by Natalia Mittelstadt
President Trump signed an executive order blocking Wall Street firms from buying single-family homes.
Trump signed the order, titled, “Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers,” on Tuesday.
“Buying and owning a home has long been considered the pinnacle of the American dream and a way for families to invest and build lifetime wealth,” the order reads. “But because of the recent high inflation and interest rates caused by the previous administration, that American dream has been increasingly out of reach for too many of our citizens, especially first-time homebuyers.”
The order adds that “large Wall Street investors” have been purchasing “a growing share of single-family homes,” and are therefore, “crowding out families seeking to buy homes.”
“Neighborhoods and communities once controlled by middle-class American families are now run by faraway corporate interests. People live in homes, not corporations. My Administration will take decisive action to stop Wall Street from treating America’s neighborhoods like a trading floor and empower American families to own their homes,” the order continues.
“To preserve the supply of single-family homes for American families and increase the paths to homeownership, it is the policy of my Administration that large institutional investors should not buy single-family homes that could otherwise be purchased by families.”
The executive order explains that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will develop “definitions of ‘large institutional investor’ and ‘single-family home’” in 30 days, and that cabinet members will issue guidance to prevent “providing for, approving, insuring, guaranteeing, securitizing, or facilitating the acquisition by” large institutional investors of single-family homes.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson will review substantial acquisitions by large investors “and prioritize enforcement of the antitrust laws, as appropriate, against coordinated vacancy and pricing strategies by large institutional investors in local single-family home rental markets,” the order reads.
Trump last week announced his plan regarding the order, posting on Truth Social, “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.”
According to The New York Post, institutional investors have bought between 5% and 10% of housing in Phoenix, Dallas, Memphis and Charlotte.
Wall Street firms buying up homes have contributed to Americans being unable to afford them. The average age of a first-time home buyer is now 40, according to the National Association of Realtors.
“The historically low share of first-time buyers underscores the real-world consequences of a housing market starved for affordable inventory,” said Jessica Lautz NAR deputy chief economist and vice president of research. “The share of first-time buyers in the market has contracted by 50% since 2007 – right before the Great Recession. The implications for the housing market are staggering. Today’s first-time buyers are building less housing wealth and will likely have fewer moves over a lifetime as a result.”
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Natalia Mittelstadt is a reporter for Just the News. Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network and contributed to this story.
