Will the value of housing be lost in 2025? Here are the areas where the price drop was the greatest
Zillow said the trend reflects affordability pressures, high mortgage rates and weak demand across the country.
scripps news
President Donald Trump says he will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes in an effort to ease the affordability crisis plaguing the housing market.
“For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream,” President Trump said in a Jan. 7 post on the social media site Truth Social. “I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from purchasing more single-family homes, and I will ask Congress to legislate. People live in homes, not businesses.”
Since the 2008 financial crisis shut many Americans out of the mortgage market, institutional investors like Blackstone have been reliably buying and renting out single-family homes.
Although many housing experts are skeptical that banning institutional investors from buying homes will result in significant changes to the overall housing market, Wall Street investors could become a popular scapegoat. As USA TODAY reported in 2024, limiting market participation was a rare point of agreement between the two presidential candidates.
Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing for the nonpartisan Consumer Federation of America, said big investors have uneven influence in rural areas across the country.
“While institutional investors make up a small portion of the nation’s homebuyers, they have turned some areas (such as the Atlanta suburbs) into ‘mortgage deserts’, limiting homeownership opportunities,” he said in an email. “Restricting private equity access to housing is a long way off.”
But such a ban would likely be difficult, if not completely impossible, to enforce, advocates say.
First-time home buyers are suffering because housing remains in short supply and prices are getting higher. Industry analysis shows that in the past year, the share of all buyers has fallen to an all-time low, and the average age of first-time buyers has jumped to 40.
This story has been updated with additional information.
