This report analyzes the recent history of the Atlanta housing market, with a focus on single-family rental homes (SFRs) owned by large institutional investors, including a newer trend called build-to-rent (BTR) in which homebuilders construct single-family homes specifically for institutional owners to offer as rentals. It explores the policy choices that led to the SFR model taking root in Atlanta, examines the impacts on would-be homeowners and SFR tenants, and offers recommendations to ensure that land, credit, and homebuilding create more affordable homes rather than merely new asset classes for investors.

No major metropolitan area in America has more SFR homes under Wall Street control than Atlanta. Institutional investors own about 72,000 homes there —more than twice as many as in the number two region, Phoenix. This wave of corporatization did not hit Atlanta by accident—or through the invisible hand of consumer choice. After the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), investors who previously had little interest in small, patchwork SFR markets were emboldened by federal policy choices to buy up houses in bulk and develop a new kind of financial instrument—the first-ever securitization of SFRs—to create a new asset class.

Atlanta became a testing ground for this new asset class because the region had been hit hard by the crisis but had good prospects for home price recovery in a landlord-friendly regulatory environment. Institutional investors have since deployed capital to accumulate SFR portfolios in other major metro areas, while continuing to build up inventory in Atlanta. They hold under 5% of national SFR market share, 5 but housing markets are local—and they now hold double-digit shares of SFR markets in over a dozen cities, including nearly 30% of the Atlanta SFR market. Although the housing supply crisis is primarily driven by sluggish construction rates stemming from a combination of inadequate financing for small builders and land hoarding by publicly traded builders, institutional investors took advantage of the constricted supply—and made it worse. Even as Atlanta’s home prices appear moderate on a national basis, it has become harder for Atlanta families to purchase a home, as prices have outpaced income growth more than in other major metro areas. Moreover, neighborhood-level analysis shows that institutional investors may have been responsible for as much as 25% of the decline in homeownership in Atlanta after the Great Financial Crisis. Yet SFR tenants are not thriving under this new model either, instead facing rent hikes, degraded living conditions, and increased evictions.

Institutional investors are aiming to scale up the SFR market to over a million tenants nationwide, and have also turned Atlanta into a testing ground for a related business model: build-to-rent (BTR), where homebuilders build single-family homes specifically for institutional owners to offer as rentals. Atlanta saw over 3,000 BTR units delivered in 2024 alone.

While proponents of the SFR model argue that it is an important source of housing supply, the dominance of large institutional investors in Atlanta has instead reduced overall affordability for families. Until recently, it was mostly Democrats, including Georgia Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who were exploring legislation to address these problems. But President Donald Trump’s embrace of the issue with an executive order15 helped create room for the bipartisan housing legislation. The lessons from Atlanta’s SFR market have implications for the bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act legislation passed in the Senate the most comprehensive housing bill proposed in decades—which places restrictions on institutional ownership overall, including BTR. Far from limiting housing availability, institutional investor and BTR restrictions are likely to improve affordability.