Invitation Homes to Spend Up to $1B Buying Houses This Year

Invitation Homes, the largest single-family rental player with a portfolio of more than 80,000 units, is planning to expand its SFR lead by purchasing up to $1B worth of houses this year.

In an earnings call last week, Invitation Homes said the company would invest between $600M to $1B in acquiring houses in 2024, augmented with an additional $100M to $300M in purchases though its joint ventures.

The Dallas-based firm also may sell between $400M and $600M wholly owned houses this year to finance its acquisitions goals. The company and its joint venture partners sold 1,489 homes for $547M last year, continuing an upgrade of its portfolio with newly built houses acquired from PulteGroup and other homebuilders.

Invitation also is aiming to gain a strategic advantage over its competitors by expanding its professional property and asset management services to third-party portfolio owners of SFR homes.

The company started the initiative late last year by bringing an unspecified third-party owner’s portfolio of 14K SFR properties onto its management platform.

“Our operating platform is now available to not just our residents and joint venture partners, but also to large portfolio owners who are seeking the best in single-family property management for their residents and the best in single-family asset management for their investors,” Dallas Tanner, CEO of Invitation Homes, said during the call.

Turner called the property and asset management platform the “logical next step” for the SFR business and a “strategic leap forward” for Invitation Homes.

“It empowers us to accretively leverage our platform in a capital-light manner, while helping us to achieve further scale, increased efficiency and additional margin expansion for our company, and substantial savings and convenience for our residents,” he said.

Invitation Homes is planning to use its operating platform to grow strategic partnerships, Tanner said.

“As in other REIT subsectors, we expect professional management can help us create a pipeline of potential future acquisition opportunities for homes about which we’ll have an information advantage,” the CEO said, during the call with investors.

“We believe the size and scale of the platform is meaningful in helping to drive down the cost of living,” Tanner added. “We want to work with professional capital and scale that will give us better market intelligence on how portfolios are doing.”

In fiscal 2023, Invitation Homes’ portfolio was 97% occupied, with comparable rental rates increasing 6.3%, including renewals and new leases, from the previous year.