Realtor ranks the top 5 housing markets where corporate landlords are most active

Institutional investors cluster in affordable, high-growth areas. But Realtor data shows their share of the market is smaller than most think

Andrew Holbrooke / Corbis via Getty Images

Few housing debates have generated more heat with less empirical grounding than the one over corporate landlords. The idea that large institutional buyers are quietly cornering the single-family market — outbidding ordinary families, hoarding inventory, and driving up rents — has become a fixture of political campaigns on both sides of the aisle. It has also produced legislation. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which cleared the Senate earlier this year, would ban large corporate entities from acquiring single-family homes and could eventually require some to sell off their holdings after seven years.

The problem is that the data tells a more complicated story.

Corporate giants are a far smaller presence in the housing market than the rhetoric implies. Buyers classified as institutional investors — those who have made more than 350 single-family purchases since 2015 — represent roughly 1% of all single-family transactions in the U.S. The dominant players in the investor segment are not hedge funds or private equity firms. They are........

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