Jan 9, 2026
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Dec. 18 after signing an Executive Order easing federal restrictions on marijuana, President Trump said he wants to prevent home values falling to preserve the wealth of existing homeowners, particularly older Americans (1). It was a small aside, but it said the quiet part out loud about the dilemma at the heart of housing affordability.
“Houses are very valuable. It's a big part of [homeowner’s] net worth, their house. I don't want to knock those numbers down. At the same time, I want to make it possible for young people out there and other people to buy housing. In a way, they're at conflict," said Trump.
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"In other words, you create a lot of housing all of a sudden, and it drives the housing prices down. So I want to take care of the people that have houses that have a value to their house that they never thought possible, that have sort of made them wealthy and happy, and especially in their later years. Got to be careful with that. I want to keep them up. At the same time, I want to make it possible for people to go buy houses," he continued.
The remarks came the day after POTUS promised to “announce some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history” (2), early in 2026, and a week after telling a rally in Pennsylvania “I have no higher priority than making America affordable again” (3).
‘People live in homes, not corporations’
Perhaps the first volley of this promised campaign was fired in a Truth Social post from President Trump on the afternoon of Jan 7th that spoke of “immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes” (4).
Calling buying and owning a home “the pinnacle of the American Dream” that was “increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans,” POTUS said he would be calling on Congress to codify the ban, and teased “further Housing and Affordability proposals” to be revealed at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos later this month.
According to a study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy released in November 2025, corporations own 8.9% of residential “parcels” (which could represent a single family house or a building with multiple apartments) in urban areas, although that percentage is doubled in certain urban centres. In cities such as St. Louis, Baltimore, Miami and Richmond, the percentage of residential parcels owned by corporations reached as high as 21% (5).
One in every three single family homes sold in the second quarter of 2025 was purchased by an investor, both individual and institutional (up from 27% the quarter before), marking a five year high according to the Q2 2025 Investor Pulse Report from BatchData (6). Many of these investors were traditional “mom and pop” buyers; however, between publicly traded giants such as American Homes 4 Rent (which owns over 60,000 rental houses as of 2025) (7) and Invitation Homes (which held 80,000 rentals in 2023) (8) and other large institutional investors, 446,000 single family homes are in the hands of mega-investors. The five largest mega-investors account for almost 300,000 homes combined.
According to a Government Accountability office report released in 2024, no single investor owned more than 1,000 homes prior to 2011 (9).
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‘You can’t have it both ways’ with housing affordability
Trump’s comments about affordability and his proposed action to be taken against institutional investors set up a central question for homeowners and buyers alike: whether the push to make housing more affordable will come at the expense of existing home values, and how real that risk actually is.
Joel Berner, senior economist of Realtor.com quoted in the wake of Trump’s Oval Office comments, was straightforward: "For homes to become more affordable to first-time buyers, they must become less valuable to their owners. This is basic economics and there's not much getting around it” (10).
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Any additional supply of new homes would act to lower the prices of existing homes, said Berner. "You can't really have it both ways when it comes to supply and demand for homes."
This could be sobering information to property owners. Homeownership is typically a wealth builder; according to the most recent Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finance average homeowner wealth outstripped average renter wealth by a factor of 43, although this figure comes from the most recent survey, which was conducted in 2022 (11).
In more recent times, home equity has become a significant source of wealth for many American households (12). Equity gains eroded by a drop in home prices could be especially painful for more recent purchasers who have accumulated less equity or homeowners who leveraged their equity for further borrowing.
A shift in the housing market on the way
Trump's comments came in the lead-up to a year that economists have flagged as marking a shift in the American housing market.
House prices experienced a historic run-up during and since the pandemic: between the first three months of 2020 and the third quarter of last year, prices rose almost 55% nationwide, and spiked even higher in more than half of metro areas, according to data from the National Association of Home Builders published in December (13).
Between soaring prices, and the reluctance of homeowners who locked in low pandemic-era mortgage rates to grapple with a pricier borrowing environment, the market has been characterized by sluggishness as sales volumes over the last few years hit historic lows (14).
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But according to the Housing Market Outlook from Compass Inc. which forecasts the US housing market, the new year could change all of that, “finally recalibrating after the post-pandemic period” (15).
According to the Outlook published in December, the market is seeing a reset characterised by flattening prices, increased inventory and improved affordability, all of which is geared towards bringing pent-up demand from buyers and sellers back into the market (16).
"After years of delay,” said Compass’ Chief Economist Mike Simonsen, in a statement released with the report “anyone looking to make a move should finally see greater opportunities to take the leap” (17).
Speaking on CNBC’s Fast Money in December, Simonsen pointed to the wave of withdrawn listings in 2025 as evidence of hundreds of thousands of owners delaying moving, amounting to shadow demand (18).
Redfin’s head of economics research, Chen Zhao, and chief economist Daryl Fairweather, make a similar prediction of a Great Housing Reset to play out this year, pointing to moderating mortgage rates and rising wages ushering in “a yearslong period of gradual increases in home sales and normalization of prices as affordability gradually improves. It will start [in 2026], with incomes rising faster than home prices for a prolonged period for the first time since the Great Recession era” (19).
What will actually happen remains to be seen. For homeowners, the takeaway isn’t that a drop in prices is inevitable, but that housing affordability debates increasingly center on tradeoffs that could shape future values, equity growth and market stability in ways worth paying close attention to.
Article sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
CNN (1, 4); New York Post (2); @whitehouse (3); The Lincoln Institute (5); PRNewswire (6, 17); AMH (7); Invitation Tenants (8); National Low Income Housing Coalition (9); Realtor.com (10). Federal Reserve (11); Census.gov (12); National Association of Home Builders (13); Capitol Lien (14); Compass (15, 16); CNBC (18); Redfin (19)
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Libby MacDonald is a Senior Staff Reporter at Moneywise. She has extensive experience in business and consumer reporting, having covered topics including insurance, wealth management, housing and equities.
