President Trump has identified what he says is a clear culprit holding back the housing market: corporate investors buying up single-family homes and renting them out.
“Homes are built for people, not for corporations,” Mr. Trump said in a speech last month in Davos, Switzerland. “America will not become a nation of renters.”
But buried in Mr. Trump’s recently announced executive order that seeks to bar large investors from acquiring single-family homes is an exemption that allows them to build homes for renting out.
These build-to-rent housing communities are a growing niche of the market and involve some of the same Wall Street landlords that Mr. Trump has blamed for preventing average Americans from owning their own homes.
In recent years, private equity firms like Blackstone have been building new subdivisions of single-family houses that are all for rent. Large home-building companies like Lennar and D.R. Horton have also gotten into the business, building single-family homes dedicated as rentals. One of the president’s own top housing officials, Bill Pulte, had a small business of buying newly built rental homes before he joined the administration.
The build-to-rent exemption may seem at odds with the Trump administration’s stated goal of making more homes available for sale to middle-income Americans by cracking down on Wall Street-backed landlords. Similar proposals have garnered support from some Democratic and Republican politicians over the years.
But housing analysts say, from a policy perspective, build-to-rent communities make sense because they are improving the availability of quality rental housing…
Eric Seymour, a Rutgers University professor who has studied the impact of Wall Street landlords on the housing market, said the federal government could have had more of an impact on the ability of Wall Street to buy homes if it had acted a decade or so ago during the Obama and first Trump administrations.