By Roland Murphy for AZBEX
Either the proverbial road to Hell may be about to get a fresh round of extensive full-depth patching with good intentions or portions of both major political parties are beating the drum for points leading into the midterm without actually having looked at the sheet music.
As is often the case, maybe two things are true at once.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (HR 6644) has been passed in separate versions by both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. After passage in the Senate last month, it is now back before the House for reconciliation.
The bill’s stated overall goal is to improve housing affordability across the country, and there are some laudable components. Changes to the bill introduced in the Senate, however, dramatically expanded its scope and raised alarm bells across the housing development community.
The key components of the bill included:
- Housing supply and regulation updates that directed the Department of Housing and Urban Development to create model zoning frameworks to make housing development easier, provided grants for local governments to create templates of preapproved home designs, streamlined environmental review, increased multifamily loan limits under government programs, and mandated a government study to support housing for middle-income households;
- Modernizing and expanding federal grant and partnership programs for new home construction and existing home improvements for low-income homeowners;
- Overhauling some limits on manufactured and affordable housing finance and investment programs, including softening process regulations on manufactured and modular homes and units;
- Updating and expanding financial protections for borrowers and families in assisted housing, and
- Increased oversight of public housing agencies and streamlined applications to promote local lending.
The original version passed the House on a 390-9 vote.
When the bill got to the Senate, it underwent major revisions. These included:
- Changes to the income eligibility, purchase price maximum and use of federal funds for housing-adjacent infrastructure,
- Removal of the community bank-related section of the House bill and
- Addition of National Environmental Policy Act flexibility and the adoption of planning templates for small-unit-count multifamily developments.
The most significant change is, despite extensive hammering by some national figures, among the least needed and potentially most harmful: a prohibition on large institutional investor portfolio ownership. The Bipartisan Policy Center explains the new language restricts the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors that directly or indirectly own at least 350 single-family homes.
The Senate version passed 89-10.
Institutional Ownership Targeted by Right and Left
Some national politicians and housing policy lobbyists, led most publicly by Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have decried corporate and institutional investor single-family portfolio ownership as a fundamental detriment to housing affordability. They claim institutional investors have removed vast quantities of units across the country from the traditional competitive market, outbidding individual potential buyers and artificially inflating prices both through increasing base price offers and withholding units from the ownership stream by using them as rentals.
That sentiment has also been expressed by President Donald Trump. In fact, it was Trump’s call for the banning of institutional ownership of single-family portfolios in the 2026 State of the Union address that is generally credited for that portion of the Senate’s revisions to the bill.
Unfortunately for the anti-investor advocates, “the math isn’t mathing” in the actual market. Multiple market examinations, including one from housing investment research group Parcl, show investors in the 350-unit-plus group own a total of roughly 530,000 single-family homes in the U.S., just 0.59% of the overall market. In a few highly targeted markets, such as Atlanta, that percentage ranges as high as 4%.
Critics have framed the institutional investors’ ownership provision as ineffective political theater.
One area that will be affected, however, is the Build-to-Rent market, which the Senate version specifically targets. The revised legislation contains a provision that would require BTR developers to sell their units to individual owners within seven years of building them, effectively eliminating the market as it exists today.
2025 data from Cavan Companies shows the national BTR market started a J-curve acceleration between 2019 and 2023, delivering 41% of all BTR homes in the market today, approximately 68,000 units. As of the first half of 2025, another 100,000-110,000 units were in the pipeline.
Between 2020 and 2023, institutional investors boosted their stake significantly, increasing allocations by 75%.
Phoenix, which is generally regarded as the origin market for the sector, leads with more than 12,700 units delivered to date. The DATABEX project database shows 115 BTR developments having completed construction since its launch in mid-2016, with 35 more under construction and a sector scope of approximately 200 total developments, not including master plans and canceled projects.
An estimate from libertarian-leaning outlet Reason puts the BTR market at “anywhere between 3% and 10% of new single-family construction” nationwide and pointedly says the legislation will destroy the sector.
Across the entire U.S. single-family rental market, which includes both individual freestanding homes in traditional neighborhoods and Build-to-Rent homes, the largest institutional investors—those with portfolios larger than 1,000 units—have been net sellers, according to Parcl. Small owners, those with two-to-nine units in their portfolios, were net buyers and grew their baseline by 102.8% between March 2024 and 2026. Those small owners are below the 350-unit ownership baseline and will be unaffected by the legislation.
As Phoenix Goes, So Goes the Market
As noted above, Build-to-Rent took off with metro Phoenix as its major initial market. If it served as a bellwether for that emerging market a decade ago, it now serves as a harbinger of what may come.
A recent article in Phoenix Business Journal details how the market “is coming to a screeching halt,” since the pending legislation has caused capital for BTR projects to stop abruptly, draining the oil from the sector’s engine.
Everest Holdings President and CEO Joe Blackbourn said all capital, including equity, has stopped moving in the BTR sector.
Hancock Builders has built 35 BTR communities and delivered 7,200 units in metro Phoenix over the last decade. Founder Greg Hancock was quoted as saying fear of the legislation’s impacts has shut the industry down nationwide and he and other developers may have to eliminate workers if projects cannot secure funding.
He added it is currently unknown if existing developments or those currently under construction will be grandfathered in if the law passes.
Other builders, including Christopher Todd Communities’ CEO Todd Wood, have called the bill “horribly written.” He and other developers believe the legislation ultimately does not (or should not) apply to BTR at all.
NexMetro Communities CEO Josh Hartmann explained in the PBJ article that, even though BTR homes are freestanding units, they are classed as multifamily, not single-family, under “every federal definition that matters.”
That differentiation is apparent in some of the other terms used to describe BTR development in the industry, including horizontal apartments.
If the bill passes as written, multiple lawsuits to flesh out exactly how and where it applies across developments around the country are a near certainty, and implementation could be put off for years.
Not a Done Deal
Even though the House and Senate have passed versions of the bill, the process is not yet finished. Because the Senate’s version differs significantly from the House’s original, the two bills must now undergo reconciliation to produce a unified version to send to President Trump for his signature.
Republican Congressional Rep. David Schweikert represents Arizona’s District 1 in the House and has said he wants to see the BTR portion killed in the conference committee. Blackbourn said he believes Schweikert will be successful.
It is worth noting Schweikert is leaving Congress to run for Arizona Governor. His Republican primary campaign is lagging in fundraising and name recognition behind frontrunner Andy Biggs. Schweikert was quoted in the PBJ article as saying of BTR, “This is one of the only parts of our market that’s been healthy. You would hate for it to become impaired.”
Saving the sector could potentially be a boost for his campaign.
He is not alone in his opposition. The House Freedom Caucus has come out against the bill, as have the National Multifamily Housing Council and the Mortgage Bankers Association.
While prognostication is generally a sucker’s bet, and even if the bill is approved as written, implementation will not be immediate due to expected challenges at both the administrative and judicial levels, the ground-level effects are already being felt.
What is certain is there are only two sets of laws that can be universally counted on to act in accordance with their inherent natures: The laws of physics and the Law of Unintended Consequences.