The share of small-scale real estate investors actively buying residential properties posted a 15-year high in the first half of 2026, Realtor.com reported Wednesday.

Underscoring shifting investor activity amid recent regulatory and market-driven pressures, the home listings platform said investors of all sizes accounted for about 10.7% of all sales throughout the first six months of the year, “close to their share in recent years” and down from 11% in the first half of 2025.

Despite maintaining purchase share, the volume of investor purchases declined to its lowest level for the first six months of any year since 2020 as economic pressures mounted following the start of the Iran war in late February.

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Rising borrowing costs suppressed homebuying activity in the second and third quarters and has continued to do so in the fourth quarter. Investors bought roughly 224,000 residential homes from January through the end of June, about 7% lower than a year ago.

“Investor purchases fell faster than non-investor purchases, though both eased compared to the first half of 2025,” said Realtor.com Senior Economist Hannah Jones, who authored the report.

Reporting earlier this month from investor-focused data platform BatchData suggests investor purchases may have been considerably higher than Realtor.com’s tally, however. BatchData says investor purchase share was about 27% in the second quarter, totaling about 284,000 second-quarter purchases on the heels of 277,000 in the first quarter.

Realtor.com’s report based its findings on “deed transaction data” to identify corporate real estate investors who have transacted under occupancy codes indicating “absentee or tenant-occupied use” through various corporate structures such as limited liability companies, limited partnerships, general partnerships, trusts and REITs.

To avoid interest costs, closing risks and other frictions that accompany financed purchases, investors often make all-cash offers that sellers find appealing, too. The all-cash share among investor purchases in the first half of 2026 was 55%, compared to recent peaks around 68% in 2021 and 2022, Realtor.com noted.

The decline in cash among investor-buyers coincides with the rise of single-family rental investor financing after the 2008 financial crisis, and the market expansion among small-time single-family landlords that ensued.

Debt-service coverage ratio loans for purchasing rental properties have experienced particular growth since 2020 as a business-purpose, non-qualified mortgage product. Residential transition loans used by fix-and-flip investors for acquiring and renovating properties to either rent or resell have also seen strong volume.

Small investors with fewer than 10 properties are thriving in this environment, according to Realtor.com, accounting for 66% of all investor purchases in the first half of the year. Defying aims of the Trump administration to limit investor purchases of single-family homes, investors are outperforming compared to typical buyers.

“These findings indicate that while investor participation has cooled since 2025 and also since the pandemic peak,” added Jones, “they remain significantly more engaged than typical buyers relative to pre-pandemic activity benchmarks.”

So-called “mega” investors with more than 1,000 properties have been steadily reducing their share of purchases in recent years, following a series of Federal Reserve rate increases in 2022.

In fact, these largest investors have not historically dominated single-family rental investor purchases. They represented about 5.7% of all investor purchases and around 0.6% of purchases overall in the first half of 2026, compared to pandemic-era peaks of 18% and 2%, respectively.

“Put differently, mega-investors purchased roughly 12,700 compared to the 148,000 purchased by small investors,” said Realtor.com. Small investors paid all cash only 56% of the time, compared with 80% for the largest investors and 27% for non-investors.

Markets with the largest investor footprints during the first half of 2026 were concentrated in the Midwest, where property values have not risen as quickly as other U.S. regions. Memphis, Tenn., and St. Louis had about 20% investor purchase share, followed by 19% in Kansas City, 18% in Wichita, Kan., and 17% in Toledo, Ohio.