President Trump on Wednesday took to Truth Social to announce that he would be “immediately taking steps” to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes.
The president’s announcement was made against the backdrop of high inflation, which Trump blamed on former President Biden and Democrats in Congress, and its role in making homeownership less attainable for Americans.
“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream,” Trump wrote.
“It was the reward for working hard, and doing the right thing, but now, because of the Record High Inflation caused by Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress, that American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans,” he continued. “It is for that reason, and much more, that 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.”
The president ended the post by saying he would discuss the topic more at the World Economic Forum in Davos in two weeks.
In the years immediately following the pandemic, institutional investors, including real estate investment trusts (REITs) and private equity firms, rapidly grew their inventory of single-family homes for use as rentals. Subsequently, some lawmakers and affordable housing advocates criticized these institutions, arguing that they take away supply from Americans while pushing up home prices.
More recently, however, institutional investor activity has been much less vigorous. U.S. investor home purchases, across both mom-and-pop and institutional investors, were only up 1 percent year over year during the third quarter of 2025, according to a study by Redfin. Institutional and mom-and-pop investor-purchased homes made up about 17 percent of all U.S. home sales, or roughly 52,000 sales, that quarter. The share of investor homes that ultimately sell at a loss is also at its highest rate in two years, Redfin added.
According to a 2024 study by the Government Accountability Office, as of mid-2022, institutional investors owned about 450,000 (roughly 3 percent) of all single-family rental homes in the country.
Affordable housing has long been a popular ballot issue for Americans to rally around. However, too much restriction on institutional investor purchases could also be a bad thing for the market, some experts have argued. These entities are important for renovating run-down homes and can serve as a reliable source of demand for builders.
It is also not completely clear how President Trump would legally enact such a ban. In select states across the U.S., including New York and California, legislation has been introduced to limit the number of institutional investors who can buy homes. When former Vice President Kamala Harris was running for president, she also called on Congress to prohibit investors who own 50 or more homes from deducting interest or depreciation on those properties.
Update: This story was updated to clarify the type of investors included in Redfin’s third-quarter 2025 investor home purchases report, and to add additional context.
