I'm not sure Trump's idea will improve the housing crunch. I recall seeing this article the other week. Seems a lack of allowing new homes to be built is the bigger problem to address ~
America's Housing Crunch Is Blamed On The Wrong Villain
Here’s an economic myth that should be left behind in 2025 as we move into the new year.
www.realclearmarkets.com
Here’s an economic myth that should be left behind in 2025 as we move into the new year. From Washington to state capitals across America—and across social media—large institutional investors are accused of hoarding homes, crowding out first-time buyers, and inflating prices. The political logic of this blame game is clear: No one ever cries for the bankers.
Yet the evidence for the populist charge is lacking.
Time for some needed myth-busting: Investors owning more than 100 properties account for a mere one percent of the US single-family housing stock, according to a recent and penetrating
analysis by my AEI colleagues. Even at their peak, these firms never represented more than three percent of annual home purchases.
(Great point here: The stock number is lower than the flow number “because investors do not just buy homes, but they also sell homes at the same time.”)
Moreover, the oft-quoted claim that “investors buy a quarter of homes” conflates Wall Street with small landlords. In reality, mom-and-pop owners dominate investor activity. Same as it ever was.
Peeking beneath the top-line numbers illuminates further. Institutional ownership is highly concentrated by geography: Five percent of counties hold a whopping 80 percent of institutionally owned homes. And more than half of US counties have none at all. Also: No county exceeds a 10 percent ownership share. Even in frequently cited metros such as Atlanta and Houston, institutional ownership sits in the low single digits. Most ZIP codes are far below even those levels.
If institutional investors were the prime driver of prices, the hard causality pattern would be hard to miss. But not so much in reality. Since 2012, national home prices have risen roughly 150 percent, yet some of the fastest-growing markets—including San Jose, Bend, and Providence—have virtually no institutional presence. Meanwhile, several metros with higher investor shares have seen below-average price growth. Econ 101 scarcity, not financialization, does the heavy lifting here.
All this matters because lawmakers want to do “something,” but that “something” may be the wrong “something.” Examples from the report: States such as California and New York face housing shortages equal to 15 percent and 11 percent of their total housing stock, respectively. Institutional investors own 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent. Even a draconian forced sell-off “would only be a drop in the bucket given their small market share.”
Markets, as they often do, offer a better explanation. Politicians pay attention: Institutional investors aren’t the cause of housing distortions but a response to them. A review of the relevant timeline is helpful. They entered after the financial crisis, when foreclosures and depressed prices created opportunity, and expanded their role during the pandemic, when ultra-low interest rates made rental yields unusually attractive. But as rates have risen, their purchases have collapsed, and several large landlords have become net sellers.
There’s also an overlooked offset that the paper smartly highlights. Large investors increasingly finance build-to-rent developments, adding supply that might not otherwise exist. In a market where zoning and permitting block construction, that contribution matters. Again from the paper:
Scapegoating investors may be politically satisfying, as is often the case. It also distracts from the actual binding constraint: America doesn’t build enough homes, people! Fix that, and Wall Street’s role will shrink on its own.