Peter Navarro is the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing.
President Donald Trump announced last week that he will seek to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes — a decisive move aimed at restoring the American Dream for working families. Homes, as the president put it, are where people live, not where corporations operate.
That pledge captures a growing national frustration. For generations, owning a home was the clearest marker of success in America — the reward for working hard, playing by the rules and planning for the future. Today, that promise is slipping out of reach for millions of Americans, especially younger families, even as they do everything right. Inflation and higher interest rates are part of the story. But they are not the whole story.
Another force has quietly but powerfully reshaped the housing market: the large-scale entry of Wall Street-backed institutional investors into single-family housing.
This is not about the neighbor who rents out a second home or a small landlord managing a handful of properties. It is about hedge funds, private-equity platforms and corporate landlords assembling portfolios of hundreds — or tens of thousands — of houses. These firms operate at national scale, bid with cash, waive inspections and rely on algorithms to set rents. When they show up at an open house, they are not competing on the same terms as a young couple trying to buy their first home.
Research shows that when institutional investors acquire single-family rental homes, rents can rise sharply at tenant turnover — at rates far above normal market increases — and continue climbing thereafter.
In multifamily buildings, corporate owners charge higher asking rentsthan smaller landlords in the very same buildings and file eviction cases more frequently. In other words, scale translates into pricing power, and pricing power is being used.
Importantly, institutional investors do not need to own “most” homes to distort the market. In many metro areas, controlling even a modest share of entry-level housing is enough to change bidding behavior, push prices higher and convert would-be homeowners into permanent renters. Once that shift occurs, it can take years to reverse.
Federal policy has too often compounded the problem. Mortgage insurance, loan guarantees, rental assistance payments and federal property sales were designed to expand access to housing. Yet without firm guardrails, these same tools can end up subsidizing consolidation — helping large investors lock up housing stock with taxpayer support.
The president’s plan is designed to reverse that dynamic. There are several concrete steps the president could take to accomplish that goal.
First, he could cut off federal channels for future acquisitions. Large institutional investors could be barred from using Federal Housing Administration insurance, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture Department guarantees, or other federal housing assistance to buy existing single-family homes. This is immediate, lawful and powerful. It does not seize property or rewrite contracts; it simply ensures that federal backing is reserved for families and owner-occupants.
Second, the president could condition ongoing federal housing benefits on divestiture or structural changes. Many large landlords receive continuing federal payments, particularly through rental assistance programs. The president could require that participation going forward comes with a choice: divest excess single-family holdings back into the market, and place those homes into a transparent and separately controlled structure that prevents further consolidation or forgo federal assistance altogether. This approach would create real incentives without retroactive punishment.
Third, he could end bulk transfers of homes through federal property dispositions. When the federal government sells or transfers housing assets, owner-occupants, nonprofits and community land trusts can be given priority — ensuring that homes flow back to families rather than into corporate portfolios.
Fourth, he could mandate full ownership transparency and anti-evasion rules wherever federal dollars are involved. Requiring clear disclosure of who ultimately owns each property — and counting related companies as a single buyer — would prevent large investors from gaming the system. Without these safeguards, the same firm can hide behind shell companies or paper restructurings while continuing to accumulate homes.
Finally, the president could pair these actions with aggressive enforcement of antitrust, fair-housing and consumer-protection laws to address collusive rent-setting, discriminatory practices and abusive fee structures that often accompany high levels of consolidation.
Some will argue that housing supply is the real problem — and supply does matter. But increased supply alone cannot fix a market where many new homes are quickly absorbed by large investors before families ever get a chance.
President Trump is expected to lay out the full details of his plan when he speaks to global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, scheduled for Jan. 21. He will address the future of growth, markets and economic fairness, and the message will be unmistakable: In the United States, the American Dream is not for sale — and homes are for families, not funds.
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