by WorldTribune Staff, January 8, 2026 Real World News

In his effort to make home ownership more affordable, President Donald Trump said he intends to ban large investors from buying single-family homes.

“I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it. People live in homes, not corporations,” Trump said in a social-media post on Wednesday.

Over the past dozen years, investors have poured billions of dollars into buying homes. At the 2022 peak, they purchased more than one in every four single-family homes sold.

While big investors would still be able to hold on to their hundreds of thousands of existing homes, if Trump is able to enact a ban it would likely ripple through a number of major housing markets across the country, analysts say.

“In several cities, investors hold a significant share of homes. During the pandemic housing boom, investors accounted for more than 20% of all home sales in some hot markets, including Houston, Miami, Phoenix and Las Vegas,” the Wall Street Journal noted in a Wednesday report.

Sunbelt cities have been a particular target for institutional homeownership. A 2024 analysis by the Government Accountability Office said large institutions owned 25% of rental homes in Atlanta and 18% in Charlotte.

Growing voter anger over high homeownership costs has led government officials from both parties to try to crack down on institutional investors in their local markets. Nebraska, California, New York, Minnesota and North Carolina are among the states where lawmakers have proposed laws to restrict large investor home purchases, though most of the proposals have yet to gain traction.

Home prices are up more than 50% nationally since 2019, and the median existing-home price in November rose to $409,200. Home buying overall has dwindled over the past three years due to high home prices and the surge in mortgage rates.

“Investor purchases have also made it harder for some first-time buyers to compete with Wall Street-backed investment firms, with their all-cash offers,” the Journal’s report said. “Institutions don’t always offer more money, but they are able to close a deal quickly and rarely quibble over worn flooring or dated bathrooms.”

Wall Street firms and other institutional investors have scooped up hundreds of thousands of U.S. houses to rent, leading some housing analysts to assert that these purchases are contributing to a dearth of homes for sale and driving up home prices in certain neighborhoods.

“People want a place to live, but if investors flood the market on the disposition side, there’s not going to be enough buyers and that will have a really big impact on home prices,” said Jason Lewris, a co-founder of Parcl Labs, which tracks the institutional investor market.

An investor ban would likely require exemptions for new-home construction, analysts at investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods said told the Journal.

Corporations that invest in single-family homes would have several ways to argue that a ban is a violation of their constitutional rights, according to the American Bar Association.

“The pushback won’t just be from our industry,” said Sean Dobson, chief executive of Amherst, a single-family rental firm that owns about 47,000 homes. “This is anti-free-market, anti-property-rights kind of policy.”

Trump said on Wednesday he intends to unveil more housing and affordability plans in coming weeks.

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  Trump acts to ban large investor buys of single-family houses, WorldTribune.com