Day: January 7, 2026

Black Rock, Vanguard, and State Street don’t actually own homes but they do purchase on behalf of their clients, large numbers of shares in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and other real estate-related companies. Why does Vanguard et al buy REITs and real estate investment companies? Many investors from 401k plans to pension plans to general investors want exposure to diversified real estate across the nation and the world.

When you invest in a  real estate fund, you are effectively buying a slice of a diversified portfolio that includes stocks of numerous real estate companies. For example, Vanguard offers mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), such as the Vanguard Real Estate ETF (VNQ), which track real estate market indices.

I’ve never invested in any real estate ETFs but they do offer diversification across millions of properties and real estate has certain tax advantages that can increase its return. That said, it’s only one sector and sometimes the global housing and commercial sectors can loose value all at once.

Many REITs are relatively small to moderate in size, but when you aggregate many REITs together you get real diversification and also buying leverage.

The largest single-family rental landlords in the US:

• Progress Residential (about 85,000 houses), a privately-held company.
  Invitation Homes (about 80,000 houses), a publicly traded REIT [INVH]. The company was formed by Blackstone during the Housing Bust in 2012 and later spun off to the public. Blackstone sold is last shares in 2019.
• American Homes 4 Rent (about 60,000 houses), a publicly traded REIT [AMH]. The company was founded during the Housing Bust in 2012, and was spun off via IPO in 2013. In 2016, it merged with American Residential Properties. At the time, AMH owned 39,000 houses, and American Residential owned 9,000. Combined, it became the largest landlord at the time.
• FirstKey Homes (about 50,000 houses), privately-held company.
• Blackstone got back into single-family rentals by acquiring other big landlords. In 2021, it acquired Home Partners of America with 17,000 rental houses. In January 2024, Blackstone announced it would acquire Tricon Residential, a publicly traded Canadian company [TCN], with about 38,000 houses in the US and multifamily apartments in Canada. When the Tricon deal closes, Blackstone will once again be one of the biggest single-family rental players. Blackstone is not acquiring individual houses.
  

These five companies combined own about 330,000 single-family rentals, or about 2.4% of all single-family rentals, and about 0.3% of the 95 million single-family houses in the US (occupied and unoccupied, attached and detached).