Day: April 23, 2026

While real estate analysts typically define large institutional landlords as those who own at least 1,000 properties, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act aims to place purchasing restrictions on landlords with at least 350 properties. But even with the lowered threshold, only about 140 institutional investors in the U.S. meet the criteria, accounting for 0.59 percent of single-family homes. To spot large landlords’ effect on housing, squint and zoom in: Their ownership of single-family homes tends to be concentrated in certain regions. The markets where landlords with 350 or more properties own at least 3 percent of single-family homes are all in the Sun Belt. In Atlanta, such investors own about 4 percent of all single-family homes — the highest rate in the country. A tighter focus on the four Atlanta ZIP codes with the most large-scale owners reveals that they own 12 percent or more of the single-family homes.