The Senate Voted 89–10 to Ban
Wall Street From Buying Your House.
The House Won’t Hold a Vote.
On March 12, 2026, the United States Senate did something it almost never does anymore: it passed a serious, bipartisan housing bill by a landslide. The vote on H.R. 6644 — the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, written jointly by Banking Committee chair Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and ranking member Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)— was 89–10. Tucked inside the 303-page package was a single section, Title 9, that the housing-finance industry has been quietly fighting ever since: a flat ban on the purchase of single-family homes by any entity that owns 350 or more of them.
The bill was sent to the House the next morning. President Trump endorsed it. Vice President JD Vance endorsed it. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) publicly demanded a House floor vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can move it under suspension of the rules in a single afternoon. He has not.
Standing in the way is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. French Hill (R-AR), who told reporters the institutional-investor language must be “corrected.” In the final two and a half weeks of March 2026 — the same window the Senate was passing the bill — Hill’s campaign and leadership PACs took in $54,250 from the Mortgage Bankers Association PAC and earmarked MBA donors, and another $10,000from the National Association of Home Builders’ BUILDPAC, according to NOTUS’s review of FEC filings. Both groups signed a letter opposing Title 9.
- 89-10Senate vote tallyMarch 12, 2026 passage of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (H.R. 6644). Authored jointly by Chair Tim Scott (R-SC) and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — Senate Banking Committee release.
- 350+homes triggers the banSection 901 prohibits any entity controlling 350 or more single-family homes from purchasing additional ones. Build-to-rent and renovate-to-rent units must be sold within 7 years — Mayer Brown legal analysis.
- 1.0%of all U.S. single-family homes are institutionally ownedParcl Labs data via AEI (June 2025); the institutional purchase share collapsed from a Q2 2022 peak of 2.4% to 0.3% in Q3 2024 — largest operators are now net sellers.
- $64,250from MBA + NAHB PACs to French HillHouse Financial Services chair Rep. French Hill (R-AR) — the lawmaker negotiating revisions to Title 9 — collected this from the two trade groups opposing the provision in a 2.5-week window in March 2026, per NOTUS / FEC.
- 97,036 + ~100,000homes owned by Invitation Homes and Progress Residential alonePlus Blackstone 62,000, American Homes 4 Rent 60,337, Amherst 59,400, FirstKey 52,000+ — the top six operators control roughly 430,000 single-family rentals between them, per Wolf Street using Q4 2025 filings.
The threshold.The provision applies to a “large institutional investor” (LII), defined as any entity that “directly or indirectly has investment control” of not less than 350 single-family homes after the date of enactment. Per Mayer Brown’s legal analysis of the Senate-amended text, the count is on a beneficial-ownership basis — LLC laddering does not get you out of it.
The ban. Once an entity crosses the 350-home line, it may not purchase any additional single-family home, directly or indirectly, with the exceptions listed below.
The exceptions. An LII may still acquire a single-family home for: new construction; renovation or rental conversions intended for resale; build-to-rent (newly constructed for rent); renovate-to-rent (must spend 15% of purchase price on improvements); homeownership programs with rent caps and positive credit reporting; foreclosure repossessions; purchases from another LII; and senior 55+ communities.
The seven-year window. Properties acquired under the build-to-rent and renovate-to-rent exceptions must be sold to an individual homeowner no later than seven years after purchase. The bill, in other words, lets institutional capital build new supply. It does not let institutional capital warehouse existing supply.
Authors and vote: Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA); passed the Senate 89–10 on March 12, 2026. Two-thirds support in the House under suspension would clear it for the President’s desk.
The political case for the ban rests on a real but contested data set. The largest institutional landlords have built sizeable portfolios — and they have concentrated those portfolios in a handful of Sun Belt metros, where they really do compete with first-time homebuyers on individual blocks. Nationally, however, their share of total housing stock is small and has been shrinking since 2022.
Progress Residential (owned by Pretium Partners) — ~100,000 homes.
Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH) — 97,036 homes.
Blackstone (after its 2024 acquisition of Tricon Residential) — ~62,000 homes in the U.S.
American Homes 4 Rent / AMH (NYSE: AMH) — 60,337 homes.
The Amherst Group — 59,400 homes.
FirstKey Homes (Cerberus Capital) — 52,000+ homes.
Combined: ~430,000 single-family rentals across the top six operators — roughly 1.0% of the total U.S. single-family stock, per Parcl Labs data cited by AEI in August 2025. Mom-and-pop landlords (1–10 units) own 82.6%.
The trend matters more than the headline.Institutional purchases peaked at 2.4% of all U.S. home sales in Q2 2022 and had collapsed to 0.3% by Q3 2024, per John Burns Research and Consulting. The biggest operators were already net sellers before the Senate vote — meaning Title 9 mostly locks in a market shift that higher rates already drove.
“Restricts the purchase of new single-family homes by large institutional investors that directly or indirectly own at least 350 single-family homes.”
Title 9, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act · as summarized by the Bipartisan Policy Center
The bill has been on Speaker Johnson’s desk for two months. The arithmetic is simple. Suspension of the rules requires a two-thirds majority. The Senate cleared 89 votes; the House passed its own bipartisan housing package in February. The votes are there. What is not there is a calendared floor vote. The reason has a name.
The position. Hill has told reporters the institutional-investor language must be “corrected,” arguing the seven-year sell rule will discourage build-to-rent construction. He is currently negotiating a substitute with ranking member Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), who has called instead for a House–Senate conference to reconcile the two bills and has not opposed Title 9.
The money trail (per NOTUS, May 2026, sourced to FEC filings). In the last two and a half weeks of March 2026 — the exact window the Senate passed the bill and the lobbying fight moved to the House — Hill’s campaign and leadership PACs received $54,250 from the Mortgage Bankers Association PAC and earmarked MBA-aligned individual donors, plus $10,000from the National Association of Home Builders BUILDPAC. Hill’s typical annual MBA PAC haul in prior years had been $5,000–$6,500. This was the first time MBA had used earmarked individual contributions to channel money to a single House member.
The industry letter.More than a dozen housing-finance and homebuilder groups, including MBA and NAHB, signed a joint letter to House leadership warning that Title 9 “would effectively eliminate the production of Build-to-Rent (BTR) housing” and would “exacerbate our housing crisis.” The same coalition has spent the spring asking for the 350-home threshold raised, the seven-year sell window struck, and the exceptions broadened.
The second sticking point. The Senate bill also bans the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC) through 2030. A faction of House Republicans wants that ban kept. A different faction wants the CBDC language stripped. Hill has used the dispute as an additional reason to delay a clean floor vote on the underlying housing package.
The Title 9 ban is a rare ideological mash-up. It carries the populist-left brand of Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who has been pushing his End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act since 2023, and the populist-right brand of Vice President JD Vance, who as a senator argued that institutional investors “completely crowd out the availability of homes for people who just want to buy a piece of their community.” It was carried into law by the centrist banking duopoly of Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), two senators who agree on almost nothing else.
Executive Order, January 20, 2026:“Stopping Wall Street from Competing with Main Street Homebuyers.” Directs Treasury, HUD, USDA, VA, FHFA, GSA, DOJ, and FTC to bar federal entities from facilitating institutional single-family purchases and to develop formal definitions of “large institutional investor” within 30 days.
Trump (May 11, 2026):“The American Dream of Homeownership is under attack — Homes are for People, not Corporations.” Called publicly on the House to pass the Senate bill.
VP JD Vance:“The American Dream doesn’t belong to the highest bidder on Wall Street. It belongs to the American people, who work hard, save up, and play by the rules.”
Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune (R-SD): Publicly urged the House to take up the bill before the August recess to give Republicans an affordability win to run on in the midterms.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH): Vance’s successor in the Ohio seat, has been the most active Senate Republican advocate for moving the bill into law.
The defenders of the status quo point, accurately, to that 1.0% national figure. The trouble with the national figure is that it averages an Atlanta zip code where institutional landlords own a documented 25%+ of single-family rentals against a Vermont county where they own zero. In the Sun Belt metros where the institutional buy-up was concentrated — Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix, Tampa, Jacksonville, parts of Texas — the numbers a first-time buyer actually faces look nothing like 1%. CNBC’s reporting cited a Houston buyer, Rachel Wiggins, who lost bids on 20 separate homes to investment firms before the Senate moved.
That is the practical case for Title 9: even at a small national share, the marginal institutional bid sets the price floor in the exact neighborhoods where ordinary Americans are trying to break into ownership for the first time. Whether you find that case persuasive, the political coalition that finds it persuasive now runs from Bernie Sanders’s caucus through the populist-right Senate freshmen and into the Trump White House. That coalition is large enough to put 89 votes on the board. It has not yet been large enough to get one House committee chair to schedule a vote.
The bill’s journey is on the public record three different ways. The Senate floor speeches tell you why 89 senators voted yes. The cable-news segments tell you how Wall Street’s defenders are making their case. The Truth Social and X posts from the President, the Vice President, and the bill’s Senate authors tell you exactly where the political pressure is now pointed: at one House committee chair.
President Trump (May 12, 2026) — calling on the House to pass the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act and quoting his February 25 State of the Union: “the American Dream of Homeownership is under attack.”
President Trump (January 7, 2026) — announcing the policy: “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes … People live in homes, not corporations.”
By passing the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, Congress would deliver on President Trump’s agenda and ensure that 2026 is truly the year of affordability.
President Trump is RIGHT. President Trump signed an Executive Order banning large investment firms from buying up single-family homes, I led the charge to put that into legislation, the Senate passed it, and now he’s calling on the House to make it the law of the land. Pass the bill. Restore the American Dream. LFG!
Donald Trump has not yet lifted a finger to bring down housing costs for Americans. I’ve been advocating for years to limit Wall Street from buying up America’s homes. Enough talk — Trump should start with getting his own party in the House to support a bipartisan bill to bring down housing costs that passed the Senate unanimously.
The Senate passed an institutional-investor housing ban 89–10. The President signed an executive order on it. The Vice President campaigns on it. House Financial Services chair French Hill (R-AR), two weeks after collecting $64,250from the trade groups fighting the provision, says the bill needs “correcting” before it can come to the floor. As of May 13, 2026, it has not.