House Republicans Aim To Strip Key Provision From Senate Housing Bill

House Republicans plan to scale back a measure limiting how long institutional investors can own certain single-family homes when they take up a bipartisan housing bill already passed by the Senate — even though President Trump has urged House leadership to pass the Senate version without alterations.Some House conservatives have voiced concern that the populist push, intended to boost the availability of homes, could have the opposite effect.“Yeah, I don’t think we have the votes to pass the Senate bill as is, so we’re going to stand by the House product,” Speaker Mike Johnson told Politico on Friday. The House is expected to vote on its version of the bill next week and send it back to the Senate.The amendments could delay what Republicans hoped would be a big policy win ahead of the midterm elections.Institutional investors started buying up large numbers of homes during the 2008-09 recession after an overheated housing market collapsed and foreclosures skyrocketed. Many of those homes were turned into rental units. Other builders turned to developing new communities of single family rental homes. The build-to-rent industry had its roots in the Phoenix, Arizona, area and exploded nationwide. Some have blamed those communities for locking out individual buyers.Mr. Trump issued an executive order in January titled “Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers.”“Hardworking young families cannot effectively compete for starter homes with Wall Street firms and their vast resources,” Mr. Trump said. “Neighborhoods and communities once controlled by middle-class American families are now run by faraway corporate interests.”The president promised steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and Congress quickly took up legislation to limit institutional ownership in the single-family housing market. It led to rare bi-partisan cooperation, with Senators Tim Scott and Elizabeth Warren co-sponsoring the “ROAD to Housing Act” aimed at boosting the housing supply and bringing down costs.The Senate bill has a provision aimed at investors who own more than 350 homes, requiring them to sell their build-to-rent homes to individual homeowners within seven years of completion.Some in the industry warn that provision — Section 901 — would have a “chilling effect” on the development of new housing stock and would effectively eliminate the construction of new build-to-rent homes nationwide.“BTR developments require large-scale investment and benefit from economies of scale,” an industry coalition said in a letter to the Senate Housing Committee. “They cannot invest under the risk of forced sales and potential losses driven by arbitrary deadlines.”Developers say the pending legislation is already affecting the industry and that financing for new projects is drying up.“An entire industry nationwide is shut down,” the founder of Phoenix-based Hancock Builders, Greg Hancock, told the Phoenix Business Journal. He says some developers are warning they may have to lay off construction workers if proposed projects are unable to get financing.The National Rental Home Council also warns that housing investment is cooling amid growing legislative uncertainty. The council says big investors are being used as an easy scapegoat but are hardly the cause of a housing shortage in America.“Build-to-rent communities are a critical part of addressing America’s housing shortage by adding purpose-built rental homes that would not exist otherwise,” a council representative said in an emailed statement to The New York Sun. “A bipartisan group of lawmakers and housing experts agree that further restricting these communities would only constrain supply, potentially eliminating tens of thousands of new homes each year. “A right-leaning public policy think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, says blaming the build-to-rent industry is misplaced. “Targeting these investors could become a feel-good yet costly distraction from the true culprit: decades of restrictive housing policies that have choked off new supply and crimped affordability,” the institute said in a 2025 report.Institutional investors, defined as investors owning more than 100 properties, account for less than 1 percent of the entire housing inventory in America, according to the institute.Georgia has the highest percentage of institutional investor-owned homes in the country but those homes still account for only 2.6 percent of the state’s overall housing inventory.“We understand that we’re easy scapegoats,” a spokeswoman for one of the largest single home rental companies in the Atlanta area, the Amherst Group, told WABE-TV. Dagney Gomez del Campo notes that Amherst has spent more than $526 million renovating thousands of homes for about 57,000 renters.Critics say the real cause of the housing crisis is a dramatic rise in home values and elevated mortgage rates. Rates for 30-year mortgages have remained above 6 percent for multiple years after dropping below 3 percent during the pandemic. Rates are rising again due to inflation concerns over the Iran war.Home prices have risen 60 percent nationwide since 2019, according to J.P. Morgan. The bank found that a typical home now costs more than twice as much per month as it did before the pandemic. It estimates the current housing shortage at approximately 2.8 million units, and believes it could take around 10 years to resolve.High land costs and cumbersome building regulations have also hurt attempts to build more starter homes.

House Republicans Aim To Strip Key Provision From Senate Housing Bill

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