Don’t Count On Trump’s Plan to Crack Down on Landlords
Donald Trump is acknowledging that corporate greed is a primary driver of America’s housing crisis and has claimed he’ll move toward banning large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes. His track record says otherwise.
Blackstone has had an alleged role in the student housing crisis, skyrocketing evictions, child labor exploitation, and climate change. (Michael Nagle / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In an announcement that’s left the corporate real estate industry reeling, President Donald Trump claimed yesterday he will take “immediate steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” blaming Democrats for making “the American Dream . . . increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans.”
The president is acknowledging that corporate greed is a primary driver of America’s housing crisis. If he follows through on his announcement, the resulting shift in policy could prove a major thorn in the side of the home-buying industry, including Blackstone, the country’s largest landlord.
In response to Trump’s post, shares in Blackstone — a trillion-dollar private equity and real estate fund that owns 350,000 rental units nationwide — dropped 5.6 percent on Wednesday. As did Invitation Homes, a corporate homebuyer with a portfolio of more than 85,000 homes, which saw its market value drop nearly 7 percent in a day.
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