The House on Wednesday approved a bipartisan bill intended to ease the nation’s housing affordability crisis by encouraging more homebuilding and restricting large corporate landlords from expanding their holdings of single-family homes. The measure passed overwhelmingly, 396 to 13, and is an amended version of legislation the Senate approved two months earlier. Lawmakers in both chambers must reconcile differences before sending a final bill to the president.
Supporters from both parties framed the vote as action ahead of the midterms to address a persistent housing shortage that has pushed the median home price to roughly $400,000, putting ownership out of reach for many Americans. Estimates suggest the country faces a roughly 4 million–unit gap between available housing and demand, so adding homes to the market more quickly is central to the bill’s rationale.
A headline provision bans groups that already own more than 350 single-family houses from buying additional single-family homes. Corporate investors, who have drawn bipartisan criticism for purchasing homes to rent and often outbidding individual buyers, account for about 3% of the national single-family rental market overall, though their shares are higher in parts of the Sun Belt and some cities such as Indianapolis and Seattle. Research on investor impacts is mixed: limiting purchases can raise sale prices in some markets but can also increase rental availability and lower rents in others.
The Senate version included a pathway allowing investors to hold build-to-rent communities but required that those homes be sold to families after seven years. That provision prompted strong pushback from the homebuilding industry; an open letter representing 79 industry groups warned it would effectively halt build-to-rent production. The House version removes that seven-year sell-off requirement, allowing large-scale developers to build and retain rental homes.
Earlier drafts of the House bill contained several exceptions to the investor purchase ban—allowing purchases of homes owned for less than a year, properties that had only ever been rentals, and exemptions for land trusts and nonprofits—but those loopholes were stripped from the text just before the vote.
Beyond restrictions on corporate buyers, the legislation is a broad mix of Republican and Democratic priorities designed to speed construction. It reduces regulatory barriers in several ways: it relaxes a requirement that many factory-built homes include a permanent steel chassis, streamlines environmental reviews for building infill on vacant lots, and creates a grant program to fund ‘‘pattern books’’ of preapproved home designs that require fewer local approvals. Cities that have adopted preapproved plans have seen faster, cheaper construction, which can help lower overall housing costs.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a co-sponsor in the Senate, described the bill as a ‘‘meatball’’—a collection of different policy ingredients from both parties that together aim to increase supply. If enacted, advocates say it would be the most significant federal housing legislation in decades.
The bill also intersects with recent executive and legislative action aimed at curbing institutional buying of single-family homes. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies not to support large institutional investors in purchasing single-family houses. Senator Raphael Warnock had pushed for a ban on such purchases, a provision that influenced the Senate bill.
President Trump urged House Republicans to back the unamended Senate text but has not publicly weighed in on the House’s revised measure. The amended bill now returns to the Senate for consideration of the changes before any final agreement can be sent to the White House.