Housing affordability bill clears Senate with investor ban
The Senate voted 89-10 on Thursday to pass the biggest housing affordability bill in 30 years, including a ban on investors buying single-family homes.
But the bill faces an upward fight in the House of Representatives, which passed its own bipartisan legislation in February. House GOP leaders have already suggested they will not accept the Senate-passed bill, saying the measure must be negotiated. House Minority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told fellow House Republicans in a closed-door meeting earlier this week that the measure would likely be deadlocked due to differences between the two chambers’ versions.
One of the biggest problems is that investors and companies are prohibited from purchasing single-family homes if they already own 350 or more homes. Companies that increase their housing supply through construction or major renovations will be able to own more homes, but they will have to sell those homes after a maximum of seven years.
This provision was not initially included in the Senate bill or the House-passed bill, but President Donald Trump supported the ban and stated he wouldn’t sign a bill without it.
Residential apartments and houses in the Queens borough of New York, USA, on Friday, January 16, 2026.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Multiple industry groups, including the National Association of Home Builders, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the National Housing Conference, said at a meeting. position statement He said the seven-year cap would eliminate build-to-rent housing production and “hundreds of thousands of homes will be taken off the market over the next decade, many of which will serve low- and moderate-income households.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., supported adding the institutional investment homeownership limit and said it would protect consumers.
“They can also build as many apartments, apartment complexes, as many triplexes as they want,” Warren said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. “But there’s a point of principle here, which is that private capital can’t come in and buy up the entire housing supply in America. Homes should be for families, not giant corporations.”
However, this view was not universally shared.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, who voted against the bill, said the 350-home limit was “bananas” and would ultimately result in a ban on rental housing. Like Warren, Schatz has a liberal voting history.
“I don’t think people anticipated how bad it would be on the supply side,” he said, adding that it would “devastate” the single-family and duplex rental market.
