Housing Policy

Christian Britschgi | 1.8.2026 5:35 PM

In the latest development in horseshoe theory, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that his administration would ban large institutional investors from owning single-family homes.

"People live in homes, not corporations," said Trump in a Truth Social post. He promised his administration would unilaterally ban large investors from buying homes and ask Congress to codify the restriction.

????President Trump will immediately take steps to ban big institutional investors from buying more single family homes and he will be calling on Congress to codify it. pic.twitter.com/Rq77lfs8Vi

— James Blair (@JamesBlairUSA) January 7, 2026

The notion that the president could enact such a ban on his own authority seems dubious in the extreme. Still, the proposal is popular with wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties, and Trump is likely to find several allies in Congress who would support passing such a law.

Large institutional investors have gone from buying effectively zero single-family homes before the Great Recession to being responsible for a small but non-negligible percentage of home purchasers in recent years.

As investors' activity has grown, so too have complaints from politicians of both parties that they are outbidding would-be owner-occupier families, who are then condemned to a life of perpetual renting.

Democrats in Congress have repeatedly introduced legislation that would levy prohibitively high excise taxes on single-family homes owned in excess of 100 by investors.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul have both criticized institutional home investors. One of the few things that J.D. Vance and Tim Walz were able to agree on in the 2024 vice presidential debate was the need to stop Wall Street from buying single-family homes.

Mostly Democratic state legislators from California to

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