On the streets of Atlanta, corporate landlords have turned modest single-family rental houses into revenue streams. Families looking to buy find themselves competing against commercial behemoths, who snap up properties with all-cash offers and keep home ownership just out of reach.
Nationally, the “Wall Street landlord” has become a ready-made villain. President Trump signed an executive order in January targeting institutional investors in single-family housing, and the Senate followed by passing the bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act earlier this month, framing corporate owners as a main driver of the affordability crisis.
But housing experts say national efforts to restrict investor ownership are unlikely to fix the problem. While institutional investors own just a sliver of the total U.S. single-family rental market, they have a local monopoly in Atlanta. State legislation makes it easy for landlords to hold these homes and difficult for individuals to take back control, keeping families priced out of the market.
Defenders of institutional investors often point to one headline number. Nationally, corporations only control about 3% of the single-family rental market. By that logic, they could not possibly be driving a nationwide housing squeeze.
But some economists argue that focusing on nationwide statistics misses the point. Institutional investors work at a local level, and in cities like Atlanta, where investor ownership is concentrated, investors specifically target single-family rentals while pricing out families from ownership.
“The housing market is not a national thing,” said Taylor Shelton, a Georgia State University researcher whose work helped lead Senator Jon Ossoff to investigate corporate ownership of single-family homes. “The appropriate scale of analysis for understanding the impact of these corporate landlords is certainly not the country, and it’s honestly probably not even at the scale of the metro area.”
Shelton’s research shows that about a third of metro Atlanta single-family rentals are corporate-owned, jumping to 82% in Paulding County, on the edge of the metro area. Those firms also control about 10% of the county’s total rental market.
Institutional ownership of the single-family rental market is highly concentrated, dominating some suburbs and blocking families from buying homes and building equity. In a city where housing affordability ranks as the top concern for residents, corporate power in single-family housing keeps first-time buyers renting, while poor housing supply and tenant protections further complicate the problem.
“It’s all just coming down to the bureaucracy of the corporate owner to enable them to make the most money that they can,” said Missy Derr, an Atlanta realtor who primarily works with first-time buyers. She talked about one client, who was recently divorced and living on disability, looking to purchase a $150,000 house.
“$150,000 in metro Atlanta is an insanely difficult price point,” she said. “For the most part, those homes are not going to be inhabitable. They are not going to be safe.” However, Derr worked to find the client a home she would be comfortable selling, and that he fell in love with. Then, corporate investors came in with cash offers, taking her client out of the running and forcing him back into renting.
Derr said if her client decided to restart the homebuying process, even a year later, he “will still be up against investors that will probably knock him out.”
Such investors didn’t rise up overnight; they were born in Atlanta out of the 2008 financial crisis. When foreclosures spiked across the city, banks, Fannie Mae, and small local lenders were suddenly holding thousands of vacant homes. Federal officials and local leaders worried about entire blocks of boarded‑up houses and falling prices, so national policy effectively invited wealthy investors in to purchase the backlog and keep properties listed as rentals, at least for a few years.
Atlanta’s demographics made that invitation especially attractive. Building has not kept up with the city’s population, and the Great Recession left high‑income households with damaged credit records who no longer qualified for mortgages under tighter post- Dodd Frank standards.
Over the last decade, as foreclosure deals died down and interest rates rose, many large firms shifted toward build‑to‑rent models, which add to housing supply and absorb some demand, but don’t allow a clear path to ownership. “Their reputations, unfortunately, precede themselves,” Derr said. “So people just rent from them anyway because they essentially don’t have another option.”
If the 2008 recession partly explains why investors came, Georgia’s legal landscape helps explain why they stayed. Shelton said that “until 15 years ago, no company in the United States owned 1,000 single-family homes at one time. There are now 13 companies just in the state.”
He traced that not just to cheap, distressed housing and population growth, but to a lack of tenant protections. “There is no enforcement mechanism to force landlords to provide a habitable premise to their tenants,” said Shelton. “Eviction is fast, cheap, and easy here in the state of Georgia.”
Chris Denson, director of policy and research at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, is skeptical that Atlanta institutional investors are a major issue. He points instead to how local land-use rules keep construction expensive. “Georgia was ground zero in many ways for a lot of aesthetic design standards, so regulations that don’t have anything to do with the structural integrity of a home,” he said, adding that the state’s strong “home rule” laws allow local governments to mandate requirements, like using brick instead of cheaper vinyl siding in building, thus inflating costs.
Local housing experts are unconvinced that federal legislation like the ROAD to Housing Act, which is expected to become law later this year after negotiations with the House of Representatives, will do much to rein in investors. Singer said that without caps tied to local market share and disclosure rules that show how much corporations actually own, large landlords can still dominate cities while staying under national thresholds.
Georgia lawmakers are taking matters into their own hands. Legislators are creating a committee to study the impact of corporations on local housing markets and have introduced state bills to combat mega investors. Only one is still under consideration. It would ban corporations from purchasing over 500 single-family homes in the state. The deadline for the law’s approval is April 2.
For now, people like Derr’s clients, who look to buy but are beaten by corporate power, are stuck renting from mega landlords, putting money into homes they’ll never own.