10 US Cities With the Largest Portion of Institutional Investors

If you’ve ever felt you can’t compete with some offers when buying a home, you might be up against a collective effort from institutional investors.

Landlords — even of those of the mom-and-pop variety — have been on the receiving end of grievances from prospective homebuyers who can’t enter the market because of the for-profit strategy employed by investors.

“I think that people see institutional investors as a maybe strange or unnatural player in the housing market,” Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel told Business Insider. “When it comes to the single-family market, this is a non-traditional actor, and the trend kind of started coming out of the Great Recession.”

During the pandemic, firms like BlackRock made headlines for snapping up homes when prices fell and renting them at favorable rates. Krimmel noted that in some cases, institutional investors expanded the rental market by giving some renters the opportunity to live in areas they couldn’t afford if they were to buy.

However, that hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump from targeting large housing investors with a plan to ban them from buying single-family homes.

Data from Realtor.com shows that while institutional investors — which Realtor defines as those who have made over 350 single-family purchases from 2015 to 2025 — account for 1% of total single-family home purchases nationally, some areas are more affected than others.

The Sun Belt specifically has been the champion of affordable housing in recent years, making it a prime location for investors to buy.

“In a way, there was all of this stock that was potentially undervalued, but didn’t have buyers for it,” Krimmel said. “I think that was where the investment opportunity came in, where you saw the homeownership rate declined, and so that meant that demand for rental properties was up, and people wanted to live in those areas as well.”

In all but one of the metros with the largest investor presence, 1 in 10 homes is owned by an investor. See where investors have the biggest share of single-family homes in the US.