A bipartisan duo — Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley — is teaming up on legislation that would ban large investment firms from snapping up single-family homes, a measure they say is aimed at the country’s housing affordability crunch.
The bill is set to be introduced on Thursday, two days after President Trump urged lawmakers in his State of the Union address to put limits on institutional investors buying houses. It will be the first new piece of proposed legislation on the issue since Mr. Trump’s speech, though Merkley and over a dozen Democrats introduced a different bill on the same topic earlier this week.
The legislation, known as the Homes for American Families Act, would amend the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to make it illegal for investment funds with over $150 million in assets to buy single-family homes, condominiums or townhouses. It doesn’t apply to homebuilders that are constructing units for sale.
It would also task the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which brings civil suits to quash alleged anticompetitive practices, with enforcing the law.
“Families deserve to be able to buy their own homes and achieve the American dream without competing with big investment companies that irrevocably drive up housing prices,” Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said in a statement. “That’s why I am introducing legislation to ban Wall Street from buying single family homes once and for all.”
Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement: “As corporate investors invade the housing market nationwide, we need action to protect hardworking Americans achieving the dream of homeownership. Now with bipartisan support, we have wind in our sails to finally crack down on billionaire corporations gobbling up American homes.”
The bipartisan push comes as Americans struggle with high housing costs that have put homeownership out of reach for many families. Federal Reserve data shows that homebuyers need to earn 43% more than the median worker to be able to afford a typical home, and a CBS News poll from earlier this month found that 83% of Americans say it’s harder to buy a house than it was in previous generations.
Large institutional investors own 3.8% of all single-family rental homes nationwide, the Urban Institute found in a 2023 analysis. But in some parts of the country, their share is much more significant. Large investors own more than 28% of single-family rentals in the Atlanta area and about 20% in the Charlotte area, the Urban Institute found.
Many experts believe the affordability problem is driven primarily by a nationwide shortage of housing, with construction of new homes collapsing ahead of the 2008 financial crisis and never fully recovering. Goldman Sachs last year estimated that the U.S. would need to build as many as four million new homes beyond the normal pace of construction to address the shortage.
But members of both parties have argued that when deep-pocketed investors decide to buy homes, it makes it extremely difficult for normal would-be homeowners to compete.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order last month directing federal agencies to avoid approving, guaranteeing or facilitating the sale of most single-family homes to large institutional investors.
In his State of the Union address this week, the president called on lawmakers to make that action permanent. He introduced a mother of two named Raysall Wiggins who he said “placed bids on 20 homes and lost all of those bids to gigantic investment firms” that “paid all cash and turned those houses into rentals, stealing away her American dream.”
On Tuesday, Merkley and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts introduced similar legislation that would prevent owners with 50 or more homes from getting tax deductions for depreciation and mortgage interest on those properties.
