We never wavered on our belief in BTR
Even as political uncertainty swamped the SFR/BTR industry in the first half of this year—and many lenders and operators stopped doing deals altogether—our belief in BTR remained strong. We felt that Build-to-Rent was too important to housing supply to be legislated out of existence, and this weekend, that belief was validated. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is now law, and the institutional homebuying “ban” that dominated headlines since January turned out to be something the industry can actually work with.
A Rough Fight, a Better Ending
It’s worth remembering how far this traveled. In January, the administration floated banning large institutional investors from buying single-family homes outright. When the Senate came out and passed its version in March, the institutional threshold came in at 350 homes—with existing portfolios grandfathered and acquisitions via some exemption pathways like Build-to-Rent and Fix-to-Rent were carved out. Only, that Senate bill in March had a huge catch that alarmed nearly everyone in this business: a forced seven-year sell-off on homes acquired through those exemptions. The National Association of Home Builders pulled its support. Seventy-six members of Congress signed a letter warning it would effectively halt build-to-rent production nationwide.
That seven-year clock is what froze much of the BTR/SFR industry this spring—with the industry unaware whether this business would exist in its current form.
But somewhere in that uncertainty, our conviction didn’t waver. We stayed close to the legislative process, and over the last month and a half, we made a call: We kept building our pipeline, well ahead of a resolution, betting that reason would prevail. It did. The House stripped the seven-year sell-off entirely. Build-to-rent construction got a clean exemption—no forced disposition clock. Fix-to-Rent and Renovate-to-Rent got similar relief—and as long as giant operators play by the guidelines, including offering homeownership pathways for tenants, many traditional deals can continue.
The bill went into law this past Saturday.
Why This Mattered So Much
This was never just about the 40,000 to 50,000 Build-to-Rent units a year that the 7-year forced selloff could’ve stalled. It was also about what happens when homebuilders lose institutional investors as buyers altogether.
Homebuilders construct roughly a million single-family homes per year, and institutional investors play a critical role most people don’t see—they purchase entire communities or the unsold remainder of a development, which frees up a builder’s capital to move to the next piece of land. Take away that exit, and you don’t just shrink Build-to-Rent. You slow the entire homebuilding engine. Even a modest 10% pullback in building activity translates to roughly 100,000 fewer homes added to national supply each year—more than double the units produced by just single-family Build-to-Rent.
And because land acquisition decisions made today don’t show up as finished homes for one to three years, a slowdown now becomes a supply shortage later. We lived through this exact dynamic after the financial crisis, and we’re still digging out of the housing deficit it created. A policy meant to improve affordability could easily have made it worse.
Where We Go From Here
We’ve been closing loans continuously through the last two months while much of the industry sat on the sidelines waiting for clarity. That’s not an accident—it’s a deliberate bet on where this was headed, and it means we’re already positioned to move for borrowers who’ve been waiting for the all-clear. In fact, we’ve quoted over $1B in BTR deals in the last 60 days alone.
If you’re a builder or investor who paused activity while this played out, now is the time to take a second look—at infill and spec opportunities in undersupplied markets across the Northeast and Midwest, at new construction relative to resale, and at build-to-rent as a durable, long-term strategy rather than a regulatory question mark.
We never stopped believing in this business. Now we get to keep building it—with you.
Matthew Neisser
Chief Executive Officer
LendingOne
