May 20, 2026
The House just overwhelmingly passed a bill to ban large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes. And the vote was overwhelmingly bipartisan: 396 to 13, with 21 representatives not voting. All of the no votes came from Republicans.
This is a big deal, of course, because of the lack of affordable housing in this country. Many have said that these big investors are a big part of the problem because they’re buying up all the single-family homes and turning them into rentals, leaving very little left — especially for first-time homebuyers who need a starter house.
Now, before I tell you exactly how this works, you should know this is not over. This bill has gone back and forth between the House and the Senate a few times, and now this version that was passed today — called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act — will go back to the Senate for another modification and vote. And it’s very possible these things can change again.
But for now, according to today’s version, the bill says, “No large institutional investor may purchase, or enter into a contract to directly or indirectly purchase, any single-family home.” The bill would prohibit these investors from scooping up these homes whether they purchase them normally or get them through mergers, foreclosure, construction acquisition, or bulk purchases.
Sounds great, right? Well, there are some exceptions.
First, this bill does not force these large institutional investors to sell the current single-family homes that they own. This bill allows them to keep those.
The bill also still allows these large investors to build, for example, a subdivision and sell those homes, or buy a rundown house, renovate it and flip it, or convert a property and market it for sale. It also allows these investors to build homes for the purpose of renting them. So generally, the bill would not allow these large investors to buy existing single-family homes simply to add them to a rental portfolio.
The bill does a lot of other things, including new funding for affordable housing construction, new federal government grants for states and local governments to plan new affordable housing developments, and establishes guidelines for zoning and land-use policies.
But here’s the thing — the House stripped out a key provision that the Senate put in its version of the bill. The Senate’s version included a provision that says if these large institutional investors build a single-family home with the intent to rent it, within seven years they have to sell that home as a single-family home to a person — not another investor. That was not included in the House version.
It’s also worth noting that this House version, like the Senate version, includes a temporary ban on the Federal Reserve issuing a central bank digital currency, or CBDC, until December 31, 2030. It also requires the Fed to get congressional approval before it can even issue a CBDC after 2030.
See how your House lawmaker voted here.
Read the bill text, section by section summary & 1 pager here.
