NEW YORK–President Trump’s demand that Wall Street investors should be banned from purchasing single family homes as a means of making homes more affordable likely won’t make much of a dent, according to several analysts.
Instead, Trump said he has ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgages.
The core problem, according to Goldman Sachs Research, is the lack of supply. Goldman Sachs said America needs about four million more homes to return housing to affordable levels.
Other analysts agree.
Won’t ‘Move the Needle’
“This is not going to move the needle as far as affordability goes,” Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com, told CNN. “Although these large institutional landlords are certainly a villain in the headlines, they’re a red herring when it comes to the actual shortages and the affordability issues that we’ve been seeing in the US for the last decade-plus.”
Institutional investors, such as Blackstone, own hundreds of thousands of apartment complexes, mobile home parks, and single-family houses across the United States.
As CNN noted, real estate has been a lucrative institutional investment since the collapse of the housing market in 2008. The finance industry swooped in to desirable neighborhoods to buy up suddenly cheap housing stock and started collecting rent on those properties. Estimates of the scale of those purchases vary, but a Brookings Institution study found that between 2012 and 2019, an estimated 240,000 single-family homes were owned by institutional investors.
‘Small Slice of the Pie’
Earlier, Democrats had attacked the large institutional investors — those that own more than 1,000 properties — but they only account for between 1% and 3% of the homes purchased in 2025, according to Krimmel.
“That’s a relatively small slice of the pie, and it’s been shrinking in recent years as interest rates have gone up,” the report stated. “The vast majority of real estate investment purchases come from so-called ‘mom-and-pop’ landlords — people who own one or two additional homes that they rent out to supplement their income.”
Sunbelt Markets See Highest Concentration
However, the percentage of homes owned by institutional investors is much higher in some markets, especially in the Southern U.S. CNN noted that a Government Accountability Office study in 2024 found large investors owned 25% of rentals in Atlanta; 18% in Charlotte, N.C.; and 14% in Phoenix, But even if you stopped all institutional ownership, Krimmel told CNN it’s not likely to make a huge difference because inventory in those cities is already rising steadily, keeping prices in check.
The report further noted the president’s order probably won’t spur people to sell the homes they live in now and look for something else, known as the “lock-in effect.”
A ‘Band-Aid’
“At a high level I feel this is putting a Band-Aid on a deeper issue and it probably wouldn’t lower rates enough to really undo the mortgage rate lock-in effect,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at real estate brokerage Redfin, told the Associated Press.
