President Donald Trump set the real estate world scrambling early January when he declared war on large institutional investors in a policy statement, asking Congress to act on the issue.
Trump doubled down Tuesday by signing an executive order banning large institutional investors from the housing market. In his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said “American will not become a nation of renters.”
But what’s the definition of an institutional investor? Reports on investor purchases in Las Vegas have different definitions.
UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate has led the charge on the subject locally, putting out a number of studies on investor ownership of single-family homes in the Las Vegas Valley. Shawn McCoy, the director of the center, said one important thing to remember is Las Vegas is definitely a hot zone for investor activity.
“Las Vegas is a standout. Investor activity in Las Vegas exceeds the national average and our report ranked Las Vegas amongst the top three metros in the country,” he said in a previous interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Large institutional investors, hedge funds, private equity and Wall Street-backed companies first got involved in buying residential real estate in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, snapping up properties largely in Sun Belt cities as millions of Americans defaulted on their mortgages and went bankrupt. They have since steadily increased their share of homes on the market since 2008, turning houses into permanent rental properties.
Back in 2023, the Lied Center for Real Estate delivered one of the first comprehensive reports on investors, which defined an investor as anyone who had purchased five or more properties over the past decade.
Investors, at that time, owned approximately 80,000 single-family homes in Clark County, which is about 14 percent of the county’s housing stock of 563,000, according to McCoy.
These same groups have made nearly 10 percent of all home purchases in the county since 1988, and control an outsized amount in North Las Vegas (approximately 25 percent). McCoy said in a previous interview that it appeared back in 2023 investors were buying homes, but not offloading them.
“Since 1988, 77 percent of homes that were purchased by investors were never sold again suggesting that roughly three quarters of homes that are purchased by investors are held as long-term rentals,” he said.
Since 2021, according to the UNLV study, the share of homes purchased by investors exceeded 20 percent in 20 different ZIP codes in Southern Nevada — three in particular making up the bulk of the purchases, 89149 (northwest Las Vegas Valley), 89031 (north Las Vegas Valley) and 89113 (Enterprise).
In 2025, UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate did an update on investor purchases, using Redfin data. Redfin defines an investor as anyone who has bought a home through a company, such as an LLC or a trust, which catches more home purchases then UNLV’s original study. UNLV’s study using Redfin data found investors bought up a lot of valley homes in two distinct chunks, said Nicholas Irwin, who was one of the authors of the study.
“Over this 15-year period, investors accounted for between 14 and 29 percent of all home sales each year,” he said. “In total, nearly 100,000 homes were purchased by investors meaning roughly 1 in every 5 homes sold during this period went to an investor. Investor activity surged during the post COVID years (2021–2022), reaching levels higher than those observed in the aftermath of the 2000s housing crash.”
According to the more recent study, investors have purchased approximately 99,759 homes since the start of the Great Recession and made up 23 percent of all home purchases in the valley last year, according to the latest report from UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate, which uses data from Redfin.
However, a Redfin report looking at third quarter data for 2025 for the valley showed investors had pumped the brakes on buying more homes in the valley, with their share of sales dropping approximately 20 percent.
A Review-Journal investigation in 2024 found that one corporate investor backed by Wall Street (Starwood Capital Group) sold 264 homes in Clark County for $98 million to Dallas-based Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH) that year, making it potentially the largest one-off residential real estate transaction ever in the valley, according to Clark County property records.
The deal, made in three separate transactions, closed on July 18, property records show. The largest sale was $57.5 million for 155 homes, the second was $26.3 million for 70 homes and the third was $14.1 million for 39.
Two Las Vegas Review-Journal investigations in 2025 found that most likely the two largest owners of residential real estate in the valley are institutional investors, with one company, Pretium, based out of New York, and the other, Invitation Homes, based out of Texas.
National look at investors
Multiple national studies have tried to quantify the extent of investor purchases across the country and give estimates as to the scope on the valley’s local market, and a 2023 study called A Profile of Institutional Investor Owned Single-Family Rental Properties from the Urban Institute estimated that investors owned approximately 17,125 homes in the Las Vegas Valley.
Clark County estimates from 2024 show there are approximately 901,866 total occupied housing units, with 873,656 of them falling with the metro region of Southern Nevada.
The report defines an institutional investor as any entity that owns 100 or more properties in a specific market, and a mega investor as an entity that owns 1,000 or more.
This was broken down into three categories: mega investors (14,412 single-family properties), small (108) and local (951). The report also looked at the percentage share that all three types of investors had when it came to the valley’s rental stock, equating that they made up 36.7 percent of all the rental properties.
The report also outlined the issue with defining and quantifying what an investor is.
“Much has been written in the popular press about institutional investor ownership of rental housing, but there has been little in the way of defining who institutional single-family rental owners and operators are and providing an analysis of their characteristics,” read the report.
Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at [email protected].
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