If you recall, the largest buyer of single-family houses in the US last year was Opendoor. This is according to SFR Analytics. Opendoor is a so-called iBuyer, meaning they provide cash offers to sellers, close quickly, and then turnaround and sell each home for — hopefully — a profit. They also collect commissions, and make money in other ways (such as through home loans).

This process seemed to be working reasonably well up until 2022, but then the market turned. They then quickly discovered that they couldn't sell their homes for a profit and so they ramped down acquisitions. Here's a chart from another post by SFR Analytics showing the fall off in purchase volume in the second half of 2022:

The worst performing market at this time was Phoenix, which apparently accounted for around 50% of the company's losses. In some cases, their gross margins were -$60,000 per property. But once they recalibrated their models (I'm just assuming this is what they did), they were able to regain positive unit economics. Here's Phoenix starting from their January 2023 cohort:

Opendoor has not done well as a public company. But it is the biggest buyer of single-family houses and it seems to be back to positive gross margins. Maybe that's something.

Charts from SFR Analytics; cover photo by Chris Tingom on Unsplash

Over the last few years, there's been growing concern around institutional buyers (namely "Wall Street") buying up too many single-family houses and then renting them out.

But as we spoke about last year, the number of homes owned in this way is actually quite small. The vast majority of homes are owner occupied. And the second largest share of owners is what you might call "small landlords." That is, people who own somewhere between 1-9 homes.

So if the specific concern is that people are out there buying houses and then renting them out, the more fruitful target would be these small landlords. But nobody seems too fussed by them, which leads me to believe that this is an instance of symbolic politics theory. In other words, it's the association with the big bad Wall Street that people don't like.

Whatever the reason, here's the data on the largest single-family house buyers in the US last year (2024) via SFR Analytics:

Here are the metro areas where they transacted:

And here's this same data in heat map form:

The largest buyer was Opendoor, which is a so-called iBuyer. We've spoken about this company a lot on this blog. They don't actually want to hold any of the homes they buy. Instead, they buy, renovate, and then resell as quickly as possible.

The second largest was New Western. They are a wholesaler or "double-close buyer." These buyers want to own for an even shorter period of time and sometimes never actually own the home; instead they just assign their contract. What they're trying to do is buy at a discount and then immediately turn around and sell for a profit.

Note: SFR Analytics believes that New Western's count might be meaningfully understated in the above data. The company uses lots of different LLCs and acquisition strategies and so it's hard to aggregate the data. Assigning a contract also doesn't show up in any county records, so it's kind of impossible to track these. It's just like assigning a pre-construction condominium agreement.

Even still, what this data suggests is that single-family rental funds aren't as dominant as some might think. The overall counts for all of the largest buyers also remain relatively small. Last year, over 4 million existing homes (including condominiums and co-ops) were bought and sold in the US. And this was a nearly 30-year low.

Cover photo by Michael Tuszynski on Unsplash

Here is a chart from a recent Bloomberg article summarizing who owns single-family houses in the US.

As of Q1-2024, about 69% were owner-occupied, about 26.6% were owned by small landlords (1-9 homes), and the rest were owned by what many are now calling "corporate landlords."

The point of this graph was to show that, despite getting a lot of political attention, corporate landlords still own very little. Let's call it sub 4%, excluding iBuying companies like OpenDoor. So how much of a problem is this, really?

Smaller landlords control much more of the US market. And at the end of the day, a house owned by a small landlord versus a corporate landlord doesn't change the supply-demand balance of a market. It still represents an available home.

The first and more important problem to solve is overall housing supply. Because that does change the supply-demand balance of a market. And once again, there's no shortage of data to support the finding that increased supply tends to moderate rental growth.

For the record, I also dislike using the term home to refer to single-family houses. Home is not a housing type. It is simply a place where people live permanently. So whenever I see a title like "US homes," I get confused, because I don't actually know what they're referring to.

If you read the article, it would appear they're only talking about single-family houses. But implying that these are the only kind of home feels to me like an anachronism.