About 23 percent of residential homes built for one to four families are now owned by investors, according to a study recently released by REAL Trends, Inc., and NEXZUS Publishing Group. The vast majority of those homes are not owned by institutional investors but rather individual investors or small investment groups.
The Iceberg Report outlines the size of the single-family residential market, as well as uncovers trends in terms of demographics, attitudes, and behaviors of owners of single-family investment homes. It specifically looks at investor-owned houses and mobile homes, which total between 23 million and 24 million nationwide.
The study found that institutional owners actually own fewer than 400,000 single-family residential homes, while nearly 8 million non-institutional investors own the rest. Most use a property management firm once they’ve accumulated more than four units. Additionally, the majority of single-family home investors use a real estate professional to help buy and sell properties.
“The Iceberg Report confirms what we suspected,” says Steve Murray, president of REAL Trends. “More successful investors rely on professional real estate agents and leading property managers to help them find, manage, and profit from an increasingly mainstream asset: the standalone single-family residential house.”
Out of about 125 million households in the U.S., an estimated 43 million live in investor-owned housing units, according to the report. “While most real estate industry and consumer publications have focused on the impact institutional buyers have had on this market, the facts show that it is somewhat ordinary American families who own the majority of these investor-owned single-family residential properties,” the report states.
Source:REAL Trends
