US Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) is betting Congress is finally ready to take a serious swing at corporate homebuyers’ grip on housing markets nationwide.
The bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act, expected to reach a full Senate vote on Friday, would bar institutional investors that already own over 350 single-family homes from buying more. Violators would be fined $1 million or up to triple the excess homes’ purchase price, whichever is higher. The bill exempts investors buying or building new homes for rent, as long as they sell the homes to individual homeowners after seven years.
Warnock says the measure would curb private equity firms from pricing first-time homebuyers out of overheated markets like metro Atlanta, where institutional investors already own an outsize portion of single-family rental homes.
“Atlanta is ground zero for private equity’s domination of the housing market, with more than one in four single-family homes owned by institutional investors,” Warnock said during a virtual press conference Wednesday. “Private equity’s greed is squeezing first-time homebuyers out of the market and pushing the American dream further out of reach.”
The comprehensive housing package would also promote homeownership, encourage zoning reform for greater housing density, and add grant funding for affordable housing development.
Warnock’s office expressed confidence that the ROAD to Housing Act will pass in the Senate this week and then earn the House’s approval. However, President Donald Trump has threatened to withhold his signature from any new legislation until Congress passes the elections-focused SAVE America Act.
But if Congress manages to pass the bipartisan housing bill, it would be a far stricter intervention to limit institutional investors’ homebuying than anything Georgia lawmakers are considering during the state’s current legislative session, which concludes on April 2.
Although most Georgia bills to rein in corporate mega-homebuyers failed to make it from one Gold Dome chamber to the other by Crossover Day on March 6, one Republican-backed bill still has a shot at becoming law. Senate Bill 463, which passed the Senate on March 3, would prohibit corporations from purchasing more than 500 single-family homes statewide.
Warnock said he brokered a deal with Republican colleagues to get the 350-home cap into the ROAD to Housing Act, but he didn’t say how they reached that figure, rather than the higher limit in the Georgia proposal.
“I wouldn’t get focused terribly on that [number],” he told Atlanta Civic Circle. “The reality is we’re 5 million units short on housing in our country, and I want to make sure we don’t so crowd out the market with private equity swooping in and dominating the single-family rental market that there’s nothing left to buy.”