‘Stealing people’s future’: Corporate landlords now own over 19K single-family homes in metro Atlanta — and they’re shutting local buyers out of the market
Home buyers and renters in metro Atlanta have some giants to slay if they want to succeed in Georgia’s hot housing market.
According to researchers at Georgia State University (GSU), three large corporate landlords own more than 19,000 single-family homes in the five core counties of metro Atlanta — and they’re renting those houses out for a big profit.
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The three landlords — Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners and Amherst Holdings — control nearly 11% of the single-family homes in select Atlanta neighborhoods, which “allows them to exercise really significant market power over tenants and renters because they have such a large concentration of holdings,” according to Taylor Shelton, an assistant professor at GSU, who led the probe into the ownership of rental homes in metro Atlanta.
“The homes that most of these companies are buying are exactly the kind of starter homes that, 15- to 20-years-ago, would have been [purchased by] first-time homebuyers,” Shelton told WSB-TV Channel 2 Action News in a feature about his research paper.
This dynamic is not lost on prospective home buyers. One commenter on Channel 2’s report stated: “It’s exhausting as a normal first-time buyer to be pushed out by these corporations, who are literally stealing the people's future.”
Here’s what the researchers at GSU found — and why the corporate grip over America’s single-family home market is such a problem.
Corporate landlords love Atlanta
Metro Atlanta, like many parts of the U.S., is facing an affordable housing crisis, according to a 2022 book by fellow GSU researcher Dan Immergluck.
Corporate landlords may be one of the reasons for that, with their ownership share of single-family homes ballooning after the 2007 foreclosure crisis and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. During these challenging economic times, these large entities were able to snap up homes for a good price and then rent them out for a profit.
The common argument against corporate ownership is that they’re hurting regular buyers by driving up costs and exacerbating the shortage of homes for sale.
In the final quarter of 2023, real estate investors bought 26.1% of low-priced U.S. homes that sold, which was the highest share on record and up 24% from a year earlier, according to Redfin analysis.
The data shows that this is happening nationwide, but according to Shelton, Atlanta is the largest market for corporate landlord activity in the country. In a GSU article about his research, he said: “You have to add up the next two or three largest markets in the U.S. together to have the same amount of corporate landlord investment that Atlanta has.”
He explained why: “Corporate landlords like places that are growing, and they like places where housing is relatively cheap. But the other box that Atlanta checks is that we have very lax tenant protections.”
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Limiting corporate ownership of homes
The WSB-TV Channel 2 report about the GSU research triggered thousands of comments about the damage that large corporations are inflicting on local housing markets.
One person said corporate landlords are “wiping out the middle class,” while another wrote: “Shame on local governments for allowing this.” Many highlighted what they see as corporate “greed” and accused lawmakers of only caring for the interests of large corporate entities.
This widespread public frustration has, in fact, triggered a string of regulatory proposals at the state and federal level to try and curb corporate ownership of single-family homes and improve housing affordability in the U.S.
Two congressional bills — the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act and the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act of 2023 — would ban large corporations from owning single-family homes and impose punitive taxes to stop the practice.
In February 2024, a bill (AB-2584) was introduced in California, which would ban companies from owning more than 1,000 homes in the state, and in Nebraska, a bill was introduced to forbid out-of-state corporations from buying up the local housing stock.
As for Georgia, this has been a contentious issue for quite some time. In 2023, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on a Georgia state legislative committee, which argued local zoning rules and building design standards were inhibiting construction and exacerbating the housing shortage. This, when combined with corporate landlord activity, has worsened affordability for many home buyers.
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