By Joe Light
A law that would ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes to rent out is almost sure to move forward after leaders in the House of Representatives and Senate said they've reached a deal on the bill.
The so-called 21st Century Road to Housing Act is a bipartisan effort to increase home affordability. Among other provisions, the bill would make it easier to build and finance manufactured homes, reduce builder regulations and use grants to incentivize home development.
Most controversially, the bill would largely ban large institutional investors from buying existing single-family homes to rent out. That provision has been a longtime goal of progressives like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and gained a tailwind earlier this year when President Donald Trump said he supported a ban.
Before Tuesday, the Senate and House had passed their own versions of the bill with wide bipartisan support, but House and Senate leaders had sharp differences on some aspects of the bill. Among them: The bill the Senate passed would have forced investors in newly built rental homes to sell them within seven years. Investors and builders argued that provision could have effectively halted those homes from being built altogether. The new version of the bill doesn't include that requirement.
Trump's support of the ban in January hurt shares of institutional investors including Blackstone, Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent.
After the 2008 financial crisis, some institutional investors bought thousands of homes in foreclosure or short sales and turned them into rentals. Some groups said those investors unfairly competed with Americans who wanted to buy homes to live in, leading them to seek a ban on the investments. As home prices have rocketed in most parts of the country, that trend has largely faded, and many institutional investors now focus on building new communities of single-family rentals rather than buying existing homes.
The bill could pass both the Senate and House by the end of next week.
Passing the bill would also start to relieve a logjam of legislation that Congress is seeking to dispose of before its August recess and the November midterm elections. With the housing bill taken care of, lawmakers can focus more on a crypto regulatory bill that the digital assets industry has sought for years.
Write to Joe Light at joe.light@barrons.com
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 16, 2026 17:28 ET (21:28 GMT)
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