Trump wants to ban investors from buying houses. Could Miami homes get cheaper?
President Donald Trump wants to keep large investors from buying single-family homes, which he says will help more Americans achieve the dream of becoming homeowners.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, the president wrote that he is “immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes” and “will be calling on Congress to codify it.”
In Miami, 5% of homes in the single-family rental market are owned by investors with more than 1,000 homes in the area, according to data from the Government Accountability Office. That puts the market at 13th in the country in terms of investor-owned homes.
Investors began buying up houses in Miami-Dade County and across the country at bargain prices during the Great Recession in 2008. In Miami-Dade, much of that real estate is in the southern part of the county.
Ron Shuffield, CEO of the South Florida brokerage Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices EWM Realty, said that investors initially planned to start selling off these houses after a few years. But when they realized how much home values were going up, they held on to the properties and have continued to rent them out.
Fifteen years ago, the median home price in the county was $150,000, Shuffield said. Now, it’s $672,000.
Rising home prices in Miami-Dade have been driven in part by economic recovery from the recession, low interest rates during the pandemic and growing demand for South Florida real estate. But this has left many Miami-Dade residents struggling to afford a home.
Investor-owned single-family rentals in Miami-Dade are typically homes under $1 million, a price point where there’s a lot of demand and not enough inventory, Shuffield said.
Shuffield said bringing affordable inventory that’s currently owned and rented out by large investors back into the market could help bring home prices down in Miami-Dade. But for that to happen, he said, it’s not enough to just stop investors from buying more houses.
“The only way it’s going to have an impact on buyers is to free up the property,” Shuffield said. “Those big corporations would have to decide that they’re going to start selling them.”
But it’s unclear whether Trump’s proposed ban would have that effect.
The president stated that he plans to stop investors from buying more single-family homes, but he did not say whether he wants to incentivize or force investors to sell off the single-family homes they already own.
This story was originally published January 10, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
