This city is challenging big landlords without waiting on Trump

By Michael Sasso and Kriston Capps | Bloomberg

President Donald Trump wants to ban big investors from buying more houses. Some local governments are already on the case – and Atlanta is ground zero.

The Atlanta area has the highest share of corporate-owned single-family rentals in the US, and that’s spooked many locals. Residents fume about the impact on prices. Politicians have tried to impose restrictions, with mixed success — and say they’re glad to have Trump on their side, even though he has yet to flesh out the executive order signed last month.

The urge to tame big corporate landlords is bubbling over among locals in woodsy Paulding County, Georgia, an Atlanta exurb where church steeples and old graveyards punctuate the rolling hills, and an 18-foot fiberglass Wonder Woman waves at drivers.

“We want to run our county in a proper way,” said Tim Estes. He’s chair of the Paulding County Commission, which enforces special requirements for rental-home subdivisions. “We don’t want a corporation with no skin in the game to come in and destroy our community and our way of living.”

He’s railing against a phenomenon that gained some steam after the 2008 crash and took off again post-pandemic, and is strongest in the US Sun Belt. Around Atlanta, institutional buyers like Blackstone Inc., Progress Residential and Amherst Holdings own more than 30% of single-family rentals.

Big investors are skeptical of Trump’s proposal, which would stop them from buying additional single-family homes as part of an effort to lower housing costs. Blocking investors from putting more capital into rental homes “is not going to make affordability any better,” Amherst Chief Executive Officer Sean Dobson  told Bloomberg Television.  “The math is not there. Our market share isn’t large enough to move home prices.”

Nationwide, institutional investors such as Dobson may have a point. The top 24 such owners hold only about 3% of the total, according to real estate data provider SFR Analytics. However, investor concentration can be far greater in specific markets, rising to around half in some ZIP codes.

Generally, it comes in two flavors: brand-new “build-to-rent” subdivisions entirely comprised of rental homes, and the more widespread cases where investors snapped up existing homes to rent them out. The same investment firms often own both types. Supporters argue build-to-rent is more palatable, since newbuilds add to the housing stock, and those projects get a carve-out in Trump’s executive order.

In Paulding County, about an hour northwest of Atlanta, some locals blame large corporate landlords for pushing up home prices and rents and driving away people of modest means.

The median listing price for a home here is up some 50% since early 2020 to about $390,000, according to Realtor.com, exceeding the statewide 33% increase. And, the county’s quickly losing its folksy character, as boxy self-storage facilities and rental-home subdivisions intrude on the patchwork of brick ranch-style homes, horse paddocks and long wooded driveways.

“There’s not a single day of the week that I don’t get a call or a text, and it’s from a desperate social worker who’s been evicted from a home because the rental price just kept getting higher,” said Patti Long, who founded a local charity for the homeless.

In Hiram, one of Paulding’s municipalities, city councilwoman Melissa Bayardelle can see both upsides and downsides in the spread of investor-owned rentals.

They’re “a great thing for tax collection,” said Bayardelle, who’s also a real estate agent. “But as a constituent, living in a subdivision, when you don’t know your neighbors and neighbors are constantly changing throughout the year… That neighborhood feel? You lose that.”

Paulding County leaders initially called a 180-day moratorium on new build-to-rent subdivisions in 2021. Later, exceptions were granted to projects that meet certain conditions, like having a staffed, on-site manager.

Overall, permanent bans on investor-owned rentals appear to be few and far between, according to researchers. Among those who’ve tried is Clayton County, a majority African-American county south of Atlanta.

Some communities have tried a quota-based approach. North of Atlanta, the affluent town of Alpharetta aims to have at least 68% of housing owner-occupied. The policy predates the pandemic-era housing boom, said Michael Woodman, a planning and development official there.

Fishers, Indiana – another wealthy community — last month capped rental homes at 10% of any neighborhood. Things got so bad that would-be homebuyers were “begging” owners to sell to them instead of to investors, Mayor Scott Fadness said.

At state or national level, there’s been more talk than action. Democratic US Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has pushed for legislation to strip tax benefits for big home investors, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for a crackdown in his state after Trump’s announcement. At least 22 states considered bills limiting institutional owners in the 2025-2026 legislative session, though most stalled or were withdrawn, according to the American Enterprise Institute.

In Georgia, 19 Republican state senators last week introduced a bill to prevent businesses from buying an interest in more than 500 single-family residences. Any business already exceeding 500 homes would be blocked from buying more, but would not have to divest any homes.

Meantime, Georgia Rep. Derrick McCollum, also a Republican, is urging several measures, including a state constitutional amendment that would impose steeper property taxes on owners with more than 500 single-family homes, an idea with some backing from Democrats too.

McCollum is emboldened by the White House taking up the issue. “Now I’ve got President Trump behind me,” he said. “It feels like I’m vindicated.”

A counter-argument comes from Richard Ross, who develops build-to-rent subdivisions at Atlanta-based Quinn Residences. He says single-family rentals give people who can’t afford to get mortgages a chance to live in a house. Still, asked if the industry would accept some limits, Ross said: “They’re going to have to.”

The industry’s chief trade group, the National Rental Home Council, did not respond to Bloomberg inquiries.

Economist studies of the impact on home prices and ownership have reached mixed conclusions.

Joshua Coven of Baruch College in New York found that big investors actually lowered rents overall in markets they entered, because of all the new supply. They hurt homeownership, to be sure, but it wasn’t a one-to-one ratio: the number of homes available for purchase by consumers fell by 0.22 houses for each one purchased by an investor.

A 2023 study by Brian An of the Georgia Institute of Technology looked at the Atlanta area specifically, finding that heavy investor purchases led to the loss of $4.9 billion in home equity – more than two-thirds of it among Black households.

Back in Paulding County, real estate agent Shannon Banks remembers the first customers she helped buy a home, in the summer of 2024. It took six months to find something, because the first three houses they put offers on wound up selling to investors.

Her clients were offering more money, but sellers couldn’t resist the instant cash on offer from corporate bidders, Banks said. It left her convinced investors are reducing the supply for everyone else.

“It’s like this crazy push and pull that does not end,” she said.

Jade Khatib at Bloomberg contributed to this report.