BREAKING: Apartments Next? Senator Warren Expands Regulatory Spotlight from SFR to Multifamily

Senator Warren sends threatening letters to large owners of apartments, manufactured housing and single-family rentals.

Author

Jay Parsons
March 27, 2026

Today’s edition sponsored by: JPI, Madera Residential, X-Caliber, Authentic, Mason Joseph and TeleCloud.

The growing regulatory spotlight on rental housing: From SFR to BTR … and now Apartments and Manufactured Housing?

After pushing an SFR/BTR ban (or close to a ban, anyway) through the Senate via the misnamed “ROAD to Housing Act,” now Senator Elizabeth Warren has set her sights on apartments and manufactured housing (and still SFR/BTR, too). She writes: “Congress also has a responsibility to take meaningful steps to address cost hikes and abusive practices by giant corporate landlords in multifamily and manufactured housing.”

That’s from threatening letters her office sent to a handful of large rental housing owners.

Before we go into the details, this needs to be said: Rents are flat-to-falling across the country for 3+ years, largely due to large investors pushing the biggest supply wave in a half-century. But you won’t find that context in the letters. And yet it’s a critical reminder that supply is the best tenant protection and the most proven remedy to affordability concerns. Just look at Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, though, Senator Warren’s home state of Massachusetts has seen little of it, and now the development pipeline there is frozen due to an upcoming ballot measure on rent control.

Back to the letters: The targets are a mix of apartments, SFR/BTR and manufactured housing: Greystar, MAA, Starwood, Blackstone, American Homes 4 Rent, Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, FirstKey Homes, Homes of America, Horizon, Impact Communities, RHP Properties, Tricon, and Yes! Communities. The letters ask for a catalog of data and information — ranging from portfolio sizes and rents and maintenance records to things like copes of e-mails with the White House and other federal agencies.

The letters are written in a way that’ll sound scary to anyone who aren’t well-versed on these topics. They include many misleading and out-of-context claims. Let’s break down seven of them.

Claim 1: “But large institutional investors also play a major role in the multifamily and manufactured housing markets. Institutional investors have acquired a ten percent share of the multifamily market, which is approximately 2.2 million housing units.”

Reality: Context matters, and this letter paints a scary picture by ignoring critical context.

First, to merely say “institutional investors have acquired a ten percent share of the multifamily market” is incredibly silly for two reasons: price tags and methods.

Price tags: The average price per apartment unit in 2025 was $224k, according to MSCI Real Capital Analytics. More than half of apartment properties have 100+ units, according to NMHC analysis of Census and HUD data. Multiply $224 by 100 and that gets us $22.4 million — and that’s at the low end. Most institutional investors target properties with 200+ units. Either way, eight figures is not exactly a “mom-and-pop” investment. Who is buying if not for “private equity” or a public REIT? There are only so many ultra-high-net-worth family offices, and how is that materially different from “private equity” anyway?

Methods: Much of this growing share came from BUILDING a lot more apartments. And that’s even more expensive than buying old apartments — further winnowing the investor pool. These are not small deals. In Austin (one of the nation’s hottest construction markets), the typical new apartment property includes about 300 units. For new construction favored by institutions, it’s not uncommon for project costs topping $100 million to build.

So ask yourself: If you take out institutional investors, who is able to write 8- and 9-figure checks for modern apartment deals?

*** It’s trendy to think “big investor = bad,” but the reality is they’re the ones funding the nation’s largest apartment construction boom in 50 years. In turn, they’re putting downward pressure on rents over the 3+ years (albeit unintentionally, of course) even as demand has remained high. So it’s intellectually dishonest to ignore that context, and fail to note that the growing share of institutional capital in multifamily is through NEW CONSTRUCTION. Few are buyers of older, cheaper sub-50 unit properties.***

Claim 2: “The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found ‘that renters might be exposed to greater housing security and well-being risks with corporate investor landlords,’ and corporate investors with more than 15 single-family rental properties ‘were more likely to file eviction notices.’ Renters living in private equity-owned multifamily buildings have also reported problems, such as ‘large rent increases, hidden fees, poor maintenance and repairs, lack of responsiveness to tenant concerns, and aggressive eviction practices.”

Reality: This citation is a bit like the old game “telephone” where one person whispers something to another person, and that person whispers it to another person, and so on. Eventually, context gets lost and the story gets twisted.

No, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond did not conclude these things. The Richmond Fed’s researchers merely cited other papers, and relevant context is stripped out.

For example: The claim about “private-equity owned multifamily buildings” defined “private equity” merely as an LLC. Anyone who knows anything about real estate knows an LLC is not synonymous with institutional private equity. Small investors use LLCs, too, for the liability protections. Furthermore, this study was based in Milwaukee, a market basically off the map for institutional investors.

And the claim about evictions was based on one study in one county (Fulton County, GA), and used a threshold so low (15 properties) that the study’s composition would likely primarily be sub-institutional.

Claim 3: “In fact, homebuilders are increasingly shifting their focus away from building for-sale homes for individual families and instead building for corporate landlords to rent entire communities.”

Reality: Simply put: This isn’t how it works. The Senator’s statement sounds earnest to an unknowing reader, but reflects total misunderstanding of build-to-rent development.

First: Most build-to-rent developers are building apartment-style communities on a single parcel of land, but with detached homes instead of attached walls, and those homes are purposely built as rentals by dedicated rental developers. It’s incorrect to say they’re “shifting their focus away from building for-sale homes” because most of them weren’t buying for-sale homes anyway.

The Top 3 largest build-to-rent owners/developers (according to John Burns Research & Consulting) are Redwood Living, AMH and NexMetro Communities. Greystar (one of the companies receiving the senator’s letter) also builds BTR. None of them have ever been in the for-sale single-family homebuilding business. They build rentals for families who prefer to rent or need to rent. If you take them out (which the Senate’s ROAD to Housing Act largely does), you’re reducing total housing supply.

Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t sell those homes individually because of how they’re platted, so sell-offs would require a very messy condo conversion.

Of course, some traditional homebuilders did expand into build-to-rent, as well. And that leads us to a second point:

Second: Long prior to BTR becoming a topic of debate, homebuilders positioned build-to-rent as ADDITIVE to total housing supply — not a replacement of for-sale housing. They noted that BTR is very different — different capital sources, different customer base, and often different product.

In other words: It’s both/and, not either/or. Here are examples

  • At DR Horton, EVP Mike Murray said on a 2022 earnings call that build-to-rent homes are NOT "cannibalizing the for-sale business.” He said: “We always thought build-to-rent is a great way to more rapidly monetize land positions without cannibalizing for-sale business because it's a different user of that real estate and different owner of that real estate, so it brings other capital pools to bear.”

  • In 2021, Lennar announced an SFR business and said it was an "opportunity for families and individuals across the country to live in brand-new homes at an attainable price point, all without putting up a down payment. We have a distinct opportunity to create upward mobility in the housing market through this initiative."

    Pulte (the homebuilder, not the FHFA director) CEO Ryan Marshall said this back in 2021 when they announced a partnership with Invitation Homes: “We think that this partnership will give us access to larger land parcels and allow us to build everything that we normally would have built for sale, and then incrementally do some rental units as well. Certainly I think there will be some projects where it becomes a little fungible and some of the units will come out of what historically would have been our for-sale portfolio.” So while saying "some" units could come from for-sale portfolio, he's also saying the SFR partnership allows them to build more total homes than they would otherwise.

Also: I was honored to partner with John Burns and other housing researchers in an open letter supporting the new for build-to-rent construction. Check it out here. It addresses more of the myths around BTR, and the unintended consequences of the ROAD to Housing Act’s severe restrictions on it.

Claim 4: “… 32 institutional investors collectively owned 450,000 single-family homes as of June 2022 – roughly 3 percent of the national market for single-family homes...”

Reality: This is indisputably, recklessly wrong and misleading. That 3% is closer to their share of single-family RENTAL homes, but amount to about 0.5% of all single-family homes. Furthermore, this letter suggests even 3% of SFR between 32 companies is a large number. But it lacks context. Could you name ONE major industry more fragmented than single-family rentals, where the 32 largest players collectively only have 3% of the market?

Claim 5: “Moreover, institutional investors often shirk on tenant protections and maintenance costs to boost their profits across the single-family, multifamily, and manufactured housing sectors.”

Reality: This is a talking point, not a data point. Here’s what the housing researchers at the Urban Institute (a non-partisan think tank) wrote specifically about institutional SFR owners, but could likely be said of apartment owners as well: “Because of their size, scale, and organizational infrastructure, mega and smaller national single-family rentals can improve the rental experience. Institutional investors’ practices have an impact on hundreds of thousands of renter households and have the potential to set new standards for practice in the rental market. And it is often more feasible for institutional investors than for their mom-and-pop counterparts to implement certain important practices, such as rent reporting.”

Additionally, the Urban Institute noted that institutional investors typically spend 2-7x more on repairs than do individual homebuyers when buying a house.

While the Senator’s letter cites specific cases, it oversimplifies them. Big companies make for big targets. Most were settled with no admission of guilt, as settlements can be cheaper and faster than a drawn-out court case. The letter also brings up “junk fees” and fee disclosures, but those are industry-wide issues (not just “institutional”) dating back decades. Fair topics for reform (and I’d argue all-in pricing is a good thing for everyone) and much of that is already under way. Again, though, context matters.

Claim 6: “Allowing private equity firms and other large institutional investors to snatch up thousands of homes can make it impossible for individuals and families to buy their own home – which is why the Senate-passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes restrictions on large institutional investors’ ownership of single-family housing units.”

  • America has 1 million-plus FEWER single-family rental homes than we had back in 2016, according to analysis from Harvard, Redfin and John Burns. Investors have been net sellers over the last decade.

  • Homeownership has been trending up since 2016 (though dipped of late due to spike in rates), and today is above the long-term average.

  • The chief barrier for renters becoming homebuyers is finances, not investors, especially after the crackdown on subprime lending in the Dodd-Frank legislation. Many SFR renters do not have the cash for the down payment, the credit scores to qualify for the mortgage, or the ability to pay >$1k in additional costs per month to own versus rent.

Claim 7: “New polling shows that 64% of Americans support reining in corporate landlords and institutional investors to lower housing costs–and 73% support banning corporate investors from single family homes.”

Reality: While I have no doubt most Americans support a ban (the conspiracy theories run deep on both sides of the aisle), it’s worth noting this was a very unserious poll by a political advocacy group that defines its mission as a “fight” to “build public power, break up concentrations of private power.”

Even its sympathizers would surely flag this poll question as fundamentally flawed. Asking Americans about how to address housing costs, the pollsters gave respondents multiple choices to pick from. Guess what was NOT an option: Build more housing. You can’t take seriously a survey that leaves out the one right answer prescribed by nearly every academic study on the topic.

Here's the scary thing that should concern everyone

Due to the Senator's bill essentially banning build-to-rent development, we've seen new BTR development capital essentially frozen. It's a supply killer. (We’ll have a podcast out on this next week.)

If investors start to perceive similar risks for the apartment market, as well, that could have devastating impacts on apartment supply going forward -- which will only further drive up rents.

Remember: Capital goes where it's wanted. If you don't want capital building housing, they'll go build data centers and e-commerce warehouses instead. So when you target that capital, those investors will just pivot. But you're allowing American renters to be collateral damage.

Let's do better, and put the focus on America's renters -- and building more housing of all types for them.

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Find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple and Amazon. Recent episodes:

Episode 77: Sub-Institutional Multifamily Update, with Adaptive Realty’s Moses Kagan and ReSeed Partners’ Rhett Bennett

Episode 76: Affordable Housing Isn’t What You Think with Dominium’s Nick Andersen

Episode 75: The Evolution of Equity Residential with EQR’s Mark Parrell

Episode 74: Inside Multifamily’s Biggest Family Business with Morgan Properties’ Jason Morgan

Episode 73: Takeaways from SFR REIT Calls + the Outlook for Rental Housing Investment with Principal’s Rich Hill

Episode 72: Debacle: NYC Rent Stabilized Apartments with New York Apartment Association’s Kenny Burgos

Episode 71: 7 Takeaways from Apartment REIT Calls with Bank of America’s Jana Galan

Episode 70: 5 Takeaways from NMHC Annual Meeting with Northmarq’s Jeff Weidell

Episode 69: Where’s All the Distress? with Benefit Street Partners’ Michael Comparato

Episode 68: Q1’26 Multifamily Update and Outlook with RealPage’s Carl Whitaker

Episode 67: Top 10 Myths About Institutional Investors in Housing with Baruch College’s Joshua Coven.

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