Growing Wall Street control of single family homes is a contributor to our housing crisis, with mega single-family investors (those who own more than 1,000 homes nationwide) controlling an estimated 446,000 homes as of January 2025. Nationally, the presence of corporate landlords in a community has been associated with raised rents, junk fees, reduced maintenance, and increased evictions.
This concentrated corporate ownership has led to price-fixing and anticompetitive, fraudulent, and deceptive behavior to tenants. In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission’s settlement with Invitation Homes confirmed longstanding tenant complaints about the largest single-family landlord in the country’s patterns of illegal practices, including charging deceptive junk fees, failing to provide proper maintenance, stealing deposits, and intentionally misleading tenants about the federal eviction moratorium during the pandemic, among other offenses. Similarly, following complaints of price-fixing by corporate landlords, the U. S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit, now settled, against rent-setting software firm RealPage, accusing the private-equity-owned firm of facilitating price fixing among the country’s largest landlords. Joined by eight state attorneys general, the lawsuit argues that RealPage’s rent-setting software uses private information to raise rents — and, by extension, landlord profits — well beyond what is fair to the general public.
Since 2014, the federal government has been a major contributor to this problem, having facilitated the financialization of the US single family housing stock through bulk distressed mortgage sales—or “note sales”—to Wall Street actors like private equity firms, investment banks, and hedge funds at heavily discounted rates. It has also subsidized low-interest loans for these firms’ predatory practices against renters in multi-family buildings. These bulk loan purchases have concentrated hundreds of thousands of home loans in the hands of a few large entities.
This data brief analyzes data from three federal agencies—Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Authority—on their auctions of non-performing and re-performing loans and distressed assets from 2010 until November 2025. It finds that of over 745,000 loans sold through four separate programs, only 0.97 percent (just over 7,200 loans) were sold to mission-driven non-profits. Ninety-eight and nine tenths percent (over 736,000 loans) were bought by Wall Street buyers like investment banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds. Another vanishingly small share (just over 1,200 loans) went to local for-profit property flippers. Over 135,00 have been foreclosed, meaning thousands of homes may now be in control of these corporate buyers. Several of the most frequent note sale auction winners have affiliated single-family rental operators. For example, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, which has bought over 53,000 re-performing loans from Fannie Mae, owns FirstKey Homes, a single-family rental company with 52,000 single family rentals nationwide. Pretium, a private equity firm that owns and manages 94,000 homes across the country, is the single largest buyer of non-performing loans from both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and has bought a total of 31,000 loans through four separate government loan sale programs. Financial firms’ growing direct ownership of single-family homes in the aftermath of the 2008 crash has harmed housing affordability by raising rents and reducing homeownership opportunities. Communities are also uprooted as rising housing costs displace residents who can no longer afford them. These effects are particularly severe for people and communities of color, who already struggle with lower-than-average rates of homeownership, historical exclusion from the housing market, and a pronounced wealth gap compared to white households. Federal agencies should not be contributing to this problem.