Corporate America hasn’t had a huge appetite for gobbling up Houston homes over the past few years.
A Kinder Institute analysis of Harris County property records shows the nation’s largest institutional investors have slightly increased the size of their single-family property portfolios since the early 2020s, as rising interest rates and home values have cooled a once-hot market.
The nine institutional investors owned an estimated 11,000 single-family properties in Harris County in 2024, representing 1% of homes in the area, with the heaviest concentration of homes located in the northern and western suburbs. Corporate entities typically rent out the homes and can later sell them for a profit.
An earlier Kinder Institute analysis of 2021 property records using similar research methods showed those companies held about 10,000 single-family properties at that time.
President Donald Trump earlier this month declared his intention to “ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes” in response to mounting voter frustration with the cost of living. Trump has not detailed how he would ban the practice, which likely would require action by Congress and even then could still face legal challenges.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also called in 2024 on state legislators to curtail corporate buyers’ share of the residential real estate market, though lawmakers didn’t make it a priority during last year’s legislative session.
Some politicians, voters and housing researchers have criticized institutional investors for scooping up single-family homes over the past 15 years, shrinking the supply of houses available to everyday buyers and limiting opportunities for people to build wealth. Large investors have targeted Sun Belt cities like Houston, where homes are bigger, newer and lower-priced than properties in major coastal hubs.
Investors have countered that they’re providing quality rental opportunities, while skeptics of a ban’s potential impact have noted that large corporate buyers own a tiny fraction of the residential real estate market.
To provide an updated picture of the local landscape, the Kinder Institute identified nine of the largest institutional investors operating in Harris County’s residential real estate market and compared their holdings in 2024 to an earlier snapshot of 2021. (Major developers that build new properties, such as D.R. Horton and Lennar, were omitted from the analysis.)
Institutional investors often purchase properties using LLCs and other entities with a different name, so properties were connected to the nine companies using a list of keywords compiled by Rutgers University assistant professor Eric Seymour. In all, 370 unique property owner names listed in Harris County records were linked to the nine firms.
The analysis likely misses some properties purchased by entities connected to the nine companies that aren’t on Seymour’s list. For the purposes of the analysis, companies that bought other large institutional investors after 2021 — such as Pretium’s acquisition of Front Yard Residential Corp. — were credited with owning the purchased company’s properties in 2021.
Who owns what
A mix of publicly traded companies, private outfits and subsidiaries of investment conglomerates own the biggest slice of residential real estate in Houston.
Pretium, a New York-based investment firm with more than $30 billion in real estate assets, has the largest footprint in Harris County. The company owned about 3,300 residential properties in 2024, up from about 2,100 in 2021, through its subsidiary Progress Residential. Part of the increase followed Pretium’s 2021 acquisition of Front Yard Residential Corp., which had nearly 700 Harris County homes at the time.
Cerberus Capital Management, a multi-industry investment company with about $70 billion in assets under management, expanded from about 1,650 to nearly 2,200 residential properties.
Publicly traded Invitation Homes added slightly to its housing stock, which rose from about 1,700 to 1,900, according to the analysis. (Financial documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show the company had 2,347 homes in the Greater Houston market at the end of 2024.)
Another publicly traded firm, American Homes 4 Rent, shrank its Harris County holdings by about 500 homes, the analysis showed. Tricon Residential, a subsidiary of Blackstone, the nation’s largest alternative investment management firm, picked up about 200 houses.
For each of the largest Harris County property owners, the company’s Houston-area holdings represent a small fraction of their nationwide residential real estate portfolio, which is often a strategic tactic used by corporations to diversify holdings and prevent local resistance to their presence in the market.
Who owns where
The region’s biggest institutional investors largely operated in middle-class, racially diverse neighborhoods on the county’s north side, the analysis shows.
The most popular areas included Cypress, Humble, Katy and Spring — suburban outposts where many homes were built in the 1990s and 2000s.
The largest concentration of homes were located in ZIP codes with median household incomes slightly above the regionwide median of $80,000, according to the analysis and U.S. Census data. Similarly, the median value of owner-occupied residential homes in those areas hovered around the regional median of $275,000.
Black and Hispanic residents accounted for roughly two-thirds of residents in the most popular ZIP codes for large institutional investors. Critics of institutional investors have argued that corporate buying disproportionately hurts the ability of Black and Hispanic residents to accumulate wealth through homeownership.
Investors had little interest in middle-class neighborhoods on the east side of the city of Houston, where the median age of residential structures is about 75 years old. They also avoided higher-income areas on the city’s west side.
