Allowing corporations to enter the rental housing market could provide hard-pressed Canadian households with a viable new route to living in the single-family house of their dreams. Photo by Jason Payne/Postmedia

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The Toronto Star and United States President Donald Trump don’t agree on much. That corporations shouldn’t rent out single-family houses is one of those rare things.

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In 2021, a Toronto condo developer announced plans to buy 4,000 houses and convert them into rental properties as a solution to Canada’s housing affordability crisis. “It’s wrong on all possible levels” screamed a Star headline the very next day. The plan never came to fruition, partly due to loud and angry denunciations from media and politicians.

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Fast forward to Trump’s January 2026 appearance at the World Economic Forum. “Homes are built for people, not for corporations,” he thundered in Davos. “America will not become a nation of renters.” This summer, Congress passed a housing bill with huge bipartisan support that similarly cracks down on the corporate rental sector.

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Both the left and right say they oppose corporations renting out single-family houses. And on both sides of the border. About the only group not on board with this crusade are folks eager to rent those houses. Who speaks for them?

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In the wake of the 2007-08 U.S. sub-prime mortgage crisis, institutional investors began buying up foreclosed houses and turning them into rental properties. “Homes were selling for below replacement value,” recalls Edward Pinto, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute Housing Center. “And Wall Street money realized they could buy up these houses at a very low cost and rent them out.”

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While single-family homes have always been available for rent, until the financial crisis the owners were usually small-time investors with a handful of houses who lived nearby — what’s called the “Mom-and-Pop” sector. By applying sophisticated management practices, Wall Street quickly figured out how to make a profit renting houses at scale, particularly in the Sunbelt states. The concept was a winner, with many firms boasting occupancy rates in the high 90 per cent range.

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In their search for new ways to make money, corporate investors had stumbled upon a large, under-served market: families keen to live in a house but unable to come up with the downpayment. Pinto says low-to-medium-income working households stuck in cramped one- or two-bedroom high-rise apartments are a key demographic. “If you have children, a three-bedroom house offers a lot more space,” Pinto observes. Offering single-family houses for rent provides “a service for people who cannot afford to buy these homes on their own.”

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As the supply of foreclosed houses dried up, U.S. investors later pivoted to building brand-new houses to rent out. The “build-to-rent” segment now constitutes seven per cent of all new home construction in the U.S. Despite these innovations, however, the institutional rental segment remains quite small; large investors currently own less than one per cent of all single-family homes in the U.S.

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But that doesn’t stop populists such as Trump from blaming corporations for everything that’s gone wrong with real estate. “You’ve driven up housing prices by purchasing hundreds of thousands of single-family homes,” he scolded investors in Davos. “It’s just not fair to the public.”