Populist Signal or Serious Plan? Experts Question Ban on Corporate Home Purchases

It’s been quite a vibe check for Blackstone, whose name is now synonymous with mega-landlord. 

Shares in the asset manager known for an expansive real estate portfolio, including tens of thousands of single-family homes, slid nearly 6% on Wednesday as investors reacted to a White House proposal to block Wall Street’s purchase of family homes, taking the firm’s shares into the red for the year.

Housing Hurdles 

Yesterday, they bounced back, with a 1.1% gain pulling them into the green on a year-to-date basis as analysts evaluated the headwinds that have blocked past proposals similar to the one President Trump announced on Truth Social. In his post, the president said he was “immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” and called on Congress to codify it. Whether Congress has the political will to do so is debatable, financial experts say. And whether courts will go along is even more uncertain.

The announcement reflects the president “trying to rally the populist wing of the MAGA coalition heading into the midterms, given the importance of housing affordability,” Jaret Seiberg, a housing policy analyst at TD Cowen, wrote in a recent analyst note. Indeed, a December Economist/YouGov poll found 78% of Americans say it’s difficult to find affordable housing. And while Democrats may agree with pushing corporate giants out of local housing markets, they’re unlikely to jump on board with Trump’s plan. 

Recent history also offers few reasons for optimism about the proposal’s viability: 

• As BTIG analysts said in a note, there have been several Congressional proposals over the past few years aimed at addressing housing affordability, including ownership bans. “However, bureaucratic limitations have historically hindered the legislation in Congress, and as it stands now, most bills remain in the ‘Introduced’ phase,” the analysts wrote. 
• “Whether the federal government can legally bar certain buyers from purchasing single-family homes is far from settled, and the lack of detail here makes it impossible to assess how such a policy would actually work in practice,” Jake Krimmel, senior economist at Realtor.com, said in a statement.

No Going Solo: There’s also this: “The president simply doesn’t have the legal authority to decide who is allowed to purchase real estate and who isn’t,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin told The Daily Upside. “If he were to try to implement it by some sort of executive order or other executive policy, I expect that there would be lawsuits challenging it fairly soon.”