When homeowners can’t find buyers for their properties, they usually have three options: lower the price, remove the listing, or convert the home into a rental. By tracking recent for-sale listings that were converted to rentals, Parcl Labs, a housing data and analytics firm, found that “accidental landlords” — homeowners who chose the last option — were becoming more common, especially in the country’s Sun Belt region.
The “accidental landlord” trend is accelerating, the researchers found, particularly in markets where large institutional investors — businesses that own more than 1,000 single-family homes — hold a substantial chunk of available properties. Since the end of the pandemic, those large investors have flocked to the states lining the bottom of the United States from coast to coast, chasing job and population growth. But surging inventory and a declining number of buyers have given rise to a competitive crop of former sellers who are now “accidental landlords.” Most are individual owners competing with those large institutional investors in the rental market.
Six Sun Belt markets — Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Tampa, Fla., Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C. — contain 37 percent of large institutional real estate nationwide, according to Parcl Labs. Accidental landlords have increased in five out of the six cities.
The biggest growth came in Houston, where the 7 percent of failed listings-turned-rentals in April represented a 41 percent increase over last year. Dallas’s 5 percent of accidental rental properties marked a 32 percent increase from last year. The only one of the six institution-dominated Sun Belt markets to see a decline was Charlotte, whose failed-listing rentals decreased by 7 percent.
The trend is one of several signs that the real estate market is becoming increasingly unfriendly to sellers. De-listings increased by 57 percent in July compared with last year, according to an August Realtor.com report, which called 2025 “the least seller-friendly summer since Realtor.com began tracking data in 2016.”
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