Trump Blindsides Wall Street Allies With Crackdown on Housing Investors

Watching Blackstone getting kicked in the nuts makes my heart soar like a hawk!

Trump Blindsides Wall Street Allies With Crackdown on Housing Investors

Move after 2008 housing crash to buy and rent out single-family homes comes under fire

By Ryan Dezember, Miriam Gottfried and Josh Dawsey, WSJ

Jan. 9, 2026 7:01 pm ET

Blackstone and other firms were blindsided when President Trump said he planned to boot investors from the housing market.

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Blackstone Chief Executive Officer Stephen Schwarzman helped launch Wall Street into the business of buying and renting out single-family homes in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash.

This past week, his firm and others across the industry were blindsided when President Trump—himself a property mogul whom many in the sector consider an ally—said he plans to boot investors from the market.

Though they regained some ground later in the week, shares of the two big publicly traded single-family landlords, Invitation Homes and AMH, shed 6% and 4.3%, respectively, on Wednesday.

“People are scared and don’t want to touch these residential stocks given the political narrative,” said John Pawlowski, managing director at the real-estate research firm Green Street.

Shares of Blackstone were hit too. The firm financed the creation of Invitation Homes but has since sold all its stock in the company. It now owns a smaller rival, Tricon Residential. The 5.6% decline in Blackstone’s shares Wednesday cut the value of Schwarzman’s roughly 20% stake by more than $2.1 billion. Shares have recovered some since then.

A Blackstone spokesman said the firm’s ownership of U.S. single-family homes represents about 2% of its real-estate assets under management and 0.5% of the firm’s overall assets.

Trump’s top advisers have pushed the president to change his messaging on the economy to address voters’ concerns about the cost of living.

Aides to the president showed him polling last year that indicated the measure was popular among the different ways to take on affordability, White House officials said. It was particularly so with young people, the officials said

“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,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Wednesday. “People live in homes, not corporations.”

Trump is also pushing a plan to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds in an effort to control housing costs.

The president said he would unveil more details on housing when the world’s business elites gather later this month in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.

It couldn’t be determined what authority Trump would have to exclude certain buyers from the housing market, and if such a measure would have enough support in Congress. Any such effort would likely face court challenges from investors.

“Ensuring the American dream of homeownership is attainable for future generations is a top priority of the President, and his move to ban big institutional investors from buying up more homes clearly demonstrates his commitment,” said Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary.

Rental-home executives and investors said they had no idea the president’s edict was coming. They have grown accustomed to being a boogeyman for Americans frustrated by housing costs, however, and have had to fend off accusations that they dominate the market to the detriment of ordinary house hunters as well as attempts by state lawmakers to curb their businesses.

The firms that buy houses contend that investors with at least 1,000 houses collectively own less than 1% of U.S. single-family homes, giving them little sway over prices or rents. Critics have said that the megalandlords concentrate their holdings in the most-desirable suburban areas around the fastest-growing cities, renting to families that might have bought their homes had financiers not got them first.

Vice President JD Vance has in the past fanned the flames, lobbing condemnations—in at least one case appearing to confuse BlackRock, known for managing index funds, with Blackstone, the world’s largest real-estate investor and a major player in single-family rentals.

Vance has been a fierce proponent of the president, wading in on the issue over the objections of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that although the administration is still outlining plans for a ban, rental-home companies and investors won’t be forced to sell what they already own.

“It’s all prospective,” he said at the Economic Club of Minnesota. “Markets are made on the margin, and so we’re pushing out the marginal buyer.”

The administration wants to keep small mom-and-pop landlords in business but hasn’t decided how big of a landlord is too big, he said.

“Is it a dozen homes? Is it two dozen?” Bessent said. “What makes you an aggregator?”

Invitation Homes rents out about 86,000 houses. The number is more than 110,000 if those held in joint ventures and which it manages on behalf of other investors are counted.

The company, like rivals, emerged from the depths of the housing crash. It was the early 2010s, when high finance could no longer ignore how low home prices had fallen.

Single-family houses were the final frontier for institutional-property investors. Blackstone and others had conquered offices, apartments, malls. But single-family homes, spread out and each with their own maintenance issues, had been considered too unwieldy to manage en masse.

The 2008 housing crash, in which nearly eight million Americans lost homes to foreclosure, offered entry into the largest asset class in the world at a significant discount. Meanwhile, the advent of mobile computing enabled investors to orchestrate one of history’s great land grabs and efficiently manage the far-flung properties.

A who’s who of high finance caught foreclosure fever, dispatching buyers to courthouse steps with duffel bags of cashiers checks to buy repossessed homes.

Blackstone, whose chief executive, Schwarzman, has been a donor to Trump’s presidential campaigns, teamed up with Arizona entrepreneurs to create Invitation Homes. Starting with a three-bedroom tract home in a Phoenix suburb, the company went on a $10 billion home-buying spree. For a time, it was buying $150 million of foreclosures a week.

Donald Trump talking to Stephen Schwarzman, with Mike Johnson in the background.

Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman has supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. brendan mcdermid/Reuters

B. Wayne Hughes, a self-storage billionaire and Trump donor, built up American Homes 4 Rent, now known as AMH, with money from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests the state’s oil royalties. Hughes died in 2021.

Tom Barrack, whom Trump made ambassador to Turkey last year, repeated with houses what he did in an earlier bust when he accumulated commercial property on the cheap. Starwood Capital CEO Barry Sternlicht, a self-described friend of Trump, was a significant buyer as well. Barrack and Sternlicht merged their pools of rental homes in 2016 and sold the combined company to Invitation Homes about two years later.

When the flood of foreclosures subsided, the buyers took to the open market, training algorithms to find the most-desirable houses before sales agents could finish pounding “For Sale” signs into the front yards.

They prowled top school districts favored by parents and looked for neighborhoods near Starbucks coffee shops, which signal disposable income. As dispassionate buyers who paid cash and didn’t quibble over ugly paint or dingy carpet, they beat out regular buyers without having to outbid them.

More investors, including a lot of individuals, joined the frenzy during the pandemic and by 2021 more than 20% of the homes sold around cities like Houston, Phoenix and Miami were being bought by someone who would never move in. When prices exploded higher, they started building houses expressly to rent and buying builders’ unsold inventory.

In recent years, some of the biggest firms have been sellers, cashing in on record home prices.

The Blackstone spokesman said the firm has been a net seller of single-family houses in recent years. Invitation Homes said it has sold 4,000 more houses than it has bought on the open market since the end of 2022, while building thousands of new houses.

“While we’re a small part of the overall housing market in this country, we’re proud to have worked to be part of the solution—through strong partnerships with home builders and by offering affordable choices for those seeking a professionally managed, high-quality home,” an Invitation Homes spokeswoman said.

The big landlords have been hurt lately by declining home prices in some of their biggest markets, fewer people flocking to Sunbelt cities and Trump’s immigration crackdown, said Green Street’s Pawlowski.

He and other analysts told clients this past week that Trump’s proposed ban might not be a bad outcome for shareholders, should it prompt the companies to liquidate. The stock market is valuing Invitation Homes’ houses at about $280,000 a piece, for example, much less than the $400,000 that Green Street thinks they could fetch on the market.