The United States Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a sweeping bipartisan bill that would bar large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes. The legislation represents a long-awaited response to years of growing public frustration over Wall Street firms buying up residential properties across the country, often outbidding ordinary American families with all-cash offers and driving up home prices.
The final version of the bill passed the Senate in a sweeping vote that reflects the rare degree of bipartisan support the measure has attracted. The legislation now heads to President Trump’s desk.
The White House has expressed strong support, with spokesman Davis Ingle stating that the Trump administration is “proud to have worked alongside our partners in Congress to move this legislation forward that advances the President’s housing affordability agenda.”
Trump himself had championed this kind of policy, calling in his State of the Union address for banning large Wall Street investment firms from buying up single-family homes by the thousands.
He also issued an executive order earlier in his second term to limit large investors from buying homes. The Senate bill represents a legislative codification and expansion of that policy priority.
The legislation was co-sponsored by Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), the chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the committee’s ranking member.
The unlikely partnership between the two senators, who represent opposite ends of the political spectrum, underscores the broad public consensus that institutional investor dominance of the housing market has become a genuine threat to the American dream of homeownership.
At its core, the bill defines a “large institutional investor” as an investment fund or other for-profit entity that, after enactment, directly or indirectly has investment control of 350 or more single-family homes.
Any entity meeting that threshold would be prohibited from purchasing additional single-family homes. The prohibition is designed to prevent further accumulation of residential properties by hedge funds, private equity firms, and real estate investment trusts at the expense of ordinary homebuyers.
The bill is careful to build in targeted exceptions so that the ban does not inadvertently restrict housing supply. Investors are permitted to purchase homes that require serious renovation in order to bring them up to local building codes.
They are also permitted to buy newly constructed homes as part of build-to-rent programs, where properties are managed as rental communities. However, under several of these exceptions, the investor is required to sell the property to an individual homebuyer within seven years of purchase, with current renters receiving both a right of first refusal and a 30-day first-look period to make a purchase.
The bill does not require large institutional investors to divest or sell single-family homes purchased before the date of enactment. This provision was designed to prevent a sudden market disruption that could hurt existing renters who depend on institutional landlords for housing. Critically, the prohibition is set to self-terminate 15 years after the effective date, giving the market time to adjust and leaving room for Congress to revisit the policy in the future.
The legislation moves to the House in its final form after a months-long back and forth between the two chambers.
The House had previously passed an amended version of the bill, making modifications to certain provisions the Senate had originally included. In particular, the House voted to remove a requirement that investors sell build-to-rent and renovate-to-rent properties, replacing that provision with a lighter-touch measure creating a hotline for tenants living in properties owned by large institutional investors.
The Senate ultimately agreed to drop the seven-year disposal requirement for build-to-rent properties in order to reach a final deal with the House, clearing the path for the bill’s passage. The compromise drew praise from a wide range of housing organizations, including the National Association of Home Builders and the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Eleven national housing organizations issued a joint statement supporting the revised measure, describing it as encompassing some of the most significant housing proposals in a generation.
Senator Warren, a longtime critic of Wall Street’s role in the housing market, described the bill in terms that resonated with Americans across the political spectrum.
“We put this bill together with the deep-seated belief that it is families who should live in homes, and that’s what homes are for,” she said. “They’re not there simply as investment vehicles for Wall Street private equity.” That sentiment echoes what many Republican voters have been saying for years about an economy that increasingly seems to reward financial engineering over hard work and family formation.
The housing affordability crisis has become one of the most potent political issues heading into the 2026 midterm elections. A mid-June 2026 poll found Trump’s overall approval rating at 37%, dragged down in part by dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy.
Nearly 80% of Americans surveyed in a separate NBC News poll said they believe housing costs are a serious problem facing the country. Republicans looking to maintain their congressional majorities have identified the housing bill as a key deliverable they can take back to their constituents.
The legislation does much more than simply restrict institutional investors. It includes a series of supply-side reforms designed to address the root cause of the housing shortage: insufficient construction. The bill includes grant programs for constructing new homes, cuts red tape, and empowers local governments to expedite permitting reviews.
It also makes it easier to expand the supply of manufactured homes, which are typically faster and cheaper to produce than traditional construction.
Both the House and Senate versions of the bill eliminate a longstanding federal requirement that manufactured homes be built on a permanent chassis.
Under current law dating back to 1974, manufactured homes must include a wheeled base that allows them to be transported, similar to traditional mobile homes. In practice, most manufactured homes are never moved after they are installed.
Eliminating the requirement is expected to cut the cost of each manufactured home by $5,000 to $10,000, according to estimates from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The bill also includes a provision that has attracted bipartisan enthusiasm for entirely different reasons: a temporary ban on the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency through 2030. House Republicans had pushed for this provision, reflecting widespread concern in conservative circles about the potential for government surveillance of private financial transactions that a digital dollar could enable.
The legislation has not been without critics. Some libertarian-leaning analysts at institutions like the Cato Institute have argued that federal grant programs have been Washington’s go-to solution for housing problems for decades without solving the underlying shortage.
Research on the actual impact of institutional investors on housing prices has been mixed. A report from the Urban Institute found that large investors own just 3% of single-family rentals nationwide, and Freddie Mac found that while institutional investors may play a small role in price increases, they are far less significant than primary drivers like limited building and migration to high-cost cities.
Those statistical arguments have done little to dampen public enthusiasm for reining in institutional buyers. For families who have been outbid on homes by faceless corporate entities with virtually unlimited capital, the percentage figures feel beside the point.
The lived experience of watching a neighborhood transform from a community of homeowners into a collection of corporate rentals has proven politically powerful in a way that academic research has not been able to fully counter.
