A provision in a piece of Senate legislation is rattling a powerful homebuilder organization.
The National Association of Home Builders came out against a provision in the Senate’s ROAD to Housing Act, Bloomberg reported. It’s unclear if that opposition will have a material impact on the bill’s prospects, as it cleared a procedural hurdle on Wednesday with a 90-8 vote.
The provision is attached to President Donald Trump’s push to ban institutional investors from the single-family housing market. The ban was added to the Senate’s bill at the behest of the White House, according to Sen. Tim Scott.
Trump’s executive order on the issue included broad exemptions for investors building or renovating homes to be rented out.
But the exemption for built-to-rent companies appears to be narrower than initially thought. The bill requires investors to sell homes, including those in the built-to-rent and renovated-to-rent categories, within a seven-year period.
“This has been a long bipartisan process with a lot of positives for housing, and it’s unfortunate that this issue has been injected at the end into what’s otherwise been a very collaborative process,” National Association of Home Builders chief advocacy officer Ken Winger told the publication, noting the uncertainty for investors would take a bite out of financing for such projects.
Neither Scott nor the White House responded to requests for comment about the NAHB position.
The final vote on the Senate bill is expected to be held next week. Should it pass, it will need to be reconciled with the Housing for the 21st Century Act, which passed through the House of Representatives last month.
Notably, the investor ban could still be left on the cutting room floor, though the White House wouldn’t appreciate that. The investor ban was excluded from the House bill, meaning it would likely need to be in the Senate bill to increase the likelihood it makes it to the final version of the reconciled legislation.
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