Corporate America hasn’t had a huge appetite for gobbling up Houston homes over the past few years.
A Kinder Institute analysis of Harris County property records shows the nation’s largest institutional investors have slightly increased the size of their single-family property portfolios since the early 2020s, as rising interest rates and home values have cooled a once-hot market.
The nine institutional investors owned an estimated 11,000 single-family properties in Harris County in 2024, representing 1% of homes in the area, with the heaviest concentration of homes located in the northern and western suburbs. Corporate entities typically rent out the homes and can later sell them for a profit.
An earlier Kinder Institute analysis of 2021 property records using similar research methods showed those companies held about 10,000 single-family properties at that time…
Institutional investors often purchase properties using LLCs and other entities with a different name, so properties were connected to the nine companies using a list of keywords compiled by Rutgers University assistant professor Eric Seymour. In all, 370 unique property owner names listed in Harris County records were linked to the nine firms.
The analysis likely misses some properties purchased by entities connected to the nine companies that aren’t on Seymour’s list. For the purposes of the analysis, companies that bought other large institutional investors after 2021 — such as Pretium’s acquisition of Front Yard Residential Corp. — were credited with owning the purchased company’s properties in 2021.