Single-family giants are selling houses they bought amid the Housing Bust and shifted to new construction of build-to-rent developments. Multifamily caught up in CRE turbulence.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The top six single-family rental landlords own 422,000 single-family properties; the top six multifamily landlords own 660,000 rental apartments; and mom-and-pop landlords own 11 million single-family rentals, out of nearly 50 million total rental units.
Big multifamily landlords and mom-and-pop single-family landlords are classic elements of the rental market. But the single-family giants are a new creature that came out of the Housing Bust after home prices had plunged.
And since 2022, these single-family rental giants have selling individual houses that they’d bought in starting in 2012, after having cut back on their purchases of individual houses years earlier as prices had become too high to make their rental math work.
But they’ve been adding new construction of entire for-rent developments to their portfolios, focusing on the higher end. And some of these giants even have their own homebuilder divisions.
In other words, they’re shedding some of their scatter-site properties and have become net sellers of them, while adding entire build-to-rent developments to their portfolios, each development with its own leasing and maintenance office and common amenities for tenants. These purpose-built communities are a lot more cost-effective to operate than decades-old houses scattered all over the place.
There are 147.9 million housing units in the US – single-family homes, condos, and apartments – according to Census Bureau data, of which:
- Owned and occupied by homeowners: 86.2 million (58.2% of total housing units)
- Owned by landlords, occupied by renters: 46.4 million (31.3% of total housing units)
- Vacant year-round for rent: 3.2 million
- Vacant for other reasons: 12 million
So there are about 49.6 million rental units (single-family and multifamily) in the US, including vacant units.
Mom-and-pop landlords, defined as owning 1-9 rentals, own about 11 million single-family rentals (SFRs). They have always been the mainstay in the SFR market. Before 2012, there were no landlords with over 1,000 SFRs.
Now there are many, and some are giants with close to 100,000 SFRs. It began amid the mortgage crisis, and with the encouragement from the Fed to push up home prices: PE firms piled into the SFR market and bought tens of thousands of single-family homes out of foreclosure for a song and put them on the rental market. That was the birth of a few giant single-family investors.
The largest single-family rental landlords in the US.
#1, Progress Residential:
94,000 SFRs, according to the company, of which over 12,000 in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta metro. The company is owned by PE firm Pretium Partners. After the financial crisis, it bought 65,000 single-family homes “one-by-one,” when prices were low. It later bought portfolios of single-family rentals from other landlords. It also bought Section 8 single-family rental properties. Years ago, it began to pull back from purchasing individual homes as prices had become too high for rentals, and since 2022 has essentially ended the practice.
Shifting to build-to-rent. In recent years, it acquired 78 build-to-rent developments, totaling 7,500 single-family rentals. These developments typically have their own leasing/maintenance office and common amenities for tenants.
In January 2025, Pretium announced that it secured $550 million in equity capital commitments from institutional investors, and that, “including leverage,” it expects to originate up to $5 billion in loans to homebuilders, part of which will be used to create communities of build-to-rent single-family homes.
#2, Invitation Homes:
93,603 SFRs as of Q2 (85,905 wholly owned, and 7,698 joint-venture owned), according to the publicly traded REIT’s SEC filings for Q2.
INVH was founded by PE firm Blackstone (not to be confused with the asset manager, and ETF/mutual fund provider BlackRock) during the Housing Bust in 2012 and spun off to the public via an IPO in 2017. Blackstone sold its last shares of INVH in 2019.
INVH has been selling individual SFRs since about 2022 that it purchased at very low prices starting in 2012. In Q2 it sold 358 individual SFRs (wholly owned and joint-venture owned).
And it switched to buying new-construction developments of purpose-built SFRs, instead of these scatter-site acquisitions it had done after the Housing Bust.
In Q2, it acquired 939 build-to-rent homes, at an average cost of $336,425 per home, and had a remaining acquisition pipeline from homebuilders of 1,338 homes, at an average cost of $340,000 per home.
#3, American Homes 4 Rent:
60,596 SFRs as of Q2, according to the publicly traded REIT’s SEC filing for Q2. AMH, founded in 2012 by Public Storage founder B. Wayne Hughes, was spun off via IPO into a publicly traded REIT in 2013. When it merged with American Residential Properties in 2016, it briefly became #1 SFR landlord.
AMH started its own homebuilding division in 2017, when it pulled back from scatter-site acquisitions. In July 2024, the company announced that its homebuilding division had completed its 10,000th home in new build-to-rent developments and was named the 39th largest homebuilder.
In Q2, its homebuilding division delivered 501 newly constructed build-to-rent homes plus another 135 homes in its joint ventures, for a total of 636 build-to-rent homes. Per its guidance, the company plans to build and deliver 1,800 to 2,000 build-to-rent homes in the year 2025.
It sold 370 scatter-site properties in Q2 that it had purchased individually for a song staring in 2012. Net proceeds from the sales averaged $325,900 per home. An additional 904 properties were held for sale at the end of Q2.
In the three markets of Atlanta, Miami, and Houston, AMH has 409 houses for sale, according to data from Parcl Labs in early August.
#4, The Amherst Group:
59,500 SFRs for rent. The privately-owned company is engaged in build-to-rent. It also bought portfolios of SFRs from other big investors, and bought individual homes and renovated them.
It also has become a seller of scatter-site properties it had purchased after the Housing Bust: in Atlanta, Miami, and Houston alone, it had 418 houses listed for sale, according to Parcl Labs.
#5, Blackstone jumps back in by acquiring two huge landlords.
62,000 SFR in the US, according to data from Parcl Labs. Blackstone, after it spun off Invitation Homes (see above), got back into single-family rentals by acquiring two landlords. In 2021, it acquired Home Partners of America with 17,000 SFRs. In 2024, Blackstone acquired Tricon Residential, a publicly traded Canadian company with about 38,000 SFRs in the US and multifamily apartment properties in Canada. Home Partners of America was folded into Tricon. Tricon is also a developer of build-to-rent SFRs.
#6, FirstKey Homes:
Over 52,000 SFRs, according to the company. It was founded in 2015 by Cerberus when it took on the 4,200 SFRs that Cerberus had previously bought from Building and Land Technology (BLT).
FirstKey Homes has also become a seller of its scatter-site properties. Alone in the Atlanta, Miami, and Houston markets, it listed 1,045 homes for sale, according to data from Parcl Labs in early August.
The largest multifamily rental landlords in the US.
The #1 multifamily landlord is Greystar with 122,545 units, according to the list of the largest 50 multi-family landlords in 2025 by the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC). Greystar has been aggressively growing its portfolio. In 2022, it ranked #5 with 80,121 units. Over those 4 years, it has grown its portfolio of rental units by 53%.
Some other tidbits:
- The top 50 landlords combined own 2.50 million rental apartments, up by 60,000 units from 2024, and up by 228,000 (+10%) over the past five years.
- Buffett’s Berkshire Residential Investments is #28 with 36,247 rental units.
- Even the smallest of the top 50 owns 25,898 rental units.
| Rank 2025 | Company Name | Units Owned 2025 | Units Owned 2024 |
| 1 | Greystar | 122,545 | 109,341 |
| 2 | MAA | 102,348 | 100,894 |
| 3 | Morgan Properties | 96,727 | 92,935 |
| 4 | Nuveen Real Estate | 86,586 | 84,697 |
| 5 | Equity Residential | 84,249 | 80,191 |
| 6 | AvalonBay Communities Inc. | 84,058 | 82,565 |
| 7 | The Related Companies LP | 83,839 | 72,423 |
| 8 | Monarch Investment & Management Group | 75,871 | 73,026 |
| 9 | Cortland | 73,479 | 74,831 |
| 10 | Edward Rose Building Enterprise | 71,591 | 70,658 |
Multifamily construction went through a historic boom of over 4 million units started between 2015 and 2024. During the years of 2021-2023 combined, 1.45 million units were started, each year by far the most since the multifamily boom in the mid-1980s, and many of these units have recently flooded the market, and others continue to flood the market, creating substantial supply, largely halting the spike in rents in those markets.
And note the drop in 2024 as the sector fell on hard times.
Multifamily is now caught up in the turbulence of CRE: The delinquency rate for multifamily mortgages that have been securitized into CMBS jumped to 6.9%. Two years ago, it was still 1.8% [for more: Office CMBS Delinquency Rate Spikes to Record 11.7%, Much Worse than Financial Crisis Peak. Multifamily Delinquencies also Spike]:
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Maybe this will help those wanting to buy first home. This could become a chance to directly sell a mortgage loan to buyers while still retaining ownership rights and then keeping or selling the instruments created for further profit.
But no, big landlords did not get a mortgage for each individual home; they borrow at the intuitional level to purchase these homes. So they cannot pass on the same mortgage they had.
I work in MF CRE. Getting a bridge loan for a shitty property was way too easy. Often you could get a 100% loan to cost. Absurd
We got a housing crisis. How many of what type need to be built and what policies could be put in place to free up some of the 50 M vacant units?
@ryan I don’t think their are 50 million “vacant” homes in the US (unless you count a home as “vacant” when the homeowners are at work or on vacation. Census.com says we have 342mm people in the US so if we have 50mm vacant homes that is one for ever 6.8 people.
“Single-family giants” is not a term I would use to describe these institutions. The ‘Great Vampire Squids’ would be more appropriate, or the ‘Predatory Housing Monsters’. These are predatory institutions that NEVER should have been allowed access to the housing markets. They have wreaked havoc in the housing market, with no regard for average citizens. They are partly responsible for sending housing prices into the stratosphere. Their overall mentality is a slave-overlord mentality. Profit is their god.
Now they’re contributing to the price declines and inventory pile-up because they have become sellers of these homes, even as buyers have vanished.
They have 95% of the way to go to undo their influence.
If a corporation builds a 500 unit apartment complex with touching walls, common areas, parking lots, then that is fine. Very few private investors have the capital for such a project.
If that same corporation builds a 500 house subdivision with no touching walls, small private back yards, maybe a community pool, then that is bad. They are “stealing the American dream”?
Corporations buy a lot of pickup trucks, airline tickets, hotel rooms, restaurant meals. They are competing with individual private buyers for those goods and services and driving the prices up. Maybe that should be banned.
Ol’B,
You need to be careful here when you’re being sarcastic. Some people might not get it. Stick a /sarc at the end of it or a 🤣
Conflating houses with restaurant meals, hotel rooms, airline tickets and pickup trucks doesn’t work because shelter is basically different – everyone needs shelter to survive, but not any of those other things.
Not living under the landlord’s thumb is widely considered desirable, especially in today’s rental market, where, thanks to lax state campaign finance laws, landlord lobbies have been able to pass some astonishingly favorable laws.
If corporates are in the housing business, it really doesnt bother me one way or the other. My only grip would be if a corporates they enjoy some tax benefits and if they are large enough, cheaper access to borrowed money.
For me personally, renting from a corporate entity would be last on my list. It becomes a form of indentured servitude. My daughter rented from a corporate outfit and the rental agreement was 30 pages long and completely slanted in the corporates favor.
It’s a bit like doing business with the DMV. I understand their predicament. There are bad tenants out there and so everyone is treated as if they are bad.
The idea of building a development, does sound much more efficient. I’ll bet the rental agreement for those are 100 pages specifying in detail what you, your kids and your dogs can and cannot do.
If they weren’t there to buy after the housing crisis, would you be ready to pay cash for all the underwater properties? Anyone could have bought – most were scared.
The sharp rise in home prices was caused by the massive dilution of the dollar – where Almost EVERYONE in the U.S. Participated as they accepted unneeded handouts from the government.
My sister & her husband were able to buy a home because of all the money the government showered down on them – the more kids you had the more cash you got. They have 4 kids, she is a stay at home mom, and husband was employed by the Feds.
They did NOT NEED $1 from the government as there lives did not change at all due to COVID. The majority of the country also Did NOT NEED $1 from the government. My wife and I used the money we got to pay down the mortgage (even though it was only 3%).
The large increase in the Money Supply caused a massive inflation spike in the housing market. Private Equity (whom I Despise) had very little to do with it.
Once again the Fed, with Bernanke’s ZIRP and QE fueled this market distortion and let it run for years. As for build to rent, lets call a spade a spade. This is just another form of apartment development with semi detached and attached units that have garages. The tax authority should treat them as single family units and hopefully tax the heck out of them. Time will tell. As for development, the ones around Houston are eyesores and in a few years of turnover will look even worse.
Just another monetary policy fiasco.
Seems to me the build-to-rent communities are more suited to big landlords, as well as renters who move often, such as students and military (presuming the houses are located near such institutions). The individual SFH are better for owner occupied (or small landlords). Of course, that logic presumes the landlords have kept up maintenance over the years and/or sell at prices appropriate to the condition of the properties.
There is nothing wrong with single family rentals
Alan,
You people bitch about unaffordability and high rents, and in your next breath you bitch about new construction to address those two issues. Tiring!
The FHFA “REO to Rental” program started this wave back in 2012 to avoid letting “too many” houses hit the market and drive down prices.
Enlightening article. Ignorant me thought this was another Raising Arizona rental development overbuild phenomenon, following the single-family development overbuild in Phoenix. Alas, it is nationwide.
Sadly, these rental developments are necessary. But for the many who would prefer to buy a house in this market but cannot, they build no housing equity. The American dream is a nightmare.
People have figured out that they can save a lot of money by renting a nice new house than buying whatever. It makes total sense. They can invest that saved money into something else to earn income and capital gains.
We rented a very nice SFH with First Key. The contract was shocking and nothing like an apartment. The renter agreed to pay for HOA, Taxes, and repairs if anything broke. It was actually cheaper to buy a fixer upper than rent home. I often wondered if big home builders owned part of First Key to keep house prices up in those subdivisions.
@Gabby Cat buying a fixer upper car is also cheaper than leasing a nice new car. Some people want to lease a “very nice” SFH (or car) and others people (like me) are happier with cheaper “fixer uppers”…
The American Dream died a while ago under some president’s rule, but I am not sure which president…maybe it was a joint effort of several presidents!
Except renting is much more affordable than owning a house so you can save a ton of money. You also don’t have to worry about repairs. Insurance is cheaper because it is bundled and often times self insured. So are we really bitching about affordability now?
Just take the money you didn’t use for a down payment and invest it.
It was maybe an honor to have lived through and survived the Great Depression.
Likewise, it will be history-making to have lived through and survived this Great Housing Abomination and Everything Bubble, whose effects will be felt much beyond the housing sector. Everyday life will be changed because of it. This will have worldwide effects.
Dumbass doom and gloom.
You really need to actually read about the great depression to see how dumb this comment is
It looks like a really bad time to be an individual SF home seller in Atlanta, Miami, or Houston.