In the wake of President Donald Trump’s announcement that his administration is developing a proposal to ban large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes, newly released third-quarter data highlights the limited impact such a restriction may have.
Investor purchase share of single-family homes rose to 34% in the third quarter from 33% the previous quarter, notching its highest quarterly purchase share in seven quarters, according to BatchData, a real estate analytics platform designed for real estate investors.
But more than 95% of investor-owned homes were held by small investors with fewer than 11 properties. “Mega-investors” owning 1,000 homes or more represented just 2.1% of all investor-owned stock, underscoring the reality that competition between traditional homebuyers and investors who never intend to reside in the property overwhelmingly occurs outside the large investor cohort.
Those who own between one and five homes represented 92% of real estate investors, while those owning six to 10 properties made up 4% of the cohort. For the seventh consecutive quarter, large investors returned more homes to the market (5,798) than they bought (4,663) in the third quarter, a margin of 24% relative to the homes purchased.
Small investors, on the other hand, purchased more than 1.03 million homes through the first three quarters of 2025, 3.6 times more than the 286,175 homes they sold. Overall investor purchases fell to 351,933 homes in the third quarter, down 6% from a year ago.
Texas, California, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia account for one-third of investor-owned properties nationwide, which BatchData says is a reflection of “strategic capital deployment in high-population, high-growth and high-yield markets.”
Part and parcel of the mortgage market’s broader shift toward higher conforming loan share, industry sources tell Scotsman Guide that elevated investor purchase share is unlikely to slow in 2026, boosted by robust demand from capital markets for debt-service coverage ratio (DSCR) loans that investors commonly use to finance rental purchases.
The third-quarter rise in overall investor purchase share came amid a 6% decline in investor purchase volumes. Nevertheless, investors have propped up sales of existing homes that ended 2025 at three-decade lows for the third consecutive year, according to data published this week by the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
Investors’ 34% purchase share means a third of home sales are not going to a buyer who plans to live in the home. BatchData describes this trend as “critical liquidity in an otherwise constrained market,” given that “six-figure incomes remain required in over half of U.S. markets” to purchase a home.
“This represents a sustained departure from pre-2020 conditions when middle-income families could access homeownership across most of the country,” says BatchData. “The combination of elevated prices and higher financing costs has fundamentally altered the buyer pool.”
An affordable housing crisis has enabled investor-buyers to largely supplant first-time homebuyers in the market, who have watched their purchase share fall from 32% in 2023 to 24% in 2024 and 21% in 2025, according to NAR data.
However, without investor activity to fill the gap created by traditional homebuyers’ retreat, BatchData claims “many markets” would face severe illiquidity and potentially destabilizing price volatility, as Scotsman Guide has examined.
