President Donald Trump’s recent threat to ban large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes might be a good-intentioned idea to ease competition for first-time homebuyers around the country.

But such a ban, if implemented, would have little impact on New Hampshire’s housing market because there are simply very few, if any, Wall Street firms purchasing single-family homes here and then renting them out as part of a long-term business-investment strategy.

“He means well by it,” said Chris Masiello, chairman of The Masiello Group, the large, Bedford-based real estate brokerage. “The president’s sentiments are nice. But large institutional investors simply aren’t buying single-family homes here. They’re looking elsewhere around the country.”

Wall Street’s Buying Elsewhere

Large Wall Street firms in recent years have indeed been snapping up tens of thousands of single-family homes, primarily for their rental portfolios.

Wall Street and private equity firms involved in the single-family rental business include Blackstone, Progress Residential, Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 rent, Tricorn Residential and even large banks like JPMorgan Chase.

But most of the large firms are eyeing markets in the South, Southwest and even parts of the Midwest where new single-family homes are being built in large numbers by developers.

And they’ve established a major presence in some of those regional metro markets.

According to Business Insider, large institutional investors own as much as 22 percent of the Jacksonville, Florida single-family home rental market, 20 percent of the Charlotte, North Carolina market and 10 percent of the Atlanta market.

But when you add up all the single-family rental homes across the country, large institutional investors own only about 2 to 3 percent of single-family rental properties in the U.S., according to BI.

AEI Housing Center, an arm of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, reports that large Wall Street firms own less than 1 percent of all single-family homes in general in the U.S.

And in New Hampshire and the rest of the Northeast?

Very little. Some put the figure at less than half a percent, if that.

NH Doesn’t Have the Right Homes

Large institutional investors prefer to buy relatively new homes because they don’t want to spend much on maintenance, experts say.

They also want to buy newer homes in geographically concentrated areas – ideally, for instance, single-family homes within a single subdivision – to help keep their maintenance and other operational expenses down.

New Hampshire? New single-family home construction here is quite low, and the existing single-family housing stock here and elsewhere across the Northeast is much older than in other regions of the U.S.

“We’re simply not building new housing at the pace of the South and Southwest,” said Chris Norwood, president of NAI Norwood Group, a commercial real estate firm in Bedford.

Even if a batch of new single-family homes came up for sale in New Hampshire, institutional investors would probably balk at bidding due to other cost concerns, such as having to plow snow for tenants or having to quickly repair or replace furnaces in emergency situations.

Then there’s the high cost of homes here, as well as higher-income buyers who aren’t hesitant to get into bidding wars to get what they want.

“The math here simply doesn’t add up for the big institutional investors,” said Norwood. “They can’t make the numbers work.”

Bill Norton, president and owner of Norton Asset Management in Manchester, said New Hampshire’s single-family rental market is simply not an option for most large investors.

“They can buy stuff in South Carolina and do whatever they want there,” Norton said. “Most of New England, just is too bureaucratic and costly for them.”

Smaller Investors Active in NH

That’s not to say smaller investors aren’t active in the single-family home market here.

The AEI Housing Center didn’t have specific numbers for New Hampshire. But it noted that small- and medium-sized investors now own as much as a quarter of the single-family home rental market in the U.S.

Those investors include people who own, say, five to 10 single-family homes and then rent them out – and those who own scores of single-family homes for rental purposes

But larger Wall Street firms want to operate regional single-family portfolios numbering in the hundreds, at minimum, to make the economics work, expert say.

“They’re not buying homes one or two at a time,” said Masiello, whose real estate firm has 26 offices across New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont. “They want to buy a large number of homes in a market.”

National Investors Want NH Multifamily

But New Hampshire is on the residential real-estate radar of larger investors in another way: multifamily housing.

Last year, there were a number of New Hampshire multifamily deals involving large national investors, such as Denver-based Aimco’s sale of the 902-unit Royal Crest Estates to Virginia-based Harbor Group International for a reported $250 million.

Meanwhile, LeCesse Development Corp. last year sold the 224-unit Slate at Merrimack, a mixed-use complex, to an out-of-state REIT for a reported $86.5 million.

Matt Lefebvre, owner of Downtown Realty, a commercial real estate brokerage and leasing firm in Bedford, said large multifamily institutional investors simply like New Hampshire’s tight housing market and strong economy, among other things.

And they’re increasingly attracted to other commercial real estate properties in the Granite State, such as retail and industrial buildings, he said.

“There’s been a lot more interest across asset classes,” he said.

But there hasn’t been a lot more interest in the single-family asset class, he said, for all the reasons other experts cited.

Ultimately, Masiello said Trump and other leaders should be looking more at the supply side of the housing-market equation, rather than at the demand side of housing, if the goal is to make it easier for people to buy homes.

“We have a supply problem,” he said. “We need more housing. That’s the real problem.”