Two indicators for lowering the rent

June 10, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2021, Amanda Cantrell was hunting for a rental house in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for herself, her boyfriend, and her rescue dog Digby. She wanted a place with a big garage. What she found instead was a landscape dominated by corporate names. “I didn't see one private landlord when I was looking,” she says. The feeling that big investors were scooping up all the available homes struck her as unfair, and that sentiment has become a bipartisan political force. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act, for example, restricts large institutional investors from owning too many single-family houses. But across the country, these companies own less than 1% of homes. So could banning them actually improve housing affordability? Planet Money digs into two indicators that tell a more complicated story.

The Institutional Investor Myth

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What you'll learn

1 Timestamped Outline
2 (00:36) **The Renter's Unease** - Amanda Cantrell searches for a rental in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and notices almost all houses are owned by big corporations, sparking concern about fairness
3 (01:36) **The Core Question** - Can banning institutional home investors actually improve housing affordability?
4 (03:18) **How Corporate Landlords Rose After 2008** - Professor Stephen Billings explains that investors bought cheap homes during the Great Recession and discovered steady rental income was more profitable than flipping
5 (04:24) **The Grain of Truth vs. The Bigger Drivers** - Institutional investors do push up home prices slightly, but they are a tiny factor compared to low construction and low interest rates
6 (05:02) **The Renovation Advantage** - Consultant Lori points out that institutional investors buy beat-up homes, fix them efficiently with bulk purchasing, and finance renovations that individual homeowners often can't get
7 (06:06) **Build-to-Rent and the Risk of Backfire** - About 1 in 12 new homes in 2024 were built specifically to rent, and restricting corporate ownership could stop this construction

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Rebecca Baird-Remba

Show Notes

One specific type of affordable housing used to be popular in American cities, kept rents low, then nearly vanished. Is it time to reconsider boarding houses and single room occupancy units? If they lowered rents in cities, why did they go away? We have the history.

Then, let’s talk about corporate landlords. They’re blamed for driving up rents. Studies show they do the opposite. When corporate landlords come to town, they do buy up homes, which can raise the price to buy, but at the same time lower rents. We’ll parse the impact as we consider a Trump administration plan to restrict corporate home ownership.

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The original episodes of the Indicator were hosted by Darian Woods and Wailin Wong. They were produced by Julia Ritchey, Cooper Katz McKim and Corey Bridges with engineering by Travis Hagan and Robert Rodriguez. They were fact checked by Vito Emanuel and Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon edits the show. This episode of Planet Money was produced by James Sneed with help from Emma Murphy. Alex Goldmark is our executive pr