Every argument about investors buying up American houses runs into the same wall: nobody can say how many they own. Deeds are public, so we counted. Across 85,061,162 single-family homes, 5,353,183 — 6.3% — are titled to a business entity rather than to a person. Among homes that have changed hands since 2021 it is 10.0%. And 68.3% of those company-owned homes belong to companies that own fewer than ten of them. All figures derived August 29, 2026; methodology at the bottom, and it matters more than usual on this page.
The shape of company ownership is not what the argument assumes
Group every company-owned home by the owner name on the deed and count how many homes each name holds. The distribution is overwhelmingly small.
| Portfolio size | Owner names | Homes | Share of company-owned |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 home | 2,020,511 | 2,020,511 | 37.7% |
| 2 to 9 homes | 514,627 | 1,635,435 | 30.6% |
| 10 to 99 homes | 49,137 | 1,006,414 | 18.8% |
| 100 to 999 homes | 1,714 | 412,556 | 7.7% |
| 1,000 homes or more | 146 | 278,267 | 5.2% |
Two million company-owned homes are held by an entity that owns exactly one house. That is the landlord with a rental and an LLC her accountant set up, and she is the largest single category in this data by a wide margin. At the other end, 146 owner names hold 278,267 homes between them — real concentration, and also 0.33% of all U.S. single-family homes.
Why that 0.33% is a floor, and a misleading one
Large single-family landlords do not hold houses under one name. They hold them through hundreds of separate borrower entities, one per financing vehicle, because that is how the securitized debt behind them is structured. Counting owner names counts the paperwork, not the landlord.
There is a way through it that requires no guesswork: the tax bill still has to go somewhere. Group company-owned homes by the address the assessor mails to, and the fragmentation collapses.
- A single PO box in Scottsdale, Arizona receives the tax bills for 74,656 single-family homes, held under 969 different owner names, across 21 states.
- A second Scottsdale box takes 46,113 homes under 1,603 names in 38 states.
- One street address in Calabasas, California takes 45,380 homes under 852 names in 26 states; one in Atlanta takes 30,040 under 543 names; one in Austin 28,659; one in Dallas 25,475; one in Tustin, California 23,118.
The ten largest mailing points together receive the tax bills for 320,051 single-family homes. Ten envelopes’ worth of destination, 0.38% of the national housing stock, and 6.0% of every company-owned single-family home in the country. Neither the name-level count nor the mail-level count is the whole truth — mailing addresses also capture tax-service bureaux acting for many unrelated owners — but the gap between the two is the honest measure of how much the LLC structure hides.
The trend is real and it is recent
Take every single-family home and ask what share of the ones that last sold in a given year are now held by a company. The line is flat through the 2000s, steps up after the foreclosure crisis, drifts sideways for most of a decade, and then moves sharply from 2021.
| Year of most recent sale | Homes | Now company-owned |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 1,429,745 | 3.6% |
| 2008 | 1,264,740 | 4.6% |
| 2010 | 1,383,608 | 4.8% |
| 2012 | 1,677,323 | 6.1% |
| 2014 | 1,983,414 | 6.5% |
| 2016 | 2,540,399 | 5.9% |
| 2018 | 3,012,128 | 6.5% |
| 2020 | 3,748,831 | 5.7% |
| 2021 | 4,599,256 | 7.8% |
| 2022 | 4,054,639 | 9.8% |
| 2023 | 3,476,229 | 9.2% |
| 2024 | 3,694,233 | 9.7% |
| 2025 | 3,622,781 | 11.4% |
| 2026 (part year) | 2,166,676 | 14.1% |
Read that table carefully, because it is easy to over-claim from. It counts current owners against the year the home last changed hands, not purchases in that year. A house a company bought in 2021 and sold to a family in 2024 appears only in 2024, as individually owned — which means the early years understate company buying, and the last two rows include holdings that will be resold and are not yet. The direction is solid. The 2026 figure is a part year and should not be quoted as an annual rate.
Geography: the Deep South and the industrial Midwest
The state ranking on recent purchases is stable, is unrelated to how expensive a state is, and lines up with the metros that housing researchers have been describing for a decade. Georgia leads at 15.7% of homes sold since 2021; New Hampshire is last at 3.4%. Note how little the two columns agree — company ownership of the standing stock and company buying in the last five years are different phenomena.
| State | Single-family homes | Company-owned, all stock | Company-owned, sold since 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Georgia | 3,076,712 | 9.6% | 15.7% |
| Missouri | 1,735,053 | 9.3% | 14.8% |
| Oklahoma | 1,325,173 | 10.5% | 14.8% |
| Louisiana | 1,352,546 | 7.9% | 14.1% |
| Alabama | 1,619,443 | 8.3% | 13.8% |
| Mississippi | 881,753 | 9.2% | 13.3% |
| Kansas | 940,440 | 8.1% | 12.4% |
| North Carolina | 3,091,818 | 7.7% | 12.3% |
| Indiana | 2,180,369 | 7.5% | 12.2% |
| Ohio | 3,512,691 | 7.2% | 12.1% |
| Arkansas | 1,054,052 | 8.9% | 11.7% |
| Kentucky | 1,176,586 | 6.8% | 11.7% |
| Texas | 8,372,254 | 7.0% | 10.9% |
| Nebraska | 636,544 | 8.7% | 10.6% |
| Arizona | 1,999,499 | 6.8% | 10.6% |
| Florida | 5,700,915 | 7.4% | 10.6% |
| Delaware | 316,033 | 7.0% | 10.3% |
| New Jersey | 2,075,162 | 5.9% | 10.0% |
| South Carolina | 1,603,386 | 6.7% | 9.9% |
| Tennessee | 2,138,451 | 6.0% | 9.8% |
| Iowa | 1,023,969 | 7.0% | 9.7% |
| Pennsylvania | 3,266,450 | 4.3% | 9.6% |
| Idaho | 619,982 | 7.5% | 9.5% |
| West Virginia | 630,614 | 5.2% | 9.5% |
| Nevada | 811,250 | 7.2% | 9.3% |
| Michigan | 3,238,518 | 6.7% | 9.3% |
| New York | 3,260,488 | 5.9% | 8.5% |
| Utah | 714,181 | 5.8% | 8.3% |
| Maryland | 1,290,128 | 4.4% | 8.2% |
| Virginia | 2,337,733 | 6.0% | 8.0% |
| Wisconsin | 1,365,836 | 4.7% | 7.7% |
| Illinois | 2,749,020 | 4.5% | 7.6% |
| Colorado | 1,609,614 | 5.7% | 7.1% |
| Minnesota | 1,670,947 | 4.2% | 5.8% |
| New Mexico | 377,972 | 4.2% | 5.8% |
| Washington | 1,950,530 | 4.6% | 5.6% |
| Oregon | 1,109,268 | 4.9% | 5.5% |
| Maine | 417,397 | 3.3% | 5.4% |
| Rhode Island | 248,556 | 2.6% | 5.3% |
| Connecticut | 850,747 | 2.9% | 4.9% |
| California | 7,328,020 | 3.4% | 4.9% |
| Alaska | 157,636 | 3.4% | 4.5% |
| Massachusetts | 1,455,883 | 2.0% | 4.5% |
| New Hampshire | 385,270 | 2.3% | 3.4% |
At county level the concentration is much sharper than any state average suggests. In Clayton County, Georgia, a third of the homes that have changed hands since 2021 are now held by a company.
| County | Homes sold since 2021 | Now company-owned |
|---|---|---|
| Clayton, GA | 22,678 | 33.2% |
| Shelby, TN | 59,646 | 28.1% |
| DeKalb, GA | 51,771 | 25.9% |
| Jefferson, AL | 66,271 | 25.2% |
| Fulton, GA | 70,863 | 24.9% |
| Caddo, LA | 23,490 | 24.8% |
| Henry, GA | 28,371 | 24.3% |
| Paulding, GA | 24,596 | 22.6% |
| Montgomery, AL | 21,979 | 22.2% |
| St. Louis City, MO | 22,338 | 22.0% |
Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Shreveport, St. Louis. These are affordable metros with sound rental demand, which is the profile that both national landlords and local investors buy into — and the reason a single county figure cannot tell you which of the two you are looking at. The portfolio-size table can. Clayton County’s share is built from both, and the interesting local question is always the mix, not the headline.
What the numbers do not settle
This is a count of title, not a verdict. It cannot tell you whether a company-owned home is a rental, a flip in progress, a builder’s unsold inventory, or a family’s house held in an LLC for liability reasons — all four are in the 6.3%. It cannot separate a locally-owned rental portfolio from a national one without the portfolio and mailing analysis above. And it says nothing about rents, maintenance, or eviction practice, which is where most of the real argument lives.
What it does settle is the scale. Company ownership of American single-family homes is neither trivial nor the dominant force it is sometimes described as, it is heavily concentrated in specific Southern and Midwestern counties, and it has grown faster since 2021 than in any period since the foreclosure crisis.
Methodology
- Source and universe. Scout Data’s production property database, restricted to active single-family residences — 85,061,162 homes. Ownership type comes from county assessor records, which classify every parcel as held by an individual, a trust, or a company.
- The raw flag is not the published figure. The assessor company flag reads 6,925,965 homes (8.14%). We publish a cleaned 5,353,183 (6.29%) because two groups of records ride along with the raw flag and neither is a company.
- Family trusts. Some assessors set the company flag on ordinary revocable trusts. San Luis Obispo County, California reads 51.7% “corporate” on the raw flag, and its largest such owners are named after private individuals followed by the word “trust”. Owner names carrying trust or trustee wording are excluded. California’s figure falls from 12.9% to 3.4% under that rule, which is the size of the problem in a single state.
- Placeholder owners. Assessor placeholder strings — “redacted upon request” (50,767 homes), “current owner” (27,542), “not available from the data source” (20,997), “owner record” (16,469), “taxpayer of” (3,118), “various owners” (1,617) — are excluded. They are not companies; they are a county declining to print a name.
- Absence is distinguishable from a negative. Before publishing anything off a coded flag we check that a missing value cannot masquerade as a “no”. The assessor company flag is populated on all but 1,020,994 of 160.5 million records, and every one of those blanks also has a blank state — no real state exceeds 0.04% missing. A column that failed this test would produce a state ranking made of recording habits, and we do not publish those.
- Government and institutional owners are counted. Land banks, housing agencies, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the mortgage GSEs all hold single-family title and all appear in the company figure. Together they are a small fraction of it, but they are not landlords and should not be read as such.
- Portfolio counts group by exact owner name after case and whitespace normalisation. No affiliate rollup is attempted, which is why the large buckets are explicitly floors. The mailing-point analysis normalises the mailing address by stripping suite, unit and floor lines and pairs it with the five-digit ZIP.
- “Sold since 2021” means the home’s most recent recorded sale is dated 2021-01-01 or later — 21,613,814 homes. Sale-date coverage varies by jurisdiction; see how long people stay in their homes for the full coverage table.
Derived August 29, 2026. Spot something that looks wrong? Tell us — we’d rather correct a number than defend it.
Companion pages: how long people stay in their homes covers tenure across the same stock, what percentage of homes have solar and the most common roofing material are the other national counts built from this database.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of single-family homes are owned by companies?
6.3% — 5,353,183 of 85,061,162 U.S. single-family homes are titled to a business entity rather than a person or a trust. Among homes that have changed hands since the start of 2021 the figure is 10.0%, and among homes whose most recent sale was in 2026 it is 14.1%.
How much of that is Wall Street?
Less than the debate assumes, and more than the owner names admit. 68.3% of company-owned single-family homes belong to entities that own fewer than ten. Only 0.33% of all U.S. single-family homes sit under an owner name holding a thousand or more. But large landlords hold property through hundreds of separate LLCs, so the name-level count is a floor — grouping by where the tax bill is mailed instead of by the name on the deed moves hundreds of thousands of homes into the large-portfolio column.
Can I cite these numbers?
Yes — cite freely with a link to this page. The methodology section states exactly which records are counted, which are excluded, and where the underlying assessor flag is known to be wrong.