https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/henry-county/3-companies-ow...
|“I’d say at least 60 percent of the homes around here are owned by corporations,” Clark said.
In the parts of the country I lived in, I've never seen big corporations own single-family rentals en masse. They usually go for apartment complexes, which are far more profitable if you have the capital to buy / build one. Commercial real estate too.
If you click around your neighborhood, a lot of single-family homes are owned by living trusts and "Bob & Kate" LLCs, but that doesn't mean there's any hedge fund money involved.
I just sold a house to a big corporation that owns about 12,000 homes. There's a whole industry for enabling these buys, opendoor, offerpad, etc... It's usually a wash selling your home as is to a wholesale deal vs. prepping your home and selling it, the difference being done about 60-90 days faster than via retail.
The company I sold to already owned four houses on my street. It's crazy.
If you do have a lot of capital ($100M+), you don't, because you can spend that money to build or buy an apartment complex that gives you something like 5x as many tenants per dollar spent. And is cheaper to maintain in the long haul.
Looking at Google, I see this press release for a 2024 study says that "3 companies own nearly 19,000 metro Atlanta homes" across 190 LLC shell companies: https://news.gsu.edu/2024/02/26/researchers-find-three-compa... (1). But even so, that 19,000 represented 11% of the single-family rental market in the Atlanta metro area, meaning that even if it's 38,000 then we're talking 1 in 5 of the rental homes available in Atlanta, which the article says has many more large investor owned homes than anywhere else in the US- an expert is quoted as saying that it has more than the next 2-3 cities combined for large investors. If that 38,000 is correct (and I only have your quote for that number) then more than 10% of all large investor-owned homes across the country are in the Atlanta metro area, since the Reuters article that this gives large investors (more than 1k homes) a total of 345k rental single-family homes across the US as of 2Q 2025. A 2022 GAO study found that institutional investors owned about 3% of all rental single-family homes across the US.
"Rich Dad" style investors simply own the vast majority of rental single-family homes across the US. According to the bar chart in the Reuters article, investors who own 1-5 single family houses available for rent (the classic dentist who went to a "Make Money in Real Estate" seminar) own 87% of the national market. Looking at the GSU press release, they claim Atlanta is an unusually attractive market for large investors- they particularly call out the lack of tenant protections- and that means that it has concentrated the activity, and it is still not particularly large a part of the market. Enough to dominate some neighborhoods of Atlanta, probably. But the solution is not some nationwide ban by executive order that can't possibly be constitutional, but for Georgia to get better tenant protections so that institutional investors aren't as attracted to the market.
1: I'm going to presume that the 38,000 is from later work finding more shell companies. I also can't read the underlying research article because I am unwilling to pay absurd journal fees.
The actual data provided was:
> For example, corporate landlords own more than 12,000 homes in Paulding and Henry County, accounting for 11.2% and 9.9% of all single-family homes in the counties.
