Trump threatens to ban Wall Street investments in single-family homes

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON, Jan 7 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday said his administration is moving to ban Wall Street firms from buying up single-family homes in a bid to reduce home prices, a potential blow for private-equity landlords that also pressured homebuilder stocks.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was immediately taking steps to implement the ban, which he would also call on Congress to codify in law. It was not clear what steps he would take.

“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream,” Trump wrote, adding that inflation had put that dream out of reach for many Americans.

“People live in homes, not corporations,” said Trump, who is under growing pressure to address voter anxiety over the cost of living ahead of this year’s congressional midterm elections.

A Republican move to target Wall Street landlords would, perversely, align the party with Democrats, who for years have criticized corporate homebuying, claiming it has helped stoke housing costs, and have unsuccessfully pushed bills to crack down on the trend.

WALL STREET BLAMED FOR REDUCED HOUSING SUPPLY

Wall Street institutions such as Blackstone, American Homes 4 Rent and Progress Residential have bought thousands of single-family homes since the financial crisis of 2008 led to a wave of home foreclosures.

By June 2022, institutional investors owned around 450,000 homes, or about 3%, of all single-family rental homes nationally, according to a 2024 study by the Government Accountability Office.

American Homes 4 Rent dropped to a near three-year low of $28.84 and was halted for volatility before trading resumed. Its shares closed down 4% at $31.01.

Blackstone shares hit a one-month low of $147.52 and closed down about 5.6% at $153.59. The PHLX housing index fell 2.6%.

A spokesperson for Blackstone said their ownership of such homes represented a small portion of their overall business, and that they had been a net seller of homes for the prior decade.

“That said, we believe our current portfolio is poised to continue to perform quite well and operate at the highest standards for residents,” the spokesperson said.

American Homes 4 Rent and Progress Residential did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Wall Street landlords dispute that their investments have stoked inflation. In a January 2025 research note, Blackstone said institutional home purchases have declined 90% since 2022 and that supply shortage is the reason for house price increases.

The GAO study found that the effect of institutional homebuying on homeownership opportunities was unclear in part due to limited data.

Critics say Wall Street firms are also bad landlords, skimping on upkeep to keep investors happy, and wrongly evicted tenants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Resident experience is hurting as a result,” said Jeff Holzmann, COO of RREAF Holdings, a Dallas-based real estate investment firm with over $5 billion in assets.

“Instead of you calling your landlord to discuss a problem, you’re calling a call center that gives you the runaround.”

AFFORDABILITY PRESSURE

Trump, who has occasionally dismissed affordability concerns and blamed inflation on his Democratic predecessor, has seen his own public approval mostly sag since his inauguration as Americans worry about the economy.

It was not immediately clear what authority Trump would draw upon to impose a ban, and he did not outline the changes he was seeking from Congress.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Since Trump’s first electoral victory, U.S. home prices have risen 75%, more than double the increase in overall consumer prices tracked by CPI. But home sales price increases have eased substantially over the past year.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency last week reported that national home sales prices had risen just 1.7% in October, from a year earlier, the lowest in more than 13 years. That’s less than half the rate by which they were climbing when Trump came back into office last January and a fraction of their peak gains of nearly 20% in 2021 and 2022.

A big factor in home price inflation has been a lack of properties for sale, although that has also been slowly improving over the last year or so, according to National Association of Realtors data.

As of November, annual shelter-cost inflation, which had shot to as high as 8.2% in the COVID-19 pandemic aftermath, had also eased to 3.0%, the lowest in more than four years, according to the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index. 

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; additional reporting by Ryan Patrick Jones, Ankur Banerjee, Saeed Azhar, Chuck Mikolajczak, Andrea Shalal, Matt Tracy and Dan Burns; Writing by Michelle Price; Editing by Caitlin Webber, David Ljunggren, Cynthia Osterman, Rod Nickel and Nick Zieminski)