A Wall Street-backed real estate investment trust purchased 151 Las Vegas Valley homes in 2024, property records show.
Starwood Property Trust (NYSE:STWD) purchased the homes in October in three separate transactions for a combined $58.2 million, according to property records reviewed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Greenwich, Connecticut-based Starwood Property Trust is valued at approximately $6.45 billion. It owns rental homes across the country. The homes purchased are spread across the valley with concentrated pockets in North Las Vegas, Henderson and the southwest and northwest valley.
Starwood did not respond to a request for comment regarding the sale, but Kristi DesJarlais, senior vice president of communications and PR for Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH), confirmed to the Review-Journal in an email that Invitation Homes would serve as property manager for an unspecified number of the homes.
Additionally, in 2023 Starwood sold 264 valley homes for $98 million in a larger multi-city deal to Invitation Homes.
Starwood’s purchase is part of a larger trend across the country of institutional investors buying up residential real estate and turning the properties into permanent rental properties. Multiple companies are now also building homes solely for rental purposes, including American Homes 4 Rent, which owns approximately 2,000 properties in the county alone with a large chunk located in North Las Vegas.
Las Vegas saw the biggest increase of investor purchases year over year (27.6 percent) in the third quarter of last year, according to Redfin data. This was the biggest increase of any metro, beating out Seattle (21.8 percent) and San Jose, California (19.5 percent). In the third quarter alone of last year, investors bought more than $1 billion worth of homes, making up 22.9 percent of all home purchases.
Wall Street-backed hedge funds, corporate landlords and cash-rich investors have been buying up single-family homes across the country as far back as 2009, which experts say means fewer houses on the market for families to purchase. A MetLife Investment Management study shows these companies could own close to 40 percent of all U.S. houses by 2030.
Political action on the way?
Wall Street companies and institutional investors swapping and selling homes is hurting regular people who are looking to get into an ever increasingly expensive housing market, U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nevada, said in a statement.
“This is a disturbing continuation of the practice of major investment companies buying up homes in Southern Nevada that should be going to families rather than into real estate investment portfolios, she said. “These companies now own more than 15 percent of the homes in Clark County. With a new Congress under way, I am looking at the best legislative options to make housing more available and affordable for Southern Nevada families.”
A 2023 study by UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate Director Shawn McCoy estimates that investors (anyone who has bought more than five homes in the past 10 years) own approximately 15 percent of all of the single-family homes in Clark County and upwards of 25 percent in North Las Vegas, a number that has been rising steadily since the Great Recession.
U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nevada, said he will continue to push his HOME Act within Congress, which looks to protect renters and buyers from price-gouging from institutional investors.
“Nevadans are right to demand answers as large investment firms hollow out whole communities by the block,” he said in a statement. “Our neighbors are struggling to make rent, or to scrape enough together for a down payment. Meanwhile, investors are buying up the homes that could put affordable roofs over heads in Southern Nevada for the sake of evermore profits on Wall Street. Time and again, these bulk purchases target communities of color, single mothers, and retirees. We need transparency in the housing market, accountability to prevent market manipulation, and an understanding that local communities are not an investment opportunity for cash-rich institutions to exploit.”
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Real estate stakeholders are unsure of the direction of the overall residential market under the Trump administration however a number of bipartisan bills are slowly making their way through Congress which look to address the growing influence of corporate investors in the housing market. In a speech during the 2024 presidential election, JD Vance repeatedly talked about taking on corporate investors because of their impact on the rental market.
Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at pblennerhassett@reviewjournal.com.
