Six Takeaways From ResiDay 2025
Over the past five years, institutional investors whiplashed between charging into U.S. housing and stepping back to watch.
In 2021, large investment players piled into single-family rentals and build-to-rent communities at a speed the industry hadn’t seen before. By 2023, that rush had cooled. Higher rates, elevated home prices, and softer rents in a few construction-heavy markets slowed deals and pushed many investors back into wait-and-see mode.
On November 7, housing market research outlet ResiClub hosted its annual ResiDay conference in New York City. There, housing industry leaders showed their perspectives on the state of institutional real estate investing in 2025—and where it’s headed.
Here are six takeaways from ResiDay 2025:
1. BTR isn’t a niche anymore—it’s now a scaled asset class
Deliveries have climbed from 3,800 units in 2015 to more than 42,000 in 2024, with Yardi’s pipeline pointing to several more big years even as annual completions drift down from the peak. This is no longer an experimental corner of the market; it is a national asset class with real cycle risk.
That growth coincides almost perfectly with COVID and the SFR pivot to new construction.
“BTR wasn’t really much of a thing prior to 2020, when it became more difficult to compete for existing home sales,” said Jaime Arouh, Managing Director of the Institutional Group at LendingOne. “A lot of real estate investors and SFR operators pivoted to build-to-rent—the idea was if you can’t buy it, then build it.”
So why is the surge in build-to-rent starting to roll over?
“In a lot of the high-growth markets, you’re seeing slower absorption rates, home prices coming down, rents leveling off or coming down, and that’s kind of giving way to the lower starts in the next couple of years,” Arouh explains.
For institutional investors, the message is simple: BTR has scaled up and is now working through a supply wave like any other major property sector—no longer operating in a small, insulated niche.
2. Growth markets are where BTR is making its long-term bet
Build-to-rent is ultimately a long-term bet. This scatterplot tells us where that long-term bet is being placed.
Metros in the upper-right quadrant—with strong population growth and a large BTR footprint relative to renter households—are markets like Jefferson, Huntsville, Myrtle Beach, and Phoenix. Arouh says these are the same markets dealing with slower lease-ups and heavier concessions today, but they are also the places where investors are still underwriting.
The logic for institutional capital: if you believe those dots on the scatter will still be the fastest-growing metros in five to 10 years, then today is the entry point—provided investors have the structure and patience to hold through the reset.
3. Institutional single-family rental (SFR) interest is switching back on
After a big slowdown in investor buying in 2023 to 2024, Roofstock’s Chief Growth Officer Dennis Bron says he is finally seeing large buyers test the pipes again—albeit often via MLS deals and smaller portfolios, not headline-grabbing megatrades.
Appetite for the asset class never really went away. What changed was the math at post-COVID price and rent levels. The last few years effectively “pressure-tested” SFR and boosted its standing with long-duration capital.
“The asset class is very, very young, but it’s performed very well through a couple of pretty extreme scenarios,” Bron says. “I think the appetite for this asset class is only going to continue to grow.”
He continued:
“In some ways, it’s the largest, most liquid asset class in the world. Returns have been very favorable, and there are multiple paths to liquidity: you can sell vacant on the MLS, sell occupied to other investors, or simply sit on the asset and enjoy the yield.
That combination is pretty unique. It’s much harder to sell an apartment building or an office building. It’s also a far more attractive asset class to invest in over 20 to 30 years— there’s a huge amount of long-duration capital out there, especially from life insurers and pensions, that needs multi-decade investments. This asset class lines up really well with that.”
4. There’s still a trillion-plus of real estate capital sitting on the sidelines
Most big investors aren’t rushing into new deals yet—they’re focused on getting their existing portfolios to perform and waiting for more clarity on rates and pricing. But the money hasn’t gone away.
Bron points out that asset managers want a certain share of their portfolio in real estate, but right now they’re underweight.
“If you look at the asset allocation of large asset managers, they’re under-allocated to real estate by like 1% or 1.5%,” Bron says. “There’s a Green Street report where they were under-allocated pre-COVID, then got to their target allocation in 2023, and since then they’ve been falling below it again, largely because the stock market just performed like crazy.”
Bron estimates that the gap between where big investors are and where they want to be in real estate adds up to roughly $1 to 1.5 trillion of potential capital. Over time, he thinks a meaningful chunk of that will end up in housing, once uncertainty clears and allocators feel more comfortable deploying.
5. The winning BTR product is changing shape
If you zoom out on the BTR footprint map, a pattern jumps off the page: big, dense clusters in the Southeast and Sun Belt—suburban Atlanta, Raleigh, Charlotte, the Carolinas—where single-family rentals and BTR have essentially become core housing stock.
That’s the backdrop for Parkland Communities President Jim Jacobi repositioning his business.
“True single-family, detached-home build-to-rent communities work really well for large institutional players,” Jacobi says. “But for private developer folks like me, that is really difficult business model”
Instead of classic detached BTR at four units per acre, he’s building for-rent townhome communities that behave like horizontal multifamily and can actually hit institutional return hurdles.
“If I have a single-family home community of four units an acre, that just doesn’t generate enough revenue,” he said. “But if I’m 18 units an acre, my revenue is so high.”
These stacked townhomes are designed to look and feel like large, high-finish townhouses, but with two rental units per structure and shared walls that dramatically lower cost.
In many of the markets that stand out on the map, that dense, purpose-built townhome format is what Jacobi expects to increasingly pencil for private developers.
6. Carolinas, zoning, and timelines will define the next real scarcity
On geography, Jacobi is pushing hard into coastal and inland Carolinas as a next-decade bet on population and job growth.
“The Carolinas, on a percent growth basis, will be the largest percent growth basis of the United States for the next foreseeable future,” Jacobi says.
But he’s equally vocal that zoning—not just capital—is the real constraint.
Many municipalities have tightened or outright banned build-to-rent, and every new project requires fresh entitlements. Jacobi says that process typically takes two to four years from land contract to finished lots, which is why he’s buying and zoning aggressively while national builders pull back.
So in fast-growing regions like the Carolinas, where entitlements are hard and starts are slowing, Jacobi says today’s oversupply and concessions are likely to give way to genuine unit and lot scarcity into 2027 and beyond.
Big picture
The industry leaders who spoke at ResiDay 2025 made one thing clear: institutional housing is past the sugar-high phase and moving into a more disciplined, data-driven cycle.
Build-to-rent has grown into a real asset class with real swings, and the winners from here will be the investors who pick their markets, product, and partners carefully enough to ride out the noise.
