Florida homes owned by corporate investors: 117,000 — and counting

It was the serenity of The Enclave at Twin Rivers that pushed Kelly Phillips to buy.

“The peacefulness of Parrish really drew us in,” said Phillips, who bought the house in Manatee County last year. “It had a lot of the things we wanted.”

Nestled along Gamble Creek and Manatee River, the community boasts open spaces and nature trails that twist among the houses, all newly built by Lennar Homes. There’s a kayak launch, a river house, multiple parks. Phillips’ property is adjacent to a nature conservation, and she likes to watch for bald eagles and lightning bugs.

But soon after Phillips moved in, residents discovered the builder had sold around 100 houses in the neighborhood to Invitation Homes — an investment company with thousands of rental properties across the state.

The corporation gained a controlling share of the 126-home community. When it came time to vote for the three-person homeowner’s association, Invitation installed two employees on the board. Both live in Texas.

Homeowners feel like their slice of paradise was sold from under them, Phillips said.

“It was supposed to be homeowners that reside in the community, taking care of their own community,” Phillips said. “If you haven’t set foot in the community before, how can you look out for its best interests?”

But these kinds of sales are not unusual. The Enclave is just one neighborhood grappling with a broader trend disrupting the real estate industry, once controlled almost entirely by homeowners and mom-and-pop landlords.

Corporate real estate investors own more than 117,000 single-family homes across Florida, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis in the state by the Tampa Bay Times. Experts say these investors capitalized on the state’s population growth and minimal renter protections.

“They’re following where the jobs are being formed,” said Lesley Deutch, managing principal of the research firm, John Burns.

It’s a change felt far beyond Tampa Bay, where earlier this year the Times found investors own nearly 27,000 homes across three counties. The same corporations have sprawled around fast-growing metro areas like Jacksonville and Orlando.

The Times analysis includes property owners with 50 or more homes — including wealthy individuals, major building companies and institutional investment firms.

The latter group drove the buying spree. The Times found that firms with ties to Wall Street and private equity own more than 10% of Florida’s single-family rentals, a rate five times higher than the national average, according to industry group estimates.

Already well-established in multi-family housing, investment firms entered the single-family rental market after the 2008 housing crash. Their market share grew during the pandemic, when mortgage and interest rates dropped to historic lows and droves of people moved to Florida and other Sunbelt states.

Sales data from several Florida counties show spikes in investor buying in 2021. In counties hosting some of the state’s largest metro areas, the share of home purchases made by investors more than doubled.

Academic researchers say it’s easier for corporate investors to keep expanding in Florida because of regulations that limit or prohibit local controls and renter protections.

“People have been attracted to Florida specifically because we’re so lax with our rental laws here,” said Renz Torres, a graduate researcher studying investment companies in the housing market at the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies at the University of Florida.

In many cases, corporate investors spend where development is booming. In Polk County, for example, subdivisions replaced citrus groves as the population surged. Construction companies like DR Horton, Lennar and others bought at least 10,600 homes in Polk County since 2019.

Most of those homes were eventually sold to individuals and families. But the nation’s largest rental companies were also frequent buyers — sometimes scooping up dozens of homes at once, bought directly from the builders. The Times found hundreds of Polk County homes purchased by investment firms, from construction companies, since 2019.

Expanding suburbs are popular for firms buying in southern Hillsborough County, outside Jacksonville and circling Orlando. A bevy of corporate ownership stretches along Interstate 4. Entire communities are rented by FirstKey Homes, AMH and other corporations.

In suburbs of Tampa, Jacksonville and other Florida cities, many neighborhoods are full of corporate rental homes.

Owner:

Invitation Homes Progress Residential Amherst Group FirstKey Homes AMH Other

Home ownership data as of fall 2023.

TEGHAN SIMONTON AND LANGSTON TAYLOR | Times

The Enclave is another of these communities. Invitation Homes purchased most of the neighborhood starting in May 2023, property records show. Though bylaws allow for investor purchases and rentals, Phillips said residents were surprised the community would become primarily renters. Neither Lennar or Invitation responded to requests for comment before publication.

“We feel taken advantage of,” Phillips said.

As the election approached for the homeowner’s association board, two of Invitation’s employees submitted applications, listing the company’s Dallas headquarters in the address field. Neither employee is listed on property records as a homeowner in the neighborhood. With 100 or so homes in the community, the company controls 80% of the vote. Resident homeowners wouldn’t make much of a difference.

They worry that Invitation’s presence will negatively affect their home values and the feel of the neighborhood.

“They could change the bylaws,” she said. “They could potentially dissolve the HOA if they wanted to.”

But not all investors target the same regions — or even the same types of homes. While bigger companies often focus on the new builds, some small- and mid-sized investment groups cluster their acquisitions in census tracts with median household incomes below county averages. They’ve also bought at a faster clip in majority-Black or Hispanic neighborhoods, the Times found.

“Each company, each firm has a different objective,” said Renee Tapp, a professor at the University of Florida in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. “I’d say if there is one common denominator across all of these investors and all the markets, it’s profit.”

Take Pine Hills, for instance. The community just west of Orlando spans a dozen square miles and is home to around 72,000 people. Seven out of 10 residents are Black and the median household income is around $43,500. More than a decade ago, Orange County officials designated the area a Neighborhood Improvement District, providing additional funding to boost the local economy.

In the median Pine Hills neighborhood, nearly 13% of home sales from 2020 to 2023 were investor purchases. That’s more than triple most other parts of Orange County.

The largest share of homes was claimed by Starwood Capital Group, a private equity firm with about 1,700 homes across the state. Around 240 of them are in Pine Hills. A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment for this story.

The conditions are not unlike those in the south side of St. Petersburg, in Pinellas County. The area is home to several historically Black communities and has also been designated a special taxing district by the city. The Times found that for years, investors purchased homes inside the district at roughly triple the rate as the rest of the county.

“Investors are all very diverse,” said Torres, at the Shimberg Center. “Each one has a different thing they’re trying to do, different markets they’re trying to hit. It’s not just like you can group all investors into one big bubble. Trying to segment out all these different investors helps clarify and give more detail to what’s happening with housing in Florida.”

In Duval County, which has one of the highest concentrations of investor-owned homes in the state, the Times found the corporate purchases are more common in low-income neighborhoods and those with more Black residents.

Researchers have similar findings. In a 2024 case study of Jacksonville, Torres found that most investors of nearly any size were active in census tracts with higher proportions of people of color. But the “mega investors,” which the study defined as having more than 1,000 homes in the metro region, were concentrated outside Interstate 295, circling Jacksonville.

David Jaffee, a sociologist at the University of North Florida, points to ZIP codes consisting of College Park, West Jacksonville and other neighborhoods in Jacksonville’s urban core. The Times found the median income is often less than half the city’s average in these places, and the majority of residents are Black.

Jaffee describes the pattern as a form of “predatory inclusion” where underrepresented groups are given access to homes and communities, but in exploitative ways.

“These are old neighborhoods, old homes,” Jaffee said. “They can get them cheap, and that’s one of the incentives.”

To Jaffee, the trend is an alarming consequence of the influence private interests have over the housing market. In 2022, he formed an informal research group, JAX Rental Housing Project, to continue studying potential impacts on rent costs and eviction rates. The research eventually inspired him to form a tenant’s union in Jacksonville, as well.

“The position between corporate landlords and tenants is one of enormous, unequal distribution of power,” he said.

Proponents, meanwhile, say the firms provide an important service for families across the state opting out of homeownership — either due to financial constraints or lifestyle choices.

“I see a lot of positives in it,” said Deutch. “Mortgage rates are so high that it’s making it difficult for people to buy homes. So these new homes are being rented out, and it allows families … if they can’t afford a down payment or qualify for a mortgage, (to) be renters. And they’re renting in these brand new, nice communities.”

Following the 2021 spike, investor acquisitions remained high in 2022, and then slowed dramatically the following year, when insurance and interest rates climbed.

Deutch predicted investment firms will continue to increase their market share — just more slowly.

“They grew very fast while they were able to, but they’re subject to a cyclical market,” she said. “I do think the industry is here to stay.”

Back in Manatee County, Phillips said Enclave residents don’t know what to expect for their community. Some have explored selling. With a corporation in control, it doesn’t feel like residents have a say anymore.

“People are upset,” said Phillips. “They feel like there’s just nothing anyone can do.”

About Buying Up the Bay

With four prior installments, Buying up the Bay explores how the rise of real estate investors in Tampa Bay influences the housing market. The series was written and reported by Rebecca Liebson and Teghan Simonton.

Liebson covers real estate, focusing on how trends in the market play out in people’s everyday lives. Simonton is a data reporter covering business and health, focusing on poverty and cost of living.

We welcome your feedback, tips or personal stories. If you are affected by this topic or if you have ideas about what the Times should cover in future installments, email us at rliebson@tampabay.com or tsimonton@tampabay.com.

About the data

The Times found more than 117,000 single-family homes across Florida that are owned by corporate real estate investors. To find these homes, we relied on property data collected by the state Department of Revenue each year from every county.

The data includes the location of each parcel of land, its street address, owner’s name and owner’s mailing address. Using the programming language, R, the Times downloaded the property data for all 67 Florida counties and standardized them into a consistent format. We corrected spelling discrepancies and grouped all single-family parcels by their owners’ mailing addresses, focusing specifically on the mailing addresses attached to 50 or more properties.

The Times then researched hundreds of addresses on SunBiz and the open source software, OpenCorporates, to identify which company uses the address or is headquartered there. We found that some companies employ the use of hundreds of LLCs and multiple mailing addresses.

This analysis allowed us to identify which companies had the greatest footprint across the state, and the areas in which buying concentrated. We requested sales transaction data from counties that had especially high concentrations: including Hillsborough, Duval, Orange, and Polk Counties. By zooming further in on sales, we could find specific neighborhoods where drastic changes have occurred in recent years.

We used additional data sources, including from the U.S. Census Bureau, to search for demographic trends in the places where companies focus.

Times reporters vetted this methodology with academic researchers at multiple points throughout the analysis.