AUSTIN – (By Dale King, Realty News Report) – Mom-and-Pop investors are continuing to buy houses, even as the large-scale housing investors continue to retreat.
The most recent Realtor.com Investor Report says that as traditional home sales fell to a multi-decade low in 2025, investor purchasing activity held steady, reaching 11.3% of all residential buys — up from 11% in 2024. At the same time, investor selling activity has eased for the first time in two years.
The report also found the small investor share of the market continues to grow while the mega-investor portion fell to a decade-plus low.
“The investor market has found a new equilibrium,” said Hannah Jones, senior economist for Realtor.com. “With small investors now comprising nearly two-thirds of all investor purchases and large institutional players continuing to pull back, the dynamics shaping competition in entry-level housing are shifting. But that competition hasn’t gone away, particularly in the affordable Midwest and Sun Belt markets.”
The report says investors bought some 534,000 homes in 2025, a 0.7% year-over-year increase, even as overall non-investor home sales fell 2.1%. Meanwhile, investors sold 442,000 properties, 1.5% fewer than the prior year and the lowest number since 2020.
While all home sales have dropped more than 25% when compared to the 2021–2022 pandemic peak, investor purchases decreased by a smaller figure — 22.6% over that same period.
The report notes that overall home sales fell 14.3% compared to pre-pandemic levels while investor purchases rose 14.6% – a separation that emphasizes investors’ persistent staying power within the real estate market even as typical buyers remain on the sidelines.
Investor Sales Activity Eases
After two consecutive years of record-high selling, investors showed significant signs of stepping back from the sale side in 2025. The share of investor sellers held at 9.3% in 2025 – matching its 2024 level – but the numerical count of investor sales edged downward from 448,000 to 442,000. As a result, net investor accumulation – the gap between purchases and sales – widened from roughly 80,000 properties in 2024 to some 92,000 in 2025.
Despite year-over-year easing, the investor selling level of 9.3% remains well above the pre-pandemic norm of 6.7%, a residual effect of aggressive accumulation of property from 2021 and 2022.
Still, the direction of property movement has shifted. Investors are no longer flooding supply at the pace seen during the post-pandemic era — and the market seems to have found a more stable footing, the Realtor.com analysis notes.
Small Investors Grow; Mega-Investors Hit a Low
The report also states that the pandemic era reshaped not only how many investors are active in the housing market, but who they are. In 2021 and 2022, mega-investors – those with 350 or more purchases – briefly expanded their share of all buys to more than 16% at their 2021 peak. But by 2025, they notched only 7.5% of investor purchases, their smallest share since 2011 – and their purchase volumes were down nearly 70% from that peak.
Large investor purchases are down about 30% from their peak and continue to decline while mega-investor net accumulation took a sharply negative turn. During the past three years, mega-investors have sold roughly 135,000 more properties than they purchased, a noticeable, though gradual, release of supply back to the market.
Small investors — corporate entities with fewer than 10 total purchases — have always represented the majority of the investor buyer market, and that supremacy has deepened, says Realtor.com. As larger operators pulled back, small investors’ share of all investor purchases climbed to roughly 63% in 2025, the highest concentration of small-investor activity in more than 15 years. While all other investor size categories have transitioned to net-selling over recent years, small investors remain steadfast net-buyers, acquiring some 53,000 more properties than they sold in 2025.
“Small investors are the stable floor beneath the more volatile institutional activity,” Jones said in the report. “They purchase at a median of $330,000 nationally – about 25% below the overall market median of $440,000 – meaning they are systematically active in the entry-level tier where first-time buyers are also competing. In high-investor metros like Kansas City, that gap stretches to more than $100,000, making the overlap with first-time buyer budgets particularly acute.”
Midwest, Sun Belt Lead Activity
Investor action in 2025 remained highly concentrated geographically. Among the 50 largest metros, Memphis, Tenn. (23.7%), Kansas City, Mo./Kan. (21.2%) and St. Louis, Mo. (21.1%) led the U.S. in investor buyer share, meaning roughly one in four or five homes sold in these markets went to a corporate investor.
Birmingham, Ala. (21.0%) and Oklahoma City, Okla. (17.9%) rounded out the top five. These markets share a common profile: relatively affordable median prices, strong rental demand, and sufficient transaction volume to attract both local small-investor operators and investors expanding regional footprints.
The Sun Belt picture is even more varied. San Antonio (15.9%) and Dallas-Fort Worth (15.6%) – two other top-ranked metros — remain heavily investor-active, sustained by population growth and a steady supply of entry-level inventory. Birmingham and Las Vegas saw the most dramatic year-over-year acceleration among large metros, with the share of investor purchases rising 3.2 and 2.7 percentage points, respectively.
The surge in Las Vegas was driven in part by softening prices creating renewed acquisition opportunities for investors who had largely left the market during the 2022–2023 rate shock.
At the other end of the spectrum, high-cost West Coast and Northeast markets remained the least investor-saturated among all major metros. Portland, Ore. (5.8%), Sacramento (6.1%) and Hartford (6.1%) all sat well below the national average, reflecting higher purchasing costs and compressed rental yields. In several cases, policy situations have made residential investments less attractive.
Both Sacramento and Portland registered as net investor-selling markets in 2025 as investors continued offloading pandemic-era accumulation.
Looking Ahead
Data for 2025 portrays an investor market that has located a new floor rather than continuing to retreat, says the Realtor.com report. Investor purchase share has held above 11% for three consecutive years — and with small investors making up two-thirds of all investor activity, that floor is unlikely to wear out quickly, even if financing conditions remain challenging.
The composition shift away from mega-investors removes one source of potential future surge, but it also eliminates the most likely source of large-scale market exit. Without a significant change in the rental economics that sustain small-investor returns, or policy intervention targeting corporate ownership at the local level, 2025’s elevated-but-stable investor share appears to represent the new baseline.
June 28, 2026, Realty News Report Copyright 2026
Image: Realty News Report, copyright 2026
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