From Wolf Street, September 15:
Single-family giants are selling houses they bought amid the Housing Bust and shifted to new construction of build-to-rent developments. Multifamily caught up in CRE turbulence.
The top six single-family rental landlords own 422,000 single-family properties; the top six multifamily landlords own 660,000 rental apartments; and mom-and-pop landlords own 11 million single-family rentals, out of nearly 50 million total rental units.
Big multifamily landlords and mom-and-pop single-family landlords are classic elements of the rental market. But the single-family giants are a new creature that came out of the Housing Bust after home prices had plunged.
And since 2022, these single-family rental giants have been selling individual houses that they’d bought in starting in 2012, after having cut back on their purchases of individual houses years earlier as prices had become too high to make their rental math work.
But they’ve been adding new construction of entire for-rent developments to their portfolios, focusing on the higher end. And some of these giants even have their own homebuilder divisions.
In other words, they’re shedding some of their scatter-site properties and have become net sellers of them, while adding entire build-to-rent developments to their portfolios, each development with its own leasing and maintenance office and common amenities for tenants. These purpose-built communities are a lot more cost-effective to operate than decades-old houses scattered all over the place.
There are 147.9 million housing units in the US – single-family homes, condos, and apartments – according to Census Bureau data, of which:
- Owned and occupied by homeowners: 86.2 million (58.2% of total housing units)
- Owned by landlords, occupied by renters: 46.4 million (31.3% of total housing units)
- Vacant year-round for rent: 3.6 million
- Vacant for other reasons: 12 million
So there are about 50 million rental units (single-family and multifamily) in the US, including vacant units.
Mom-and-pop landlords, defined as owning 1-9 rentals, own about 11 million single-family rentals (SFRs). They have always been the mainstay in the SFR market. Before 2012, there were no landlords with over 1,000 SFRs.
Now there are many, and some are giants with close to 100,000 SFRs. It began amid the mortgage crisis, and with the encouragement from the Fed to push up home prices: PE firms piled into the SFR market and bought tens of thousands of single-family homes out of foreclosure for a song and put them on the rental market. That was the birth of a few giant single-family investors.
The largest single-family rental landlords in the US.
#1, Progress Residential:
94,000 SFRs, according to the company, of which over 12,000 in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta metro. The company is owned by PE firm Pretium Partners. After the financial crisis, it bought 65,000 single-family homes “one-by-one,” when prices were low. It later bought portfolios of single-family rentals from other landlords. It also bought Section 8 single-family rental properties. Years ago, it began to pull back from purchasing individual homes as prices had become too high for rentals, and since 2022 has essentially ended the practice.
Shifting to build-to-rent. In recent years, it acquired 78 build-to-rent developments, totaling 7,500 single-family rentals. These developments typically have their own leasing/maintenance office and common amenities for tenants.
In January 2025, Pretium announced that it secured $550 million in equity capital commitments from institutional investors, and that, “including leverage,” it expects to originate up to $5 billion in loans to homebuilders, part of which will be used to create communities of build-to-rent single-family homes.
#2, Invitation Homes....
....MUCH MORE
