A typical questionnaire asked the company to list all its wholly and partly owned subsidiaries, how many properties it owned in Georgia, how many purchased homes were foreclosures and whether the company had access to home listings. There were also detailed questions about its business practices.

In the case of Invitation Homes, the country’s largest landlord of single-family homes, the questions went further. They probed deeply into a $48 million settlement the company reached with the Federal Trade Commission in September 2024 to refund consumers harmed by actions the FTC said “preyed on tenants.”

The FTC’s charges against the company included “an array of unlawful actions against consumers, including deceiving renters about lease costs, charging undisclosed junk fees, failing to inspect homes before residents moved in, and unfairly withholding tenants’ security deposits when they moved out. The complaint alleges that between 2021 and June 2023, Invitation Homes charged consumers tens of millions of dollars in junk fees as part of their monthly rental payments.”

In a series of articles on the activities of institutional investors in Georgia single-family homes, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) described metro Atlanta as “ground zero” for the corporate takeover of single-family homes. It found that between 2012 and 2023, investors had bought up more than 65,000 single-family homes in 11 counties, and 11 companies each owned more than 1,000 homes. In many districts targeted by the companies, 90% of the population comprised minority residents.

A 2024 paper by researchers Taylor Shelton of Georgia State University and Eric Seymour of Rutgers described “tangled webs of corporate property ownership which are to deliberately obscure the true ownership and concentration of such property from public view.”

By untangling that web, the researchers found that three companies – Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners and Amherst Holdings – owned more than 19,000 single-family homes in metro Atlanta’s five core counties, using “an extensive network of more than 190 corporate aliases.” It was likely with this in mind that Ossoff’s letter called on each company to list all its wholly and partly owned subsidiaries.

A 2024 study of corporate ownership in Atlanta found that it resulted in the loss of $1.25 billion in equity from affected neighborhoods between 2010-2022. And $681 million of that loss fell on the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods, where corporations are involved in 70% of single-family home transactions, compared to 30-40% for other neighborhoods. The researchers, Nicholas Polimeni and Brian Y. An of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, said homes in the Sunbelt are especially targeted because many Southern states have weak tenant protections, rising home values and strong economic growth, with weaker access to mortgage markets for nonwhites.

A report by the GAO in 2024 estimated that 25% of the single-family rental home market in Atlanta – 71,832 homes -- was held by large institutional investors. This share far exceeded that for any other major metro studied. However, the GAO said the effect of these investors on homeownership opportunities and tenants was unclear because data was limited and there was no consistent definition of institutional investor.

Though Atlanta may be the poster child for corporate home ownership, it is far from the only region with this challenge. For example, a 2024 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis focused on the seven-county Minneapolis metropolitan area, where investor ownership of single-family rental homes doubled from 2006 to 2015 and now accounted for 3.4% of single-family detached homes.

It cited a $2.2 million settlement reached in Minnesota in March 2024 with HavenBrook Homes and six other defendants over deficient maintenance. They were required to grant $2M in debt forgiveness to tenants and create a path for the sale of the rental homes to affordable-housing entities. However, the local Fed’s analysis was unable to determine whether the benefits of corporate ownership outweighed the defects.

Meanwhile, policymakers at all levels across the country are trying to figure out ways to address the problem. In addition to reform proposals in several states, a number have been piling up in Congress. For example, U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley has introduced the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act to bar hedge funds from buying new homes and require them to sell those they own. Merkley and Rep. Adam Smith have also introduced the Humans Over Private Equity (HOPE) for Homeownership Act aimed at again to crackdown on hedge funds.

In addition, three California representatives have authored the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act to prevent large institutional investors from using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the purchase of single-family homes.

Another Senate bill, the Stop Predatory Investing Act, would prevent large-scale investors from deducting depreciation and interest from single-family homes. Yet another Senate bill would require private equity and other corporate investors to report housing purchases to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice for antitrust review to prevent anti-competitive transactions that would raise housing costs for would-be homeowners.

The findings of Ossoff’s investigation in Georgia will likely provide useful data for them all.