Trump says he wants to ban Wall Street from buying houses

President Donald Trump announced a plan to ban large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes, claiming it will help address the housing affordability crisis. He said he will urge Congress to codify the ban, while housing experts doubt the policy would significantly impact the market.

President Donald Trump said he would ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes in an effort to ease the affordability crisis that’s plaguing the housing market.

“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream,” Trump said in a Jan. 7 post on the social media site Truth Social. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it. People live in homes, not corporations.”

Institutional investors, such as Blackstone, have been reliably buying and renting out single-family homes since the 2008 financial crisis locked many Americans out of the mortgage market.

Many housing experts are skeptical that banning institutional homebuying would make a sizeable difference in the housing market overall, but Wall Street investors can be popular scapegoats. As previously reported by USA TODAY, limiting their participation in the market was a rare point of agreement between both candidates during the 2024 presidential election.

Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing at the nonpartisan Consumer Federation of America, also notes that big investors have an uneven impact in local areas around the country.

"While comprising a small fraction of homebuyers nationwide, institutional investors have turned some neighborhoods (think suburban Atlanta) into 'mortgage deserts' and limited homeownership opportunities," she said by email. "It's long overdue to limit private equity's incursion into housing."

In an email sent to USA TODAY, a Blackstone spokesperson said the company's ownership of U.S. single-family homes represents about 2% of its real estate assets under management and 0.5% of the overall firm. The company has also been a "net seller of homes over the last decade."

Implementing such a ban will likely prove challenging, if not outright impossible, advocates say.

Under the Biden administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development implemented many policies to encourage owner-occupants in the market, said Sarah Edelman, who held roles at the Federal Housing Administration during that time.

Among the most important were "First Look" requirements that established and lengthened the period during which owner-occupants, public entities and nonprofits had a chance to buy distressed properties and mortgages before they were available for investor purchase.

In the past year, HUD has rolled back many of those protections, said Edelman, who is now an executive vice president at the nonprofit National Community Stabilization Trust. "An administration that wants to prioritize owner-occupants could restore those protections," she told USA TODAY.

First-time homebuyers are suffering as housing has remained scarce and increasingly expensive. They made up a record-low share of all buyers in the most recent year, and the average age of a first-time buyer jumped to 40, according to an industry analysis.

Source; USA Today