The Landlord Lens - Congress Passed a Historic Housing Bill. Trump Delayed It

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Congress passed a historic housing bill aimed at expanding housing supply, cutting red tape, and putting new limits on Wall Street’s role in the housing market. But even after passing Congress, the bill still faces delays from President Trump before it can become law.In this episode of Landlord Lens, we break down what’s actually in the bill, why it matters for landlords, investors, renters, and homebuyers, and whether these new housing rules could change the rental market going forward.

The House and the Senate both passed a major supply side shot in the arm for the housing market and affordability. If your community was one where institutionals were really active buying existing homes, you may feel a little bit of a pre- Ladies and gentlemen, John and I just filmed an excellent episode around the new housing bill that passed. And of course, as soon as we finished, we found out that it will not be signed by President Trump until save a major. America hits his desk. I don't need a housing bill. I want to see what happens. We said, I made billions of dollars with housing.

I know housing better than anybody, maybe anywhere. But because we're so proud of the video, we're going to roll it anyways. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Landlord Lens, and this one's pretty special. Just this week, the House and the Senate both passed a major bipartisan supply-side shot in the arm for the housing market and affordability. We've been talking about supply-side, supply-side, supply-side, supply-side. side. Why isn't anyone doing anything about supply side? And then turns out everyone did something

about supply side. Everyone did. It was a huge bipartisan win too. Some of the margins were nuts. I think it passed the Senate 85 to 5. Yeah, absolutely crushed the Senate and the House was equally lopsided as affordability is in, regardless of your party today. Yeah. Now, there's a bunch of titles in this. I think there's 10 titles, 12 titles of sections of changes they're making. Grants are in here, changes to regulations, changes to the Environmental Protection Act, getting streamlined in reviews. But the headline that everybody's talking about is around institutional investors being capped at 350 units. Yes, there is a restriction that this places on our institutional, as you said, defined by having 350 single family homes, where they can't go out and continue to purchase new single family homes for the person.

of renting. Exactly. Now, this makes great, great headline, but there's a lot of nuance underneath it that I think it's worth unpacking because it'll probably play out differently than you might expect in your local housing market. Absolutely. And we're going to refer to single family rentals as SFRs as we go through this. And what we've seen in institutional's is they were actually investing quite a bit of money in purchasing existing SFRs. Right. We've talked about this across the Sunbelt. There's a lot of purchases. is real hot spots in Atlanta. Yeah.

We saw Phoenix. Yeah. But what has actually happened since that peaked around COVID 2022, 2021, is they've already been drawing back, right? As interest rates went up, they've stopped purchasing. They've dropped back 70% of their purchasing of SFRs across the country. Yeah. Exactly.

They've pulled back already significantly. Cash flow is not as there as it was at the beginning of COVID. Everyone knows that. So they pulled back there and have instead a lot of that money is now going into build to rent communities. Yes, exactly, which kind of require institutional involvement, right? The amount of money to plan out a brand new community of 200 single family homes is a lot. Yes. There's you, myself, most of our audience out there are going out and setting up brand new communities like these institutionals have been able to.

Exactly. Yeah. And whether it's single family or some of these take the form of like duplexes, just kind of plopped around, right? You probably see them in your local market. They're getting built everywhere and that's where the institutional money has already gone. Yeah, it's already shifted there in a big way. Now, earlier versions of this bill was actually going to limit the life, the tenure that you can own a build to rent property. For sale kind of thing. Exactly. For sale after seven years. Now, that did not make it in this final version that was luckily. Luckily for the institutional's and I think from our perspective, luckily for the economy and supply itself, because if you don't have institutional funding some of these built to rent

communities, I don't think they get built. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the capital requirements for it are just way too huge. And you can't really make it make sense on just a seven year timeline. Absolutely. Yeah, you need to be able to hold that for longer and not be forced to sell an entire community all at once. That's the other challenge, right? Who is? the buyer of that community when you have to liquidate it all within, you know, the one or two years that it got set up, especially now that institutional can't buy it. Exactly. Yeah.

Yep. So it was actually good to see that exemption added, I think, for the purpose of what we constantly talk about is supply here in the United States. Now, political conversations, though, and there was a huge political conversation about what we're talking about right now, has an impact on decisions that institutions make. So I think institutions were probably watching this, calling their senators saying, hey, pretty spooked out right now. Can you make sure this doesn't happen?

That fear is not going to go away just because this specific version of the bill passed. Absolutely. Now, maybe it was all employed by lawmakers just to increase the lobbying that institutionals have to spend on these topics. But yes, if you're an institutional landlord, right, that has, built up a large aspect of your investments in single family rentals. And you're seeing this, you may be inclined to move your investment elsewhere. Right.

Now, real estate is part of a diversified portfolio, right? And so my expectation is they're not going to move it out of real estate at all. But what you might see is institutional to move more into multifamily, which is already largely run by institutional due to the size, complexity and expense of putting new multifamily buildings together. Exactly. Yeah. And also the cost of land that a multifamily is going to be successful on top of, right,

is going to be pretty high. Absolutely. And so in a world where multifamily starts getting more investment by institutionals and becomes a growing percentage of the housing supply in different communities, I actually wonder if that's going to make single families more valuable as opposed to more affordable, which I think is the goal of this bill. right? Because an apartment is really not, or a condo is really not a substitute for a single family home with a yard, right? And so you could actually see a world where money shifts from SFRs to more

multifamily, which increases supply and affordability in communities. But amongst those single family owners, it may actually increase value of their properties and the rent for them. Gotcha. And to see if your theory is correct, we'd probably just look at new construction around bill to own and whether that goes up or down as a result of the passage of the bill, right? Exactly. And I would also look at whether or not multifamily permitting, right, increases here as a result of the passage versus the build to, build to rent single family and community. Gotcha. Interesting. Yeah. So it also, I guess, depends on your local community where you invest, how prevalent is institutional money and where is that going. You can just pay attention, right,

to new construction. Absolutely. because the institutionals are not going to back out, right, of real estate as a whole. But what's also really interesting is this bill tried to remove some of the red tape that exists for just building in general. Yeah, yeah. Which, I think the removal of red tape, increasing supply side, something we've talked about, and I'm a huge fan of. Now, the reality is, though, the federal government can actually force local municipalities to necessarily adopt these things. Right. And so it still's going to come down to your local building code, zoning, and restrictions that they have in place as to whether or not this actually makes it easier for you as a builder or not.

Right. Yeah. And there's a bunch of money that has the strings attached to make those adjustments that they want to the local building process. But like you said, it depends on the state and the local municipality saying, yes, I'd like to do that and prove that they're doing it so that they can get that money. Yeah, I think realistically in the state of Colorado where we're located right now, the day after this was signed, it did not become any easier to build yet. No, not yet. Yeah, exactly. There's still a whole devolution process where the states and local areas need to decide how to and which parts of this law to take advantage of. And I said before I became a landlord, I never really appreciated the value of local elections. Yeah. And so I don't think we can say it enough if you want to fight, you know, nimbism in your community. If you want to make sure things like building and zoning is possible, zoning for building is possible.

You got to get out and you got to vote, especially if these things come up specifically on ballots or just make sure that the candidates that are representing your interests in your local government get elected. Okay. So we just kind of summarized what we think of the headlines surrounding. this bill. And it's a huge bill with Tim Scott, Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, crazy three names to say together, threw a giant rock into the pond of the American housing market, right? It's going to have a lot of ripple effects. But what does this actually mean for the independent real estate investor? Yeah. So if you're a investor, a landlord like myself, if your community was one where institutionals were really active buying existing homes,

you may feel a little bit of a reprieve. I am skeptical, though, that nation, wide, it's going to make a big impact from that standpoint. And so that means really as an individual landlord, there's not a huge impact that this is going to have right now, I think, on your business. We've seen across the country as supply has increased, rent prices have stabilized or even dropped a little bit. And so this may very well be a continuation of that, especially if some of the red tape provisions that make it easier to build actually. drip all the way down to the local municipalities where a lot of that's controlled. Super interesting. Okay. So you're probably not going to see an impact immediately,

and it definitely depends on how prevalent institutional money is in your market. And then you've also got the question of how activists your local government's going to be and taking advantage of the other supply side benefits of the bill. Absolutely. And if you see a lot of supplies starting to pop up in your area, you should think about two things. One, usually rent prices are going to drop. So holding onto your existing tenant, right, if you're cash flowing well. Two is keeping your eye open for investment opportunities, right?

When supply increases, it is when property values will drop. And there might be great buys out there for you to start building your portfolio. And entrance price is so important as a real estate investor that getting it on the way down, is actually better than getting it on the way up in terms of cash flowing it 10, 20 years out. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That entry price, so important, right? Absolutely.

Cool. Okay, well, something tells me this is not going to be the last time we talk about this bill and its impact on the American housing market. It's going to have a lot of them. But thank you guys so much. If there's something in this bill you want us to talk about, please leave a comment.

We're definitely interested in addressing what you're interested in. Yeah, especially if you love an aspect, hate an aspect, leave the comment, like and subscribe. TurboTenant is the all-in-one platform for landlords to manage their rental properties. From vacancy to tenancy, we have you covered with industry-leading tools and expert advice. Landlord better from anywhere for free at turbotenant.com.