Renters Warehouse buys online marketplace for rental homes

Property management company Renters Warehouse acquired OwnAmerica Real Estate, an online marketplace for the sale of single-family rental homes.

Renters Warehouse already manages around 22,000 rental houses across the U.S., often on behalf of institutional owners, Bloomberg reported. By buying OwnAmerica, the company is expanding the range of services it offers to customers. Renters Warehouse is already the country’s biggest third-party manager of single-family rental homes, according to the report.

“A lot more institutional capital is coming out and saying we want to get into the SFR (single-family rental) space but we don’t want to do anything as far as building an operation or building an acquisition team,” the company’s CEO Kevin Ortner told Bloomberg. “We’ve been approached by a number of folks that have said, ‘Can you help us acquire and liquidate assets?’ and the answer was really, no.”

OwnAmerica claims to have sold $490 million worth of homes through its platform.

The deal comes five months after Roofstock, another online marketplace for single-family rental homes, bought the property management company Streetlane PM. In October, Roofstock raised $35 million in a Series C funding round, looking to cash in on growing interest in single-family rental housing.

Those single-family rentals have been experiencing a resurgence. Institutional players are acquiring homes and converting them into rental. One in 10 homes sold by startups like Opendoor and Offerpad were acquired by such institutional investors so far this year. [Bloomberg] — Konrad Putzier