#sun-belt

#sun-belt

During the pandemic housing boom, we saw red-hot housing demand quickly absorb much of the available slack in the housing market. Back in 2021, active housing inventory for sale, unsold completed new builds, and available lot supply all plunged to historic lows. But ever since the pandemic housing boom fizzled out in mid-2022, housing slack has been building back up in the housing market-especially in certain pockets of the Sun Belt.

President Donald Trump put big investors who own single-family rental homes in the spotlight this week by announcing he wants to ban "large institutional investors" from buying more of this type of housing. Overall, major investors own only about 2 to 3% of the country's single-family rental housing stock, researchers have found. But they control a much larger share of the single-family rental industry in certain markets, particularly in the Sun Belt.

Rents for both multifamily and single-family built-to-rent units moved sideways over the last year. Still, rents in most major Sun Belt markets are down annually due to a glut of new housing, according to the latest Yardi Matrix National Multifamily Report. Meanwhile, rental growth is typically the strongest in the Midwest, Northeast, and California. This mirrors trends in the for-sale market, as markets with negative home price appreciation over the last year tend to be concentrated in the Sun Belt and the Mountain West.