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HOUSTON (AP) – In 2020, Raysall Wiggins decided she no longer wanted to rent a home in the Houston neighborhood where she grew up. She wanted to buy.

“I wanted to have something of my own, something that I could eventually pass down to my children,” said Wiggins, who has two teenage sons. “My parents never had that, and I wanted something different for my own children.”

Wiggins, who works in health care, put in multiple offers on homes in Houston’s Acres Home neighborhood. But more times than not, she was beaten not by another family, but by an investor or company, her real estate agent said.

“It’s devastating to continuously go through the same thing, for a person to constantly be told, ‘no’ or ‘we didn’t get it,’” Wiggins said. “It’s a complete letdown.”

President Donald Trump highlighted Wiggins’ story as he pressed lawmakers at his State of the Union address to bar so-called institutional investors, large corporations that buy homes, as well as investors big and small, from purchasing single-family homes.

Trump blamed investors for “stealing away her American Dream.”

Homeownership is viewed as the most accessible way for Americans to build wealth. By that measure, the idea of corporations owning homes is offensive to Americans, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, an online real estate brokerage. Going after them carries populist appeal.

But, she and other housing economists said, such a prohibition does not attack the root of the nation’s housing problems.

“Declaring a ban on institutional investors works as a political talking point,” Fairweather said. “It works in terms of it emotionally resonating with people who understand the problem but don’t necessarily understand what the right solution is. The real solution, which is to build more homes in the places that people most want to live, is much harder for the President to achieve.”

Republicans, including Trump, and Democrats, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have sought to cast blame on Wall Street and other kinds of investors driving up home prices and making it too hard for would-be first-time homebuyers out of the market.

They’ve sought ways to give first-time homebuyers a leg up in the housing market. Trump signed an executive order in January aimed at discouraging federal agencies from facilitating sales of homes to large institutional investors. Trump called on Congress during his State of the Union address to make that ban permanent. Senators are expected to vote on a bill this month that would limit firms from owning more than 350 single-family homes.

Texas officials, too, have shown an appetite — including Gov. Greg Abbott and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat challenging Abbott in this year’s gubernatorial race — to curb investors from buying up too many homes.

Kicking Wall Street out of the housing market, housing economists argue, wouldn’t blunt the country’s affordability problems — and could make the problem worse.

For one, estimates show large institutional investors own only a small percentage of the nation’s stock of single-family homes — between 1% and 3%. Investors have pulled back considerably since the height of their activity during the pandemic and are now selling more homes than they buy. Those homes aren’t just sitting there — they’re rented to tenants who may not be able to afford to purchase them.

“When you ban institutional investors, you’re potentially banning the people who might not otherwise have access to local schools in single-family neighborhoods or other amenities in those neighborhoods,” Fairweather said. “That reinforces income segregation and racial segregation.”

The primary driver of the nation’s high housing costs, experts have argued, is a deep shortage of homes to buy or rent. By various tallies, the nation is short millions of housing units. Texas, in particular, needs 319,500 homes of all kinds, according to one oft-cited estimate. Banning institutional investors from buying homes, or at least making it more difficult for them to do so, would do nothing to create more homes.

“If you stop them from buying, will it result in more housing construction? No,” said Edward Pinto, co-director of the AEI Housing Center at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Low rates led to rush of investors

Institutional homebuying took off during the COVID-19 pandemic as low-interest rates and high housing demand made owning a home an attractive investment. At one point, they bought one in nearly every 10 homes sold nationwide, according to figures provided by ATTOM Data Solutions, which tracks property transactions and real estate data.

Investors bought even more homes in Texas during the same period. Institutional investors bought 68,482 homes across the state in 2021, or 14.2% of all homes sold in Texas that year, ATTOM figures show. ATTOM defines institutional investor purchases as “residential property sales to non-lending entities that purchased at least 10 properties in a calendar year.” In 2019, such investors bought 26,735 — some 7% of homes sold in Texas that year.

The Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin regions emerged as particular hot spots for investor homebuying in 2021 and 2022.

Institutional buyers significantly ramped up their presence in the Houston region’s home-buying market just as Wiggins began her hunt for a home. In 2019, institutional investors bought fewer than 4,500 homes in the Houston area, ATTOM data show, some 5.3% of all homes sold there that year. Two years later, they bought more than 15,000 — and accounted for more than 13% of sales.

With that influx came a flurry of anecdotes of would-be homebuyers getting outbid by one corporation or another.

Kim Gartner, a Fort Worth real estate agent, said it was common during the pandemic for investors of all sizes to beat out her clients for homes. Often, corporate buyers, she said. Some buyers stuck it out, putting in offers on multiple homes before finally securing one, Gartner said. Others gave up.

“They got frustrated and didn’t feel like they could compete, so they just kind of decided to hold off,” said Gartner, who is secretary and treasurer at the Greater Fort Worth Realtors Association.

There’s no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes an institutional investor. A corporation that buys a single-family home could be a major company that owns tens of thousands of homes or a mom-and-pop landlord that owns one or two homes.

Whatever their size, investors own very few of the state’s single-family housing stock, estimates show.

Less than 1% of Texas’ single-family housing stock is owned by corporations that own 100 units or more as of June 2025, according to estimates from the American Enterprise Institute. Smaller landlords who own between two and nine properties own about 13.2% of the state’s single-family homes, while owners with 10 to 99 homes hold about 1.8% of the stock.

It’s not clear whether institutional investors ultimately have any effect on home prices, housing policy wonks said.

A home renovated by an institutional investor will likely rent for more than it did before that investor bought it, said Daniel Oney, research director at the Texas Real Estate Research Center. But he said he hasn’t seen convincing evidence that investors have driven the state’s housing prices upward.

“We see a role for (institutional investors), and regulating them may not actually have that big of an impact on home prices,” Oney said.

But tales of would-be buyers’ struggles to purchase a home when matched against a Goliath investor have garnered sympathy from Texas lawmakers, who in 2023 sent a bill to Abbott’s desk compelling the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University to keep track of institutional buyers’ activity in the state’s housing market.

Abbott vetoed the bill among a slew of bills he vetoed to try to force Republican legislators at the time to reach a deal to cut property taxes.

The following year, he called on state lawmakers to rein in Wall Street homebuying when they convened in 2025.

“I strongly support free markets,” Abbott wrote in a post on X. “But this corporate large-scale buying of residential homes seems to be distorting the market and making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home.”

Lawmakers left Austin last year without touching the matter. Hinojosa, who has pushed bills targeting investors, reintroduced a similar measure to track investor activity as well as one to prevent them from buying a home for at least 30 days after it first hit the market. Neither went anywhere.

“Making housing affordable in Texas starts with holding private equity and institutional buyers accountable,” Hinojosa wrote in a Facebook post in December. “As governor, I will do just that — make it easier for working Texans to buy a home.

An Abbott representative did not directly answer questions about the governor’s stance on banning institutional investors, referring a reporter to his past comments. Hinojosa’s campaign did not return requests for comment.

A slight edge

The U.S. Senate this week advanced a bill aimed at easing the nation’s housing affordability crunch. Within that bill is a provision banning large investors from owning more than 350 single-family homes. That doesn’t count homes in build-to-rent developments, subdivisions of single-family homes intended for tenants.

The bill includes a provision that requires companies to sell those build-to-rent homes within seven years, Bloomberg News reported. Builders and a coalition of housing advocates, including the group Dallas Neighbors for Housing, have called on lawmakers to strike that language from the bill.

Would-be homebuyers might gain a slight competitive edge should officials pass laws to force those homes back onto the for-sale market, some experts acknowledged, because supply would be increased. But that injection of supply wouldn’t be big enough to put a real dent in home prices, they argue. What’s more is that supply infusion in the for-sale market would bite into the country’s rental supply, which plays a role in the country’s overall housing ecosystem. Rents could go up as a result.

Depending on the scope of whatever law gets passed, an institutional investor may wind up selling their home to a smaller investor, not a homebuyer who wants to live there, housing experts noted.

Instead of targeting Wall Street, housing experts said officials should focus on ways to allow more homes to be built like speeding up local permitting processes, allowing smaller homes on smaller lots and a wider array of housing types like duplexes, townhomes and smaller apartment buildings in places that now only allow single-family homes. Housing advocates are fond of noting that firms with a large portfolio of single-family homes have said that they’re less profitable in places that allow more homes to be built.

The power to enact those kinds of changes largely rests with states and cities, not the federal government — and those kinds of changes often face pushback from existing homeowners. But policymakers at the federal level could pass measures encouraging states and local governments to allow more homes to be built, housing experts said.

Texas lawmakers enacted several measures, which Abbott signed and Hinojosa voted for, to boost the state’s housing supply last year like allowing smaller homes on smaller lots in some places and apartments in commercial areas in the state’s biggest cities. Austin officials, too, have relaxed a slew of local regulations in recent years to allow more homes to be built, but few other major Texas cities have.

There are additional solutions.

When Wiggins finally purchased her home in 2023, she bought it through the Harris County Community Land Trust, which uses a method housing advocates have touted to help lower-income families secure affordable homeownership. Under the program, Wiggins owns the house but the trust owns the land underneath, which lowers the overall cost of the home — an arrangement Wiggins said she has mixed feelings about. But the setup allows her to build equity and pass the home down to her kids, Wiggins said.

“It was another way of still obtaining the dream,” Wiggins said.

BOCA CHICA BEACH (AP) – The Texas Supreme Court pondered how far the state can go in limiting access to a public beach during oral arguments Thursday in a case involving the closure of Boca Chica Beach for SpaceX’s rocket launches.

Rio Grande Valley environmentalist and indigenous groups are suing the Texas General Land Office and Cameron County over a law, passed in 2013, that allows some counties to temporarily close a beach for space flight activities.

The lawsuit is among multiple waged over the years between local advocates and SpaceX as the space exploration company has continued to expand its physical footprint and the frequency of its rocket launches in South Texas. Both, activists argue, have caused harm to the local environment and impeded the public’s ability to access a beach that has to be closed off for safety when SpaceX is conducting its test launches.

Last year, the Federal Aviation Administration authorized SpaceX to launch rockets up to 25 times per year, up from the five times per year the company was previously allowed. The launches cause a closure of the roughly 8-mile long beach that lies adjacent to the SpaceX launch pad.

Attorneys representing the groups — Save RGV, the Sierra Club and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas — centered on the Open Beaches Amendment to the Texas Constitution that grants the public an unrestricted right to use public beaches.

The state, however, argued that the amendment did not guarantee every person access to every Gulf Coast beach at all times.

“It is a more limited right,” said Beth Klusmann, deputy solicitor general for the Texas Attorney General’s Office. “The question, of course, then is what are those limits.”

Klusmann argued that all property is subject to Texas’ valid exercise of police power and that the 2013 law — Texas House Bill 2623 — fell within that power because it is meant to protect people during rocket launches and furthers the state’s interest in the space industry.

The justices questioned Klusmann on what would constitute the state going too far in restricting access to the beach, to which she replied that a blanket elimination of access to the beach would be a violation of the Constitution.

Justice Evan A. Young asked if the state would be going too far if SpaceX launches necessitated a closure of the beach for 365 days out of the year.

“I think 365 days probably would exceed the police power in this case given the obvious interest of the people in enacting this amendment and putting it in the Constitution, but we’re nowhere near 365 days,” Klusmann said.

The court also asked why the use of “unrestricted right” in the Open Beaches Amendment, when it comes to the public’s access to the beach, should not be considered as a limit on Texas’ police power. Klusmann pointed to a previous court opinion that stated that unrestricted use of property did not mean it was not subject to the police power.

“I could give someone the unrestricted use of my backyard but the cities can still come in and say you can’t put a gas station there,” she said.

Attorney Marisa Perales, who represented the environmentalist and indigenous groups, was asked by the justices why this use of police power, through HB 2623, was invalid in her clients’ eyes.

Perales said the purpose of the Open Beaches Amendment was to provide an unrestricted right of access to the beach, though she acknowledged there are some limits.

“Where’s that line?” Justice Debra H. Lehrmann asked.

Perales couldn’t specify where that line would be, but said the restrictions set by the state through HB 2623 should not be allowed because the beach closures were being done to facilitate a hazardous activity that puts the public in danger in the first place.

But Lehrmann suggested there were other instances in which the government could be conducting dangerous activity that needed to be off limits to the public..

“So I don’t know that that’s a sufficient answer,” Lehrmann said.

Justice Young asked if SpaceX were to only conduct one launch per year, would her argument be the same. Perales said their argument, based on the plain language of the Constitution, would be the same.

Perales said the plain text would also prohibit state law enforcement from directing a training or simulation of a beach attack on the beach that excluded the public. However, she said that an analysis of whether that was a valid exercise of police power could apply, allowing that to go forward.

There were also questions from justices about whether private residents were allowed to file a legal challenge in this case.

An attorney representing Cameron County, James P. Allison, argued that the Open Beaches Act of the Texas Constitution did not create a private right of enforcement, meaning that private citizens should not be able to challenge the law.

Justice Jimmy Blacklock said there might be an argument that the lack of private enforcement renders the provision useless because it cannot be enforced. To that, Sullivan said that was incorrect because state agencies would still be allowed to file challenges in court.

However, Justice Jane N. Bland asked that if it is the state that is alleged to have violated the Constitution and the state is the only one with the right of enforcement, how would they remedy the state’s violation of the Constitution.

Allison did not directly answer the question, saying they could only apply the language of the Constitution.

Asked if local governments, like counties, could sue, Allison said they would have that power.

However, Perales pointed out in this case it was the county, along with the GLO, who were the ones impeding access to the beach and argued that a private citizen can sue the government to rectify a constitutional violation.