Big investors exiting for-sale housing market, even before Trump ban

Legislation to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes to rent is making its way through Congress, but many of them are already selling thousands of homes — and have been for two years.

Research from housing data and analytics firm Parcl Labs shows that the largest investors are now net sellers of homes.

In every major metropolitan housing market, investors make up a larger share of for-sale listings than they do of the total housing stock. In some cities, like Dallas, Philadelphia and Houston, they are selling most aggressively. Dallas investors own 9.2% of the housing stock but account for 22.8% of new for-sale listings.

FirstKey Homes appears to be most motivated, with more than twice the listings of its peers, according to Parcl. It is also offering much deeper price cuts, an average 10% off original list prices, and is reducing prices about every 20 days.

“It’s a volatile housing market, and folks are trying to take risk off the table,” said Jason Lewris, co-founder of Parcl Labs. He noted that rents are not holding up relative to what investors can get if they sell.

“So it’s better risk-adjusted returns to just get that cash and see how things pan out,” he said.

In its latest quarterly earnings release for the fourth quarter of 2025, Invitation Homes, one of the largest publicly traded landlords, reported that all 368 of its wholly owned acquisitions were newly constructed homes purchased from various homebuilders. It reported selling 315 existing homes.

For the full-year 2025, Invitation reported “almost all” of its 2,410 wholly owned acquisitions were bought through homebuilder relationships, while it sold 1,356 wholly owned homes, “frequently to families purchasing for their own use.”

In an effort to make housing affordable, in late January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at restricting large, institutional investors from buying single-family homes to use as rentals. He put an exemption on purchasing new construction specifically built as rentals.

The White House later sent proposed legislation to Congress, saying investors owning more than 100 single-family homes would be banned from buying any more, but didn’t have to sell what they have. Senate and House bills have different volume thresholds for what constitutes large investors, but they are not far apart.

To put this in perspective, single-family rentals make up roughly 10% of U.S. housing stock, and the vast majority, 80%, are owned by so-called mom-and-pop operators, with fewer than 10 homes each, according to analysis from Bank of America. Smaller investors, those who own between 10 and 1,000 homes, make up 17% of landlords. Large institutional investors who own more than 1,000 homes make up just 3% of the single-family rental market.

The numbers, however, are coming down.

Investors initially…