Trump wants to ban corporate landlords : NPR

An aerial view of a housing development in Las Vegas on August 8, 2025.

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In 2020, Ashley Maxwell and her husband were looking to buy their first home, near Indianapolis.

“We looked at over 80 homes in the span of two months,” she said.

The couple was in a difficult situation. They had three children and were forced to move because their landlord was selling their rent. This pressure made their searches even more frustrating.

“We’d pull up to a house, our agent would come out and say, ‘There’s 10 more offers, sight unseen, all cash.’ Usually that means they’re an investor,” Maxwell recalls.

The couple, who finally found housing, were one of many whose path to homeownership was hampered by a nationwide wave of institutional investors, then driven by record-low mortgage rates, snapping up single-family homes for rent.

This is a question that President Trump now intends to tackle. In a recent social media post, he said he wants to “ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes” to help lower housing costs.

It’s a popular idea, especially among some Democrats. But passing such laws has proven difficult, and economists say the link between investor-owned housing and high prices is not so simple.

A cap on investor rents has just come into force in this city

In Fishers, Ind., a suburb of Indianapolis, Republican Mayor Scott Fadness was surprised when he saw new data in a housing report compiled by his team that showed the extent of homeowner investors in his city.

“We have neighborhoods today where 35, 38 percent of the homes have been purchased for investment purposes,” he said.

The situation became so serious, he recalls, that one of his employees, looking for accommodation, sent letters to homeowners, explaining that they were going to work for the city “and would please consider allowing them to purchase the house” instead of an institutional investor.

To address the problem, Fadness last year proposed capping rents at 10 percent per neighborhood to protect local homeownership.

“It’s been a source of generational wealth in our country for a very long time, particularly among the middle class,” he said. “I hate to see it go.”

It’s also more difficult, he added, to deal with code enforcement and other issues when the owner is a foreign company.

Real estate agent groups opposed a cap, arguing it encroached on private property rights and could deprive sellers of the highest offer, but the City Council unanimously supported the project. The new law just came into force on January 1st.

“It was the first time I proposed an ordinance in our community where outside interests, business interests, came into town and spent money to try to defeat the legislation,” Fadness said.

It was a rare victory for such a proposal. Cities and states across the United States have debated restrictions on homebuyers, but most measures have not passed. A proposal that Trump said went nowhere in Congress would have been necessary. codify any prohibition. California Gov. Gavin Newsom joined Trump this month in saying he was determined to do something.

Economists say large investors are not the main factor determining real estate prices.

But housing experts say it’s too easy to place the blame entirely on corporate landlords. for skyrocketing prices.

“People see the connection, but they don’t necessarily distinguish between cause and effect,” said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center.

Prices rise where investors buy, but she said, “It’s part of their strategy” because the places they choose are already growing. And often they buy serious renovations.

“Most of us don’t have the knowledge to do repairs,” Goodman said. “(Even) if we did, we wouldn’t be able to get the funding.”

Nationally, the largest companies hold about 3% of the single-family rental market, with larger shares in some places like the Sunbelt. And the institutional The buying frenzy has slowed from its 2022 peak as rising interest rates have made homes more expensive.

The main driver of rising prices is the housing shortage, Goodman said, and some investors are currently helping to alleviate that problem by building their own single-family homes for rent.

“The best way to make housing affordable is to simply build more, increase the supply,” she said.

The debate continues in Las Vegas

In Las Vegas, Democratic Sen. Dina Neal remains concerned that the build-to-rent trend will hurt people’s chances of homeownership. She cited the example of a corporate investor near her neighborhood who built an entire neighborhood of homes for rent.

“They didn’t build the whole neighborhood up and abandon it,” she said. “They wanted to make sure they would get rental income from 200 different families and keep it.”

Additionally, like Fadness in Indiana, Neal worries that investor rents are so expensive that it may become impossible for many people to save for a down payment. She said her former next-door neighbor sold to an investor thinking he could trade, but he to rent a place down the street – from another corporate investor.

Neal has three times proposed capping the number of business owners, but Nevada’s Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo blocked it, most recently last month.

Neal is surprised – and cautious – now that Trump is making his case. “I’m trying to understand how I entered a world where I aligned myself with a president who is the sworn enemy of the Democratic Party,” she laughed.

But if Trump’s interest can persuade more Republicans to join the initiative, she said she would accept it.