Trump signs order to ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes - What this means

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday seeking to advance his effort to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, before a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos where he’s expected to lay out his efforts to address affordability concerns.

The executive order details a multi-part process designed to limit institutional home purchases, though stops short of immediately implementing new rules or regulations that would tie the hands of companies with significant housing portfolios.

According to the order, the Treasury Department has a month to develop definitions of “large institutional investors” and “single-family homes.” Within 60 days, agencies across the federal government will look at ways to prohibit “insuring, guaranteeing, securitizing, or facilitating the acquisition” of those homes by entities considered large in scale.

“Hardworking young families cannot effectively compete for starter homes with Wall Street firms and their vast resources,” Trump said in the order. “Neighborhoods and communities once controlled by middle-class American families are now run by faraway corporate interests. People live in homes, not corporations.”

With Trump’s order, his administration will also look to set policies promoting sales to individual owner-occupants, and have the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission conduct antitrust reviews of substantial acquisitions by institutional investors across housing markets. The White House also plans to prepare proposed legislation to provide additional tools.

The president’s announcement earlier this month that he planned to unveil the executive order sent the S&P 1500 Homebuilding Index tumbling with shares of Blackstone Inc., a major investor with a growing housing portfolio, as well as homebuilders and investors including Toll Brothers Inc., Invitation Homes Inc., KB Home and PulteGroup Inc. all down.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hinted earlier Tuesday that the administration’s efforts would likely only target the largest real estate investors in an interview with Fox Business in Davos.

“We are going to give guidance at some point to see what is a mom and pop is,” Bessent said. “Someone, maybe your parents for their retirement, have bought 5, 10, 12 homes.”

“So we don’t want to push the mom and pops out, we just want to push everybody else out,” he continued.

The remark drew criticism from Democrats, with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office suggesting in a social media post the administration was “out of touch” since many Americans were hoping to simply buy a single house to live in.

Democrats have seized on the broad public anxiety over high costs and a slowdown in wage growth in their campaign to retake control of Congress. Trump initially dismissed talk of affordability as a Democratic hoax intended to undermine support for his economic policies, but the White House has escalated its effort to convince voters they are taking action.

Housing, in particular, plays a prominent role in that bid, comprising the largest monthly expense for most Americans. Home prices spiked and mortgage rates doubled in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump’s proposals to help ease access to the housing market for more Americans and other parts of his affordability push, however, have rattled key stakeholders, including home builders, Wall Street banks and institutional homebuyers.

A combination of high home prices – driven by a supply shortage years in the making, after construction cratered following the subprime crisis – and high rates has kept both buyers and sellers on the sidelines, stalling sales and leading builders to take a more cautious approach. Younger people are struggling to claw their way into homeownership. The median age of first-time home-buyers has risen to a record of 40 years old, the National Association of Realtors reported in November.

The National Rental Home Council, a trade association, said in a statement on Tuesday night that “in recent weeks, independent experts and news outlets have made one thing clear: professional single-family rental providers own far less than 1% of homes and are not the cause of America’s housing shortage.”

The administration has floated a number of different proposals to address housing in recent months, including ideas such as a 50-year mortgage loan term that fell flat with the housing industry as experts quickly pointed out that borrowers would ultimately pay more in interest and build equity in their homes more slowly. Trump officials later said they were considering portable mortgages, an idea that would be challenging to implement.

The White House is also examining whether it can enable penalty-free withdrawals from retirement savings accounts to assist homebuyers with down payments.