President Donald Trump is going to war against investment firms he says are scooping up homes that families should live in, but there might be another culprit at play.
Trump announced Wednesday that his administration is seeking to ban major investment companies from purchasing single-family homes in an effort to bring down U.S. house prices, claiming that the American Dream has grown “increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans.” Multiple economists told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the limited supply of homes in the country may be drastically worsening its ongoing housing affordability crisis.
“It is important to note up front that this is scratching the surface of a very complicated issue,” Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in economics at the Pacific Research Institute, told the DCNF. “The cities with the worst affordability problems are the ones with too few homes relative to the number of families living there. There are too few homes because excessive regulations are effectively preventing developers from building new housing in a timely manner.”
Winegarden also emphasized that large investment firms such as Blackstone “are not the cause of the problem of declining housing affordability.”
“The inadequate supply of homes artificially inflates housing prices, which turns potential buyers into renters,” he added.
“This announcement is another example of this president pursuing a damaging government driven industrial policy,” Winegarden explained to the DCNF. “Just like other housing interventions – like rent controls – inevitably undermine the viability of the housing market, allowing the government to dictate who can purchase a home will undermine housing market efficiency to the detriment of current and potential homeowners.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Some Americans have faced various housing-related affordability burdens in recent years. The average price of a U.S. single-family home reached a new record high of $432,700 in June 2025, Trading Economics reported, citing data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). At least three to four million additional new homes beyond normal construction would need to be built in order to tackle the U.S. housing supply shortage and bolster affordability, according to a Goldman Sachs report released in October 2025.
Major investment firm ownership of homes has captured significant attention in recent years, when some investment groups bought up an increasing number of residential properties.
However, some large investors have faced big losses on such investments, according to Jason Sorens, senior economist at American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
“If we define ‘major investment groups’ as those owning 100 or more homes, they own less than 1% of all single-family homes in the U.S.,” Sorens said. “In no county do large investors own more than 10% of single-family homes. During 2021 and 2022, large investors made up as high as 3% of all single-family home purchases, but that percentage then fell. Some major investors, like Zillow, suffered huge losses on their single-family homebuying activity.”
“Recently, institutional investor ownership correlates with house price declines,” Sorens continued. “Over the 12 months from November 2024 to November 2025, the latest available data, house prices increased on average 0.5% in large metro areas with under 1% institutional ownership, but fell by 3.6% in large metros with 1-3% institutional ownership, and fell by 2.9% in Atlanta, the only large metro with over 3% institutional ownership.”
While 25% of homes in the U.S. were purchased by investors of all sizes in the first quarter of 2024, just 1% were bought by institutional investors — also known as investors who own 100 or more properties — the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) reported in August 2025, citing data from John Burns Research and Consulting. Meanwhile, small and medium-sized investors made up more than 90% of all investor home purchases during that time period, according to AEI’s report.
Private equity firms own at least 8,200 apartment buildings in the U.S., with more than 2.2 million units, which comprises about 10% of the total number of apartment units nationwide, according to a Private Equity Stakeholder Project report published in April 2025. Moreover, real estate investors purchased 33% of all single-family residential properties in the U.S. sold in the second quarter of 2025, marking the highest percentage of investor purchases in the last five years, according to a September 2025 report by BatchData.
Some Democrats have also sounded the alarm about potential negative impacts from major investment groups scooping up residential homes in the U.S., such as Democratic Rep. Emilia Sykes of Ohio, who said in a July 2025 statement that “many Ohioans are struggling to afford homeownership and some are being priced out of the neighborhoods they’ve lived in all of their lives.”
Sykes added that it is “unfair for homeowners to have to compete with deep-pocketed investors who are adding to their real estate portfolios, meanwhile they drive up rents and reduce the housing supply while receiving generous tax breaks.”
Winegarden also told the DCNF he thinks that the U.S. needs to introduce new housing “reforms” to improve affordability.
“The affordability problem is, at its core, a problem of supply,” Winegarden said. “The governments are (intentionally or not) preventing the construction of homes. Promoting greater housing affordability requires reforms that will increase the number of homes available.”
“Within this context, the major investment groups are looking for a competitive return on their investment by renting out properties,” Winegarden continued. “If they overpay for these properties, they will not earn their required return. In other words, there is a market check that will help prevent these groups from driving prices up excessively.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said two months before his September 2025 assassination that homeownership “is the cornerstone of the American Dream,” also claiming that the dream “is being auctioned off to the highest bidder on Wall Street,” VINnews reported.
Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte told Fox Business on Thursday that “it’s time that corporations stop owning these homes, and people start owning and living in these homes as nature intended.”
The FHFA did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Additionally, the total share of first-time home buyers in the U.S. has plunged to a new record low of 21%, while the typical age of first-time buyers rose to an all-time high of 40 years, according to a report from NAR released in November 2025. In the same month, the Trump administration floated plans to introduce 50-year mortgage terms in an effort to help Americans buy new homes.
In September 2021, former President Joe Biden’s White House notably said that it was aiming to “make more single-family homes available to families instead of large investors.”
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