A New Housing Marketplace That’s Keeping Homes Unaffordable
Homebuilding giant Lennar has a large stockpile of houses it can’t sell at current asking prices. Instead of lowering home prices for the public, the company has launched an e-marketplace catering to wealthy investors and corporate landlords.
Lennar’s new housing marketplace comes at a time when stockpiles of newly built homes have reached a fifteen-year high, with the number of homes for sale far surpassing the number of buyers. (Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
Lennar, the nation’s second-largest homebuilder, has built more homes than it’s capable of selling at the current asking prices. But instead of lowering home prices for the public, the company has launched an online marketplace available exclusively to deep-pocketed investors and corporate landlords to offload its housing stockpile.
The new platform offers search tools and sweetheart deals targeting C-suite customers like Blackstone and Greystar, the largest corporate landlords in the country, as well as smaller landlords. Real estate experts say Lennar is doing this to juice home sales and steer business toward its lucrative in-house mortgage lender — at the expense of consumers, who are being boxed out of homeownership and forced to pay ever-higher home and rental costs.
These all-in-one suites of services have become common as increasingly popular online real estate behemoths like Zillow and Rocket Mortgage have vertically integrated the homebuying process. These companies’ online platforms advertise listings and then funnel buyers toward their in-house mortgage lenders to maximize profits — a type of “kickback scheme” that generates profits at the homebuyers’ expense, according to experts and federal regulators.
Now Lennar, too, is getting in on the action with its online investor marketplace, one designed specifically for those looking to generate income from these properties. The search engine offers data analytics tailored to landlords, such as estimated returns for renting out the homes. The fine print in the new Lennar investor portal directs investors to use Lennar’s own mortgage lender to qualify for limited-time offers, instead of shopping around for other lending options.
Lennar’s new housing marketplace comes at a time when stockpiles of newly built homes have reached a fifteen-year high, with the number of homes for sale far surpassing the number of buyers. Typically, these developments would lead to lower prices for ordinary homebuyers. Instead, Lennar is moving to sell its housing supply to investors for “an optimized return on investment,” according to its website.
“From rental comps to school scores, our platform gives you the full picture — plus real-time underwriting tools that provide projected returns, expenses, and neighborhood insights to guide your investment decisions,” Lennar states.
Critics warn that such corporate consolidation of services carries significant risks for consumers.
“The homebuying industry is experiencing a trend toward vertical integration that deserves antitrust scrutiny,” wrote a group of Democratic lawmakers in a June letter to the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission calling for the agencies to block a series of real estate mergers.
These “one-stop shops” allegedly include kickback schemes so widespread that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the federal agency overseeing consumer finance laws — sued Rocket Homes and Zillow over these practices. Both lawsuits were blocked under Donald Trump’s current and previous administrations, leaving room for companies like Lennar to adopt similar self-dealing arrangements.
An Investor Homebuying Surge
Lennar’s new marketplace portal has the potential to hand over an even greater share of the nation’s housing market to investors, who already own about fourteen million homes nationwide. Of all homes sold in the first three months of 2025, nearly 27 percent were purchased by investors, up nearly 10 percent from 2020 to 2023.
These investors include massive private equity firms like Blackstone, which owns roughly 63,000 homes around the country, plus another 274,000 rental units through its housing trust, Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust. Other market players include corporate operations like Greystar, the largest landlord in the country, and small investors who own fewer than a hundred homes. Real estate investors have come under criticism from tenant advocates for purchasing homes and converting them into high-cost, low-quality rentals
In California, the most expensive housing market in the country, investors own one in five homes, and research has shown that investor-owned properties have higher rents and eviction rates and shoddier maintenance upkeep.
As investors buy up the growing home stockpile, homebuilders have little incentive to lower prices and make housing more affordable to homebuyers. Fewer young Americans than ever are homeowners, and the average American is now spending more than 30 percent of their paycheck on rent, a record high.
A 2023 study by researchers at Georgia Tech found that institutional investors buying up homes in the Atlanta area, one of the hot spots for corporate-landlord buy-ups, “effectively [cut] Black families out of home ownership. Collectively, Black people lost more than $4 billion in home equity over a ten-year period because of investors,” according to the study.
Blackstone claims that institutional investors are not to blame for higher home prices. Instead, they attribute the dynamic to basic economic supply and demand.
“Housing prices are high due to a significant supply and demand imbalance that has persisted for over a decade,” Blackstone wrote in a March blog post. “While the US population has nearly doubled since 1960, single-family housing starts are roughly the same.”
The Trump administration claimed that the One Big Beautiful Bill aimed to make housing more affordable. But in reality, the bill included tax breaks for firm-level investors, not single-unit homebuyers, according to the nonprofit Center for Economic and Policy Research, and failed to lock in renter protections.
“[The law] is structured more as a tax break for investors than as a solution to the rental affordability crisis,” the center wrote. “Without strong tenant protections or deeper affordability requirements, the program risks reinforcing existing inequities rather than easing them.”
How Lennar Cornered Investors
Along with using its new investor platform to offload swathes of its housing stock at a profit, Lennar is also aiming to earn interest from financing those home purchases through its in-house mortgage lender.
The purchase agreements on Lennar’s investor marketplace offer “7/6” adjustable-rate mortgages, which come with a lower fixed-interest rate for the first seven years, then transition to a higher adjustable rate. Such mortgages are typically selected by buyers who plan to sell or flip properties in the first few years.
Lennar’s mortgage operation offers a rate just below 5 percent for the first seven years of ownership, which is comparatively lower than the average 7/6 rates offered by other lenders.
“We haven’t seen an [adjustable-rate mortgage] like that since before yield curves got inverted and interest rates went up [around 2022],” said Gordon Miller, president of the North Carolina–based mortgage brokerage, Miller Lending.
The standard thirty-year mortgage rate often selected by single-unit homebuyers is currently 6.6 percent, according to Investopedia.
As listed in its agreements, Lennar’s offer “requires financing through the seller’s affiliate Lennar Mortgage, LLC.” The offer only stands if the purchase is made and the deal is closed within ten days.
Critics see such tactics as Lennar trying to quickly squeeze as much money as it can from excess housing inventory.
“[It says] we’re moving a lot of [speculative] inventory and to lure you in we’re offering discounted rates,” said Miller. “It says they’re stuck . . . that sounds like a business trying to survive.”
D.R. Horton, Lennar’s closest competitor in the homebuilding market, also operates an in-house mortgage lender. In its home listing advertisements and promotions, D.R. Horton lists similar offers that require homebuyers to use its own mortgage lender, similar to Lennar’s terms on its investor marketplace.
While Lennar is targeting corporate investors with its new marketplace portal, it’s also using its homebuilding empire, mortgage-lending arm, and market dominance to drive out small and medium-sized homebuilders. As one building industry news outlet put it, D.R. Horton’s and Lennar’s “dominance creates a vortex of price competition, supply chain control, and operational efficiency that smaller builders struggle to match.”
“This model lets them use their financial advantage to create artificial affordability for buyers while raising the price of homes, which makes it very difficult for small builders to compete, and over time results in actual home prices going up,” Basel Musharbash, an antitrust and trade regulation lawyer, previously told the Lever.
Lennar already controls a significant portion of the homebuilding industry, ranking as either the first- or second-biggest builder in the country’s ten most active homebuilding markets. Lennar controls more than 26 percent of the homebuilding market in San Antonio, Texas, and nearly 30 percent of the Tampa-St Petersburg, Florida, market, according to a building industry news site. In the Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida, market, the twenty-fourth most active building market, Lennar controls nearly half of all homes being built.
Lennar’s market concentration, vertical-integration efforts, and new investor search platform leaves one stakeholder out in the cold: the average American homeowner.
“It’s Bob the builder and Bob’s mortgage guy dealing with Jane Doe, [who doesn’t realize] it’s the same person,” said Miller. “It’s all strictly for financial gain, not for the consumer at all.”