SPRING HILL, Tenn.—When real-estate agent Don Nugent listed a three-bedroom, two-bath house here on Jo Ann Drive, offers came immediately, including a $208,000 one from a couple with a young child looking for their first home.
A competing bid was too attractive to pass up. American Homes 4 Rent, AMH 2.00% a public company that had been scooping up homes in the neighborhood, offered the same amount—but all cash, no inspection required.
Twelve hours after the house went on the market in April, the Agoura Hills, Calif.-based real-estate investment trust signed a contract. About a month later, it put the house back on the market, this time for rent, for $1,575 a month.
A new breed of homeowners has arrived in this middle-class suburb of Nashville and in many other communities around the country: big investment firms in the business of offering single-family homes for rent. Their appearance has shaken up sales and rental markets and, in some neighborhoods, sparked rent increases.
On Jo Ann Drive alone, American Homes 4 Rent owns seven homes, property records indicate. In all of Spring Hill, four firms—American Homes, Colony Starwood Homes, Progress Residential and Streetlane Homes—own nearly 700 houses, according to tax rolls. That amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town, a 2016 census indicates, and roughly three-quarters of those available for rent, according to Lisa Wurth, president of the local Realtors’ association.
Those four companies and others like them have become big landlords in other Nashville suburbs, and in neighborhoods outside Atlanta, Phoenix and a couple dozen other metropolitan areas. All told, big investors have spent some $40 billion buying about 200,000 houses, renovating them and building rental-management businesses, estimates real-estate research firm Green Street Advisors LLC. Still, they own less than 2% of all U.S. rental homes, according to Green Street.
The buying spree amounts to a huge bet that the homeownership rate, which currently is hovering around a five-decade low, will stay low and that rents will continue to rise. The investors also are wagering that many people no longer see owning a home as an essential part of the American dream.
For once I'm glad I have an HOA. No renters allowed in my sub division.