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A bipartisan housing bill that would cap the number of single-family homes large institutional investors can purchase is on track to reach President Donald Trump's desk before the end of the month, after House and Senate leaders agreed to final bill text on Tuesday.
An 87-8 procedural vote cleared the way for Senate floor debate on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. A full Senate passage vote could happen before the week is out, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters, with the House scheduled to return next week and take up the measure at that point.
Under the agreed-upon language, any investor owning 350 or more single-family homes qualifies as an institutional investor subject to purchase restrictions. A Senate-passed provision that would have forced build-to-rent investors to offload those properties within seven years or face financial penalties did not survive the bicameral negotiations.
Beyond investor limits, the package addresses a range of other issues — from relaxing construction-loan requirements for community banks and adjusting disaster recovery grant programs to encouraging localities to loosen zoning restrictions and expanding access to manufactured housing, Roll Call reported.
The deal was reached among the top four lawmakers overseeing housing legislation: Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, ranking member Senator Elizabeth Warren, House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill, and ranking member Representative Maxine Waters.
"This bill is the result of years of work to lower costs, expand housing supply, cut red tape, protect taxpayers, and help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership," Scott said in a statement. Hill said in a statement he looks forward to President Trump signing the bill into law.
Warren called the investor restriction a historic first. In a brief hallway interview at the Capitol, Warren told CNBC: "Never before has Congress put any restriction on the ability of private equity to move into whatever industry they want, buy up whatever they want and destroy whatever they want."
Every one of the eight dissenting votes was cast by a Republican senator, The Hill reported.
The bill's investor provisions build on a debate that data suggests is more geographically concentrated than the national political conversation implies. Institutional investors — those who have made more than 350 single-family purchases since 2015 — represent roughly 1% of all single-family transactions in the U.S., with buying activity clustered in Sun Belt and Midwestern markets like Memphis, Atlanta, and Charlotte rather than in higher-cost coastal cities.
House members backed earlier iterations of the legislation by wide margins — 390-9 in February and 396-13 in May — a track record that lawmakers say opens the door to fast-tracking the final text when the chamber reconvenes.
