House Housing Bill Protects Build-To-Rent<\/h1>\n

A bipartisan housing supply bill that has been in the works since the summer of last year passed the House last week, minus a controversial requirement that large investors sell off their holdings of build-to-rent single-family homes to individual owner-occupiers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The latest House version of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which passed<\/a> 396<\/span>\u2013<\/b>13 on Wednesday, still bans large investors from purchasing existing single-family homes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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But these investors would no longer be required to sell off their holdings of purpose-built single-family rental communities, which the Senate’s version of the bill would have forced them to do.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Housing supply advocates, who are generally supportive of the ROAD to Housing Act’s grab bag of policies aimed at increasing home construction, have praised the removal of the forced dispossession requirement for build-to-rent housing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“<\/span>Just by removing that dispossession requirement changes the bill from something that has some positives for housing supply and one big negative into something that is unambiguously good for housing supply,” says Will Poff-Webster, a housing policy expert at the Institute for Progress.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Build-to-rent single-family communities are often owned<\/a> by large investors, built on a single, legal parcel of land around shared amenities, and intended as a long-term “hold” investment. In recent years, build-to-rent housing has accounted for as much as 10 percent of new single-family home construction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Requiring owners of these communities to break them up and sell them off to individual owners thus presented a huge list of legal and practical difficulties. The mere passage<\/a> of the Senate’s bill with the build-to-rent restrictions included reportedly already caused some investors to pull out of build-to-rent projects.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the glass-half-empty side, the bill still does include a ban on investors owning more than 350 single-family homes. This restriction is predicated on the popular bipartisan notion that large corporations are frequently outbidding individual families for existing single-family homes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This never made much sense. Large investors have always owned<\/a> a tiny share of single-family homes. The number of individual homes owned by large investors has also been falling for over a decade.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cracking down on large investors now likely won’t lower prices, but will marginally reduce the number of available single-family rentals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“The House bill still strongly favors wealthier homebuyers over less-wealthy renters [and] <\/span>feeds off myths about investors<\/span><\/a>,” writes<\/a> rental housing economist Jay Parsons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Popular Politics of an Investor Crackdown<\/b><\/h1>\n

Politically, it likely would have been very difficult to pass the ROAD to Housing Act without some restrictions on corporate single-family home ownership.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

President Donald Trump has actively pushed<\/a> for these restrictions for much of his second term. The White House urged the House to pass the Senate’s version of the ROAD to Housing Act, even with the build-to-rent restrictions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Its statement on the House’s version also singles out the remaining large investor restrictions for praise.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Trump admin blesses House version of housing bill pic.twitter.com\/sMfnbMYzc4<\/a><\/p>\n

— Burgess Everett (@burgessev) May 20, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n