Executive Summary
To get a sense for institutional investor activity in 2023, we looked at nationwide single-family home transactions. Our analysis was limited to resale properties and does not include new construction, meaning that build to rent activity is excluded.
Institutions running a variety of strategies made the top ten list, including: public SFR REITs, private SFR funds, iBuyers, and lease-to-own.
In 2023, the top ten largest institutional buyers combined for 1,500 to 3,500 purchases a month, with a peak month in July driven by a portfolio acquisition completed by Invitation Homes.
At the end of the article, transaction-level details are available for purchases from the top ten institutional investors, including purchase date, price, property address, and property characteristics.
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Introduction
After a large increase in acquisitions during 2021, institutions significantly reduced purchase activity in 2023. While 5,000+ acquisitions for the year was the threshold to make it into the top ten largest SFR purchasers in 2021, almost an order of magnitude less would be enough in 2023. Zillow, the second largest institutional purchaser of homes in 2021, has exited the property buying space.
Some funds remained active, however, buying up to a few dozen to a few hundred properties per month. Private SFR funds like Amherst and Pretium made the top ten, along with public SFR funds Invitation Homes and recently acquired Tricon, all of which have recently been profiled on the SFR Analytics blog.
Data Overview
At SFR Analytics, we leverage nationwide deed and assessor data to track the single family home investing market. To generate this analysis, we’ve:
Identified and reconciled the entities that institutions have purchased homes under.
Tagged and filtered transaction types to remove “entity shuffling” where a property is moved between different LLCs controlled by the same entity.
Analysis & Results
Monthly Purchase Volume
Monthly combined acquisition totals for the top ten institutions ranged from 1,500 to 3,500. One large contributing factor for the peak month of July 2023 was a portfolio acquisition by Invitation Homes.
Commentary
Amherst, Invitation Homes, Pretium, and Tricon are all large SFR operators, representing four of the five largest SFR funds (First Key being the only of the top five not to be included). As a group, their purchase volume is down significantly since 2021-2022.
Open House is publicly traded on the Japanese stock exchange and has a strong presence in the Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) and Atlanta markets. Open House helps Japanese investors buy properties in the US, then handles the full renovation and property management process.
Opendoor and Offerpad are both iBuyers, and while their volumes are down significantly from 2021, they still have a meaningful market presence and rank among the top ten purchasers of single family homes.
New Western is unique amongst names on the list in that the company effectively operates as a marketplace for real estate investors. New Western gets properties under contract from off-market sources as well as from properties listed on the MLS, then sells the contract to its network of investors. New Western doesn’t take ownership of the home, instead double closing or assigning the contract to an investor.
The remaining uncategorized name is Choctaw American Insurance, which runs a lease-to-own program for people who can’t qualify for traditional mortgages. The company is completing a surprising number of transactions, with over 600 purchases in 2023 and over a dozen metro areas having more than ten acquisitions.
Note: we’ve removed a couple of companies that aren’t investors or taking exposure to the underlying assets (such as relocation companies or companies that offer sell-before-you-buy type programs).
Purchases by Metro
In 2023, Dallas was the metro with the most properties purchase by the top ten institutions, with almost 3,000 homes bought. Atlanta was a distant second at just over 1,900, followed by Houston at 1,575 and Phoenix at 1,383.
Acquisition Count by Top Buyers
As a reminder, these figures only count resale properties that are coded as single family residences by the county assessor where the property is based. There is significant entity detection and matching work involved; while we believe these numbers are mostly accurate, there may be some discrepancies vs actual totals.
One company that may be more meaningfully undercounted is New Western. New Western uses different LLCs for each metro area and doesn’t follow a standardized approach, which makes aggregation more difficult. Additionally, New Western doesn’t always double close its transactions; occasionally, New Western will instead assign contracts which doesn’t show up in county records.
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Transaction-Level Details
While aggregate statistics tell part of the story, transaction-level details provide more nuanced information about the activity of institutional buyers. Below, we’ve included all transactions from institutional buyers in 2023, including details like property address and characteristics (bed, bath, square feet, etc).
Note: the remainder of this article is available to paid subscribers, sign up below for access. Paid subscribers get full access to weekly data-rich articles about the SFR market and select additional articles only available to paid subscribers.
