The 10 largest buyers of US single-family houses in 2024
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
Subscribe to Brandon Donnelly to receive new posts directly to your inbox.
After a brief hiatus, we're back with a fresh round of great writing over the past few weeks!
@lawl explores how crypto-native content is evolving through tokenized attention economies and internet capital markets, shaping the next generation of digital media and decentralized IP ownership. "Tokenization can be the next evolution of capital formation for content creation, pairing risk-seeking capital in crypto with artists." https://paragraph.xyz/@cc0/internet-content-empires
@merlinegalite explores the existential stakes of AGI development, warning that the accelerating intelligence explosion will grant unprecedented power to those who control it, making alignment and security urgent global priorities. "Once this self-improvement point is reached, we’ll have a very, very short window to solve the alignment problem while the race is raging." https://paragraph.xyz/@merlin-egalite/the-new-arm-race
@brandondonnelly.eth analyzes the data behind institutional home purchases, highlighting that institutional buyers and single-family rental funds remain less dominant than public perception suggests. "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." https://brandondonnelly.com/the-10-largest-buyers-of-us-single-family-homes-in-2024
Super ✨
Lol, thank you! :)
Wow. Humbled to have made the list. Appreciate it and hope you enjoyed the read
Absolutely, loved it! Was totally unaware that Gucci Seville was an actual thing. The old pics were really cool too.