“I thought you were my friend!” shouted the private equity baron to the real estate mogul US president.

Donald Trump on Wednesday delivered a rebuke of sorts to a deep-pocketed corner of his political support base when, in a social media post, he announced plans to bar institutional investors from buying single-family homes.

Credit where it’s due, and forgetting that this is just Trump f(l)ailing to shore up his single-issue polling on inflation, barring private equity from playing Monopoly with America’s residential housing stock isn’t the worst idea Trump’s had this term. Or this month. Or this week.

We can debate the degree to which institutional ownership of single-family properties is a significant contributor to the country’s housing affordability crisis, but there aren’t a lot of great arguments for why corporate interests should own large portfolios of homes that might otherwise be available for purchase by regular people.

In other words, if you had to rank the contributing factors to America’s housing crisis from most impactful to least, institutional buying wouldn’t top the list and might not even make it into the top five. But any such list, if it’s honest and exhaustive, would at least mention private equity’s push into the market.

The figure below will be familiar to regular readers. It’s updated with the latest Redfin data, which suggests investors bought more than 52,000 homes in Q3 of 2025, down slightly from the prior quarter, but up marginally YoY.

At 17%, investors’ overall share of the market is now back to where it was on the eve of the pandemic, but still more than double where it stood 25 years ago.

Importantly, that’s just a snapshot. The Redfin series doesn’t differentiate between institutional and mom-and-pop investors who, by most accounts, comprise the vast majority of investor purchases. Institutional investors are said to own less than 3% of America’s single-family rental homes.

Still, it helps to have pictures and the chart at least gives you some idea of the impact the public health crisis had on this particular aspect of the housing market: It exacerbated a long established upward trend.

Recall that as of late 2023, investors’ share of affordable homes (the lower-tier price bucket for a given locale or region) approached 30%, according to Redfin.

As the chart shows, the share of low-priced homes bought by investors in any given quarter was just  ~10% at the turn of the century.

Naturally, Trump blamed Joe Biden for the affordability crisis, which made his ban on institutional investors feel a bit like a non sequitur.

“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream, the reward for working hard and doing the right thing,” he said. “But now, because of the Record High Inflation caused by Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress, that American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans.”

He then broke the bad news to corporate homeowners. “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,” Trump said.

The reaction in shares of Blackstone was immediate and predictably adverse, as illustrated below.

At the intraday lows, it was down nearly 9%, which would’ve counted as the worst single-session decline since “Liberation Day.” The shares later trimmed losses.

Blackstone has repeatedly (and loudly) pushed back on claims that its ownership interests in residential real estate are a bane, calling such accusations an “activist fiction.” “Investors provide valuable access and affordability to residents, who have materially lower incomes than homeowners,” the firm said, in a defensive fact sheet released a year ago this month.

Three months later, in March of 2025, Blackstone set about explaining why it’s actually a force for good in residential housing, describing a steadfast “commitment to responsible ownership.” “We own less than 1% of rental housing in the US and every country across Europe and Asia where we own assets,” another, longer, fact sheet reads. “Single-family rentals are not the cause of home price appreciation in recent years.”

That’s all… I don’t know, whatever it is, but the inescapable reality is that Steve Schwarzman owns a lot of homes, and I don’t mean the ones he lives in. Indeed, Blackstone’s been doing this for a long time. In 2013, for example, Schwarzman bragged that “Blackstone is now the largest owner of individual houses in the US.” “It’s a good business for us,” he told CNBC a dozen years ago. “It’s a new thing, but it’s also good for America.”

Not everyone agrees. In March of 2020, just as the pandemic swept across the country, The New York Times published an absolutely scathing feature piece on former Blackstone subsidiary Invitation Homes, the largest single-family-rental company in America.

The article includes first-hand accounts from a number of the company’s renters, including someone the Times described as “an anti-abortion, Trump-loving conservative Christian.” “I am the biggest Trump supporter you are ever going to meet,” that person told Francesca Mari. “But this is one area he’s furiously failing at. It’s not like he doesn’t know.”

He sure does. “Know,” I mean. As Mari was keen to point out, Schwarzman served as the chairman of Trump’s economic advisory council while mega-donor and inaugural committee chairman Tom Barrack was once dubbed a “modern day slumlord” by an investigative reporting outfit. (Barrack, who was indicted on, and eventually acquitted of, foreign lobbying charges, now serves as Trump’s ambassador to Turkey.)

At the end of the day, and all protestations and data aside, institutional investors are a class of home buyer that’s less sensitive to financing costs than everyday people, and they’re competing for scarce supply. Conceptually anyway, that puts a floor under prices.

Further, as non-investors remain priced out by high mortgage rates, competition for scarce homes can sometimes be between investors, a dynamic which could likewise be expected to push up prices.

I could go on. As Trump put it Wednesday, feigning concern for the American everyman with whom he has exactly nothing in common other than a weight problem and bad taste in hats, “People live in homes, not corporations.”

Now, he’ll just have to hope any plaudits he wins from Main Street are enough to offset lost campaign contributions from the private equity lobby.