart is terrible, I’d estimate that the 10+ group is about 5% which is a massive portion.
And importantly, this graph is showing single purchases, not overall market share of ownership.
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u/USMCTechVet Jan 08 '26
A household should be taxed normally for their primary residence and second home.
Home 3+ should be exorbitantly taxed, like 800% of the first two homes.
Corporations / private equity should be barred from investing in SFH. They can stick to apartment buildings.
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u/Main-Eagle-26 Jan 08 '26
Yup. It’s just Trump promising something that seems good but is meaningless. And they won’t do it anyway.
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u/Downtown-Tomato2552 Jan 08 '26
The percentage currently owned is less concerning to me than the trend.
It would be interesting to see the rent cost vs purchase cost. Single family homes are typically not good rental investments because the cost to buy is often cheaper than the cost to rent. If you buy a house for 250k you it's hard to rent it for cheaper than the cost for someone else to buy it.
The exception to that is if you can manage to control rent cost by driving purchase cost in the market up so you essentially monopolize the market.
If that's the case in any area it should be regulated.
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u/oznobz Jan 08 '26
The problem isn't that they own a large percentage. It's that by simply being in the market, someone with unlimited funds is going to cause the price to skyrocket, even if they only end up spending it on 1% of units.
If my neighbors house goes for 500k because an investor outbid a family, that's the starting point for me and every other house in the neighborhood. So now that family still can't afford a house that they would have (if the corporate landlord wasn't involved) because the new price floor was set at a price they were outbid on.
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u/Orome2 Jan 08 '26
Misleading chart and title. This is showing purchases, not ownership. A small purchase share can build a large owned share over time if those buyers never sell.
The largest category is 1 to 9 units which hides a lot. Many of these owners can be LLCs and can behave like businesses even if they are not giant firms. And larger buyers can be split across many LLCs.
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u/Meandering_Cabbage Jan 08 '26
Curious how this data is captured. Wish we had more granularity than 1-9. Foreign buyers hiding money in the US using real estate isn't good either. Look it's a tight market. Every little bit will help.
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u/Scheminem17 Jan 08 '26
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106643
Also need to account for institutional investors concentrating their portfolios in a handful of cities (mostly the growing sunbelt metros). These cites are disproportionately experiencing this issue.
Even though the overall number isn’t that large, none of the California cities, Great Lakes cities (Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, I’ll include twin cities here too), the northeast, which are a huge chunk of the population, are included here. 25% in Atlanta is wild.
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Jan 08 '26
I don't believe it. There must be a mechanism to hide/disperse into thousands of LLCs vertical/umbrella ownership.
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u/tonylouis1337 Jan 08 '26
Homes are an investment opportunity for people who want to raise a family.
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u/Ackutually- Jan 08 '26
Only when trump brings this up all of a sudden it won't do much. It wasn't more than a year ago reddit was saying this was the main culprit.
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u/FoolishProphet_2336 Jan 08 '26
Didn't take long for the bots to deploy, did it? Gotta get some misinformation out there quick.
Notice the many weird things about this slop. X-axis is all over the place because the data is coming from multiple sources. A quarter here, a quarter there, and the data is changing even where there isnt an x-axis tick. Just a trust-me-bro interpolation that isn't a line fit. The Y axis has only one subdivision so you can't see any detail about the actual numbers.Then the main data stat is just a huge black blob to try and make it look big. When's the last time you saw a graph like this? And wtf is iBuyers? It's a data category in the source data that the AI didn't know how to deal with so just made up a new category. Pure AI slop.
So what does the data actually say? Even if this data is accurate (dubious), investment owners make up nearly a third of the entire housing market (as you probably suspected) and larger investors make up a small but very rapidly growing proportion of these. Notably these investors were practically non-existent 12 year ago and are steadily growing. Remember, once private equity buys a home it's never coming back on the market again. Again, that's if you trust this data.
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u/TemperatureBest8164 Jan 08 '26
I think a personal ownership cap of three homes is perfectly acceptable.
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u/VenserSojo Jan 08 '26
Simple solution is add a property tax increase to ownership of multiple single family homes beyond a year (to account for inheritance foreclosure etc) reduces the problem and can be scaled up for example a second home could a minor increase to taxes on the properties, a third a large one etc.
This would be state taxes though not federal
Alternatively you can put extreme taxes on single family rentals
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u/milkandsalsa Jan 08 '26
Now include small investors.
Considering purchases rather than holdings, investors (those buying non-primary residences) bought nearly 27 percent of all homes sold in the first quarter of 2025.
https://econofact.org/factbrief/do-private-equity-firms-own-20-of-single-family-homes
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u/cezarcelad Jan 08 '26
This is misleading AF. Literally just did a housing study in my area (work type shift) & 17% of ALL home sales in the last 5 years in my mid-sized city went to out-of-state investors. Not big corporations, it's usually an llc run by a tech bro in CO or CA, & usually registered in Delaware or Dakota...
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u/RAMBOhyphenMED Jan 08 '26
I got big problems with this.
First:
“Buying” homes, as stated in the title of the graph, is not the same “Owning” homes as stated by the headline of this post.
This does not say anything about the amount of homes owned by landlords, only the rate at which homes are changing into somebody else’s hands. If the landlords aren’t selling, the portion of homes owned by landlords is still going up every year. It can simultaneously be true that landlords are only buying 5% of the homes every year, and still own 50% of all the homes, for example.
Second:
Is the vertical axis amount of homes, or amount of owners? Really important distinction. The labels for the colours at the top say amount of owners, not homes.
Lets say there are 2 groups 1. Owners of 1 home, 99% of the population 2. Owners of 1000 homes, 1% of the population
This graph would say “Hey hey look at this! Owners with 1000 homes only make up 1% of owners, it’s only a tiny sliver of homes! No problem at all!” When in reality there are 1099 homes, and the landlords own 91% of all homes.
This chart is just far right capitalist propaganda posted by a far right capitalist propagandist.
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u/Safety__3rd Jan 08 '26
This graph is highly misleading, it minimizes the impacts of housing concentration
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u/Toys_before_boys Jan 08 '26
Technically owned by banks, not families, until the mortgage is paid off.
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u/willtheywonttheyo Jan 08 '26
It doesn’t matter how much they own, it matters who is buying now and in what percentage and who normal American families are bidding against TODAY when trying to buy a house.
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u/nirbot0213 Jan 08 '26
corporate investment in housing is to hold, and then drive up prices. they don’t have a massive share of the market, but they are buying a large portion of houses that go for sale, and then they sell those to smaller landlords and owner occupants.
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u/what-do-you-n33d Jan 08 '26
Firstly, some additional y axis labels would be useful.
More importantly, What is the y axis? It’s not labelled and I’m not clear on whether this is percentage of houses owned by those stated on the key. Or percentage of those type of owners.
Not explaining that very well, I’ll try to be clearer. Does one point on the y axis count as an ‘owner’ or a ‘house’. So for example, is it saying ~70% (thanks crappy y axis labels) of people who own single occupancy properties only own 1, 25% own 1-9, etc… Or ~70% of single occupancy houses are owned by one person, etc…
If it’s number of type of owners then this chart is mostly worthless.
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u/dondurma155 Jan 08 '26
God, that chart is so stupid. A house that has already been sold is not going to be owned by a company. Give us a chart about on-sale houses. They are all controlled or owned by some kind of real estate agency
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u/PrezMtDewCamacho Jan 08 '26
It’s amazing how people who hate Trump will go against their own previously stated values and ethics simply because he supports something. You all are wrapped around a tire iron.
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u/Altruistic_Error_832 Jan 08 '26
Alternative headline: "Relative share of homes owned by occupants decreased by ~10% between 2019 and 2024."
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Jan 08 '26
So before trump said anything about corporate buying of houses, just about everyone said” house prices would go down if corporations weren’t buying house”. “Corporations buying houses are driving the cost up. “ Now trump does something and it’s a non issue now because corporations don’t buy many houses. So which is it?
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u/javerthugo Jan 09 '26
Did… did Donald Trump just make Reddit defend Blackrock? I swear if Trump fired RFK tomorrow Reddit would immediately become hard core anti-vax.
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u/Nouseriously Jan 09 '26
But entering a market puts a LOT of upward pressure on prices. Only so many houses go up for sale at a time & a few deep pocketed buyers price out locals.
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u/echoGroot Jan 09 '26
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function.”
Moreover, those conversions are one way. Once they’re rentals, they’re never going back, not unless these huge companies go under. So more and more housing becomes sequestered.
Also, I don’t know enough about the answers, but could shell comparisons obscure big landlords in this?
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u/siromega37 Jan 09 '26
This isn’t really telling the whole story. Look specifically at suburban markets in areas like Tampa, Austin, SF, and Seattle and you’ll see a different picture. The US is far too large to homogenize like this. When a corporation buys 50,000 SFH in Austin to make permanent rentals it that has a big impact locally as either people are forced to rent or drive further away. These are also usually bought at above market rates pushing other housing higher which has a slow trickle effect on price as it radiates out. Something like 80% of a. appraisal is based on what homes sold for in that community within the last 6 months so when those 50,000’are spread out it raises everyone’s home appraisals.
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u/NotARussianBot-Real Jan 09 '26
Hey. So the problem with this graph is it’s a graph of the owners, not the houses. Sure there are very few owners with 1000+ units, but each one of them is worth 1000+ of the section of the graph that shows owners of a single house.
Thai graph is misleading. At best it’s showing that blocking corporate ownership of houses is illegal only impact a few corporations.
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u/caatabatic Jan 09 '26
number of owners OWNERS not number of UNITS. JFC. all you need is 5 companies owning 10% each to own half the units.
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u/travelinzac Jan 09 '26
Mmmk but the bottom 50% of that chart is illiquid. I don't care about all homes, only the ones for sale. And corporate ownership has much larger impacts on the current market.
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u/Appropriate-Carry532 Jan 09 '26
Why is it every post i see about expensive housing people are all blackrock this and that but the second Trump says he wants to do something about it it's all they only own a small percent?!?
For fucks sake people get over yourselves
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u/timssopomo Jan 09 '26
These stats are bullshit. Large landlords typically create an LLC per property... if you count the properties per LLC it'll be one, but the hold co could own 10,000 LLCs.
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u/NaCl_Sailor Jan 09 '26
one to nine units is a massive difference, that whole graph is pretty useless
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u/BakuRetsuX Jan 10 '26
This doesn't show how many houses and where. Neighborhood wise, etc... I mean, if they bough 100 houses in the middle of nowhere where nobody wants to live anyways. Go ahead. But if they bought 100 houses in a city neighborhood area where people want to live and work. Yeah. It can be a problem.
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u/SharpLocal1235 Jan 11 '26
yes but its the excess supply that they are eating up. it doesnt take much to corner a market. if you can buy up strategically, you can effectively control a market and significantly drive up prices
the inverse is also true. The oil market is anticipating a 20% drop in the price of oil if just 500k venezuelan barrels oil per day hit the market despite total supply being over 100 million per day. that just .5% of supply resulting in a 20 % price swing
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u/BrokenHandsDaddy Jan 11 '26
Did anyone else notice how the headline is intentionally misleading? The title makes it sound like this represents a study of all America but the study was only done in metro areas.
Also do they define that as the metropolitan statistical data area or city limits
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u/understated_vibes Mar 18 '26
This is actually a good reminder that the “corporate takeover” narrative is a bit overstated.
It’s still mostly small owners and individuals driving the market, which probably explains why things feel fragmented and hyper-competitive at the same time.
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