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Investors are buying fewer and fewer homes as they contend with big-picture problems from challenging weather conditions to political pushback.
In the first quarter, investors bought just over 236,000 homes across the country, a nearly 23 percent year-over-year drop, according to an analysis by CJ Patrick Company using data provided by BatchData.
The start of the year saw strong interest in home buying, said Rick Sharga, founder and CEO of CJ Patrick Company. But that fell off amid unusually strong winter weather in parts of the country. The war with Iran, which began at the end of February and injected uncertainty into the economy, didn’t help.
“I’m inclined to think at least part of the fall off we saw in the first quarter had to do with events that really are outside the housing market,” he said.
There also has been increased criticism from politicians such as President Donald Trump against Wall Street-backed buyers crowding out the typical homebuyer. At the start of the year, he signed an executive order that directed federal agencies to make it tougher for them to scoop up existing properties.
The Senate on Monday also passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, aimed at improving housing affordability. If enacted, it would ban big-money homebuyers.
While there has been an increased focus on institutional buyers, they make up a small share of the country’s homeowners. Investor-owners accounted for about 32 percent of home purchases in the first quarter, but some 96 percent of those were small investors, or those who own one to 10 homes. Institutional investors, or those who own 1,000-plus properties, own roughly 2.2 percent of the housing stock.
“It’s one of those urban legends that just won’t die like the giant alligators and the New York sewer systems,” Sharga said.
Additionally, for the past nine quarters in a row, institutions have been on a selling streak, offloading more properties than they buy as they work to place their funds elsewhere. For all of 2025, institutional investors sold about 24 more properties than they bought, the report found. In the first quarter of 2026, they parted with 38 percent more than they bought.
Many are also transitioning into building ground-up communities.
“It’s better for them from a management perspective, to have a community of rental properties than to try and manage these one-off properties that are scattered around a metropolitan area,” Sharga said.
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The markets with the highest shares of investor-owners are concentrated in the South and are typically those with high rental and tourism potential, along with second-home demand. The Asheville, North Carolina metro area has the highest percentage of the country’s top regions, at 28 percent.
Portland, Maine, is the lone Northeastern market on the list, with investors holding 24 percent of the metro’s housing stock. Maine is one of the states, along with Wyoming, Alaska and Hawaii, with large shares of investor homeowners, thanks to those states’ large tourism industries, Sharga said.