The Senate voted 89 to 10 on Thursday to pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan bill that prohibits any investor owning 350 or more single-family homes from purchasing additional ones and that imposes penalties of $1 million or three times the purchase price, whichever is greater, on violations. The bill now heads to a conference committee with the House, which passed its own version in February by 390 to 9. The lead authors of the Senate bill were Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, an unusual co-sponsorship that reflects the breadth of the bipartisan coalition that has formed around restricting institutional investment in single-family housing.

President Trump signed an executive order earlier this year directing federal agencies to restrict institutional purchases of single-family homes and described the policy in remarks at the signing as a recognition that "homes are for people, not corporations." The administration has indicated it will sign whatever bill emerges from the conference committee provided that the conference text retains the central institutional-investor restriction.

The Growth of Institutional Ownership

Before 2011, no single investor owned more than 1,000 single-family homes in the United States, according to data compiled by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. The six largest institutional landlords collectively now own approximately 430,000 single-family homes, according to filings reviewed by the Senate Banking Committee. Progress Residential, the largest, owns roughly 100,000. Invitation Homes owns approximately 97,000. Blackstone, through its Tricon Residential subsidiary, owns approximately 62,000. American Homes 4 Rent owns approximately 60,000.

The institutional portfolios were assembled in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, when private equity firms purchased large blocks of foreclosed homes from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Senate Banking Committee staff report accompanying the bill describes those purchases as having been made "at bulk discounts under federal auction terms" and identifies the foreclosure pipeline of the 2008 to 2012 period as the foundational source of the inventory now held by institutional landlords.

Nationally, institutional investors own approximately 6 percent of single-family rentals and less than 1 percent of all single-family homes, according to figures cited by the National Association of Realtors. The national figures, however, mask substantial regional concentration. In the Atlanta metropolitan area, institutional ownership of the single-family rental market is approximately 25 percent. In Jacksonville, the figure is approximately 21 percent. In Charlotte, it is approximately 18 percent. In several suburban zip codes outside Atlanta, institutional ownership exceeds 50 percent of actively listed rental properties, according to data compiled by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

The Case Made by Sponsors

Senator Scott, in remarks on the Senate floor before the vote, framed the bill as a measure to restore competitive access to the starter-home market for individual buyers. "When a young family in South Carolina makes an offer on a $250,000 home and is outbid by an algorithmic cash offer from a Wall Street fund, the family does not get the home and the fund does," Scott said. "The market is not working as it should when the buyers competing for the same property are not playing by the same rules."

Senator Warren cited Federal Reserve survey data showing that the share of renters who assigned a high probability to their own future homeownership had fallen from 53 percent in 2019 to 34 percent in 2025. "The structural reason is not that families have become less responsible," Warren said in floor remarks. "The structural reason is that the buyers competing against them have changed."

The Senate Banking Committee staff report cites enforcement actions against major institutional landlords as part of the policy rationale for the legislation. The Federal Trade Commission settled with Invitation Homes in September 2024 over allegations of undisclosed junk fees, uninspected homes, and improperly withheld security deposits, with the company agreeing to pay $48 million. Progress Residential is the subject of an active lawsuit by the Minnesota Attorney General alleging deceptive and fraudulent business practices. Congressional investigators found that Progress filed more evictions than any other single-family rental company during the 2020 and 2021 pandemic-era eviction moratoria.

The Case Made by Opponents

The ten senators who voted against the bill, all Republicans, raised a combination of free-market and federalism objections. Senator Mike Lee of Utah argued in floor remarks that the 350-home threshold was an arbitrary number that would in practice "freeze the market structure of single-family rentals at its current shape" without addressing the underlying supply constraints that the senator described as the actual driver of housing unaffordability. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky argued that the bill would "displace local zoning judgments with a federal preference for one form of ownership over another."

The National Rental Home Council, the principal trade association for institutional single-family landlords, issued a statement following the vote that described the bill as "a measure that addresses a symptom rather than a cause" and that argued the 6 percent national figure for institutional ownership was inconsistent with the legislative premise that institutional investment was the primary driver of homeownership decline. The council further argued that single-family rental supply provides housing options for households not in a position to purchase, and that the bill's restrictions would reduce supply at the lower end of the rental market.

What the Bill Contains

The institutional-investor restriction is the bill's central provision, but the legislation also includes a series of measures aimed at supply expansion. The bill eliminates the "permanent chassis" requirement for manufactured homes, a regulatory provision that the Department of Housing and Urban Development has estimated added between $5,000 and $10,000 to the cost of each manufactured unit. It updates the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, last revised more than 30 years ago. It raises the public welfare investment cap for banks from 15 to 20 percent of capital. It funds grants for the conversion of abandoned commercial buildings to residential use. It includes incentives for new construction in markets designated by HUD as high-cost.

The bill also prohibits the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency before December 31, 2030, an unrelated provision that has been a Republican legislative priority and that was added to the package as part of the negotiation that produced the final Senate text. Local zoning authority is preserved throughout.

Conference and Implementation

The conference committee with the House is expected to convene next month. The two chamber versions differ on several details, including the geographic concentration treatment, the disposal timeline for properties currently held above the threshold, and the carve-outs for certain government-sponsored entity holdings. The 350-home threshold itself is unchanged between the two versions.

Several House Republicans have raised objections to the Senate bill's enforcement mechanics, particularly the provision allowing private rights of action by displaced bidders, and conference negotiators on the House side have indicated they will press to narrow that provision. The administration has not publicly stated a position on the enforcement provisions and has signaled, through HUD Secretary Scott Turner, that the conference text will be acceptable to the White House provided that the institutional-purchase restriction itself remains intact.

The 350-home threshold has been criticized from both directions. Senator Warren, in committee markup, indicated that she had pressed for a lower threshold of 100 homes and would continue to do so in conference. The National Rental Home Council has argued that the threshold draws the line at a point that excludes most regional landlords while capturing the largest national portfolios. Whether the conference text moves the threshold in either direction will be one of the substantive questions of the conference negotiation, and the answer will affect the operational reach of the legislation in ways that the headline figure does not capture.