A New Mapping Effort Shows How Much of the Country’s Housing Has Gone Corporate

As home prices climb and mortgage rates keep would-be buyers on the sidelines, a new report is putting hard numbers behind a question that has nagged at American homebuyers for years: how much of the neighborhood is actually owned by someone who doesn’t live there?

The answer, according to a report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and its affiliated Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS), is that corporations — a category ranging from small local LLCs to sprawling institutional landlords — now own 8.9 percent of residential parcels across nearly 500 urban counties nationwide. That works out to roughly 1 in every 11 residential lots in the areas studied.

Titled “Who Owns America: Mapping Corporate Ownership of Residential Land,” the report takes a different approach than most previous research on the subject. Rather than counting housing units, as earlier studies have done, CGS analyzed ownership at the level of the land parcel itself — tracing corporate structures such as LLCs, partnerships and trusts across state lines to determine who ultimately controls a piece of property. That distinction matters, the report’s authors argue, because it offers a clearer picture of how ownership of the land underlying America’s housing stock is shifting, not just who holds the deed to a rental unit.

The 8.9 percent national figure, drawn from parcel data in nearly 500 counties, masks enormous variation from place to place. In some communities, corporate ownership exceeds 20 percent of all residential parcels — more than double the national average. St. Louis, Missouri; Harrisonburg, Virginia; and Franklin County, Ohio, are among the hardest-hit markets, according to the report. Baltimore, Miami and Richmond also show corporate ownership roughly double the national baseline.

To illustrate what that concentration looks like on the ground, the report zooms in on three postindustrial cities — St. Louis, Cleveland and Baltimore — examining how investor activity intersects with local demographics in places that have already weathered decades of population loss and disinvestment. The authors also identify 25 county “hot spots” nationwide with the highest rates of corporate control, a diverse mix of markets meant to serve as an early-warning list for policymakers and community groups.

The report notes a regional pattern as well: out-of-state investors make up an above-average share of corporate owners across the Sun Belt, a region that has drawn heavy investor interest since the years following the 2007–2009 foreclosure crisis.

The Rise of the “Mega-Investor”

The Lincoln Institute report builds on a body of federal research documenting the growth of large-scale corporate landlords. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis found that by 2022, 32 “mega-investors” — companies that each own 1,000 or more single-family homes — collectively held nearly 450,000 homes nationwide, with the five largest companies alone accounting for roughly 300,000 of them. As recently as 2011, no single investor owned more than 1,000 single-family homes; by 2015, that had grown to somewhere between 170,000 and 300,000 homes held by institutional investors.

Even so, federal data suggests these mega-investors still control a small slice of the overall market — GAO estimated their combined holdings at about 2 percent of the nation’s single-family rental stock, and a separate 2026 estimate put the largest investors’ share of all single-family homes at under 1 percent. But that national average, much like the Lincoln Institute’s parcel data, obscures sharp regional concentration: GAO found institutional investors owned an estimated 25 percent of Atlanta’s single-family rental market, 21 percent of Jacksonville’s, and 18 percent of Charlotte’s.

Investor purchasing activity has also remained brisk in the broader market. The Lincoln Institute report cites data from real estate analytics firm Cotality showing that investors of all sizes — not just mega-investors — accounted for nearly a third of single-family home purchases nationally in the first half of 2025, buying an estimated 85,000 properties a month.

Much of the public debate over corporate landlords has centered on rental units and the tenants who occupy them — rising rents, eviction rates, and maintenance complaints. The Lincoln Institute report argues that focusing on land ownership itself reveals a different and equally important story: the erosion of a pathway to household wealth-building that has defined American homeownership for generations.

“These shifts in landownership have economic, environmental, and social implications for communities,” the report states, noting that as more residential land moves into corporate hands, opportunities for local ownership — and the equity that comes with it — move further out of reach for many households already squeezed by high prices and elevated interest rates.

The debate has moved beyond research reports and into statehouses. Several states — including New York, California and Texas — have introduced legislation aimed at capping how many single-family homes large corporate investors can own. Cities such as Baltimore and St. Louis have taken their own steps to respond to investor activity in their housing markets.

At the federal level, momentum has been building as well. In mid-2026, Congress attached a provision to the 21st Century Road to Housing Act barring the largest institutional investors from purchasing additional single-family homes, following a presidential executive order aimed at limiting large-scale investor competition with individual homebuyers. The measure drew bipartisan support, though some analysts have cautioned that because mega-investors control well under 1 percent of the nation’s homes, the cap alone is unlikely to meaningfully move affordability on its own.

The Lincoln Institute report closes with its own menu of local policy tools, including property tax relief programs and community land trusts — mechanisms designed to keep land, and the wealth-building potential that comes with it, in the hands of residents rather than distant investors. The authors frame the report as a baseline rather than a final word, one they intend to revisit as corporate ownership patterns continue to evolve.

Source: “Who Owns America: Mapping Corporate Ownership of Residential Land,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Center for Geospatial Solutions, November 2025.

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Wayne Creed

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