Real Estate Investment Statistics:
September 2026

Key Real Estate Investment Statistics at a Glance

Every headline real estate investment statistic SealedFolio tracks is listed below with its period and its published source, so you can lift a single number without reading the whole page. Each figure is repeated with context in the section that follows.

Two cautions before you quote any of these. The resale margin, the flip return, and the capital gain are all gross figures, calculated before renovation, financing, holding costs, and commissions, so the net number an investor keeps is materially lower. And the investor share figures count purchases, not ownership, which is why investors can buy nearly three in ten homes while institutions still own only about 2 percent of the rental stock.

The State of Real Estate Investing in September 2026

Real estate investing in the United States entered 2026 at a turning point. The investor share of home sales climbed to a near record around the end of 2025, then began to ease in the first quarter of 2026 as the largest funds pulled back. Reading why the share rose, and why it is now slipping, is the key to the rest of this page.

For most of the past two years the story was the owner-occupant buyer. Persistently high prices, mortgage rates in the low-to-mid 6 percent range, and stubborn affordability pressure kept many would-be homeowners on the sidelines. Investors did not surge; the pool of competing buyers shrank around them, which lifted the investor share even when investor purchase volume was flat. That pushed the investor share to about 30 percent of single-family purchases in December 2025. In early 2026 the picture shifted again, as mega and large investors stepped back and the investor share eased to 27.7 percent by March.

The other theme running through the 2026 data is that the easy returns have cooled. Home-price growth has slowed to low single digits. Flipping returns ticked up slightly in the first quarter of 2026 after nearly two years of decline, but they remain historically low and below year-ago levels. Investor home purchases have dropped to their lowest level since 2020 as squeezed returns push buyers to the sidelines. None of this points to a downturn, but it does describe a market where margins are thinner, mistakes cost more, and disciplined bookkeeping matters more than it did three years ago. The statistics below, refreshed every month, lay that out theme by theme.

Investor Share of the Housing Market

Investors are still buying close to three in ten of the single-family homes that sell in the United States, though the share slipped in early 2026 after peaking near a record at the end of 2025. The figures below come from Cotality, which tracks investor purchases of single-family homes nationwide.

The detail that matters most is what is driving the share. The rise into late 2025 came not from an investor buying spree but from the retreat of owner-occupant buyers, whose January purchases have stayed below the 200,000 mark every year since mortgage rates jumped in 2022. Then, at the start of 2026, investors themselves pulled back. Cotality found investor purchases fell by 10,000 to 15,000 homes a month in the first quarter, led by mega investors, whose buying roughly halved from about 250 homes a week to about 100 after the New Year. The investor share eased from 30.1 percent in December to 27.7 percent in March, and Cotality projected it could dip below 25 percent by midyear if the largest funds kept stepping back.

For anyone reading this as an investor, the practical takeaway is that you are not competing against a wave of institutional money so much as operating in a market where both ordinary buyers and the biggest funds have grown cautious. That changes the calculus on negotiation, on holding periods, and on how carefully you underwrite a deal, because the exit you are counting on depends on those buyers eventually returning.

Who Is Actually Investing

The popular image of real estate investing is a Wall Street fund buying homes in bulk. The data tells a different story. The investor category is dominated by small, individual buyers, not institutions.

The picture is clear. Small and medium investors, the people running portfolios of fewer than 100 properties, make up about 24 percent of all US home purchases and the large majority of investor activity. Small investors who own 3 to 9 properties are the single largest group at 15.0 percent and actually gained share in early 2026 even as the overall investor share fell. Large and mega investors combined account for only about 3 percent of the market, down as the biggest funds retreated. Real estate investing in the United States is overwhelmingly a small-operator activity, and the small and medium range is exactly the band where a spreadsheet stops being adequate and a real portfolio system starts to earn its keep.

Rental Property Ownership

Owning a rental property is far from universal, and the people who do own one are mostly individuals, not companies. The Census Bureau's Rental Housing Finance Survey, the most authoritative source on this question, was last refreshed for 2024 and released in February 2026.

Two trends stand out. First, individuals still own the clear majority of single-family rental properties, but their share has fallen sharply, from 70.9 percent in 2021 to 59.6 percent in 2024. That decline is not mainly a story of Wall Street buying everyone out. It is largely individual owners restructuring how they hold property, moving title into LLCs and partnerships for liability and estate reasons. LLC, LP, and LLP ownership rose from 15.2 to 20.6 percent over the same period. In many cases the human owner did not change; the legal wrapper did.

Second, demand for rentals keeps climbing. Renter households reached a record 46.1 million in 2025. A growing renter base is the structural tailwind behind buy-and-hold investing, and it is the main reason rental ownership remains attractive even as resale margins compress. If you are on the operating side of that trend with one or two units rather than a portfolio, see SealedFolio for landlords.

The Institutional Investor Question

Few topics in real estate generate more heat than the role of large institutional investors. The Government Accountability Office reviewed dozens of studies and found that, nationally, the institutional footprint is small, but that it is heavily concentrated in a handful of Sun Belt metros.

The honest reading of this data is that both common narratives are partly wrong. Institutional investors do not own a meaningful slice of the national single-family rental stock, roughly 2 percent, so the claim that Wall Street owns the housing market is not supported. But the dismissive counterclaim that institutions do not matter is also wrong, because in metros like Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charlotte, and Tampa, institutional ownership reaches 15 to 25 percent of the single-family rental market and is concentrated in specific neighborhoods and price bands. If you invest in those markets, you compete with these buyers directly. If you invest almost anywhere else, you essentially do not.

Home Prices and the Wider Market

The price appreciation that powered returns from 2020 through 2022 has cooled to low single digits. Prices are still rising, but slowly, and that has direct consequences for how investors underwrite deals.

The shift in price appreciation reshapes investor strategy. When prices rise 15 or 20 percent a year, appreciation alone can rescue a mediocre deal. At 2.1 percent national growth, it cannot. Returns now have to come from cash flow, from operating discipline, and from buying well, rather than from the market lifting every property. That is a return to the historical norm, and it rewards investors who track their numbers closely.

Inventory has also loosened. At 4.6 months of supply, the market is far from the depths of the 2021 shortage, which gives investors more to choose from and more room to negotiate. The homeownership rate holding near 65.0 percent, meanwhile, confirms the theme from the opening section: ordinary buyers have not been displaced, they have simply paused, and the rental vacancy rate of 7.3 percent shows the rental side is balanced rather than tight.

Is Real Estate Growing or Declining in 2026?

US real estate is growing slowly on price and sales while investor participation shrinks, and the real estate investment statistics SealedFolio tracks split cleanly into those two columns. Nothing in the September 2026 data looks like a crash, but nothing looks like a boom either.

On the growing side: US house prices rose 2.1 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026 per the FHFA House Price Index. The median existing-home price reached $434,100 in July 2026, the 37th consecutive month of annual price increases, and existing-home sales ran at a 4.06 million seasonally adjusted annual rate, up 0.7 percent from a year earlier, both from the National Association of Realtors. Renter households hit a record 46.1 million in 2025, which keeps the demand floor under buy-and-hold rentals.

On the declining side: investor home purchases fell 6 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026 to their lowest level since 2020, per Redfin. The gross profit margin on a typical home resale dropped to 44.1 percent, down from 50.2 percent a year earlier and the weakest since the first quarter of 2021, per ATTOM. Flip volume fell to 64,348 homes. Build-to-rent starts fell 16 percent over the four quarters through the second quarter of 2026. So the honest answer to whether real estate is growing or declining is that the asset is appreciating gently while the profit available to investors is compressing, which is a different market from 2021 and asks for different underwriting.

Average Returns on Real Estate Investing

There is no single average return on real estate investing, and any real estate investment statistics page that quotes one number is hiding something. A long-hold resale, a flip, and a rental all make money differently. SealedFolio lists the three published measures below so you can pick the one that matches your strategy, and every one of them is a gross figure.

Read the word gross carefully, because it is doing a lot of work. ATTOM's 44.1 percent resale margin compares the sale price to what the seller originally paid. It subtracts nothing for the mortgage interest paid over an 8.44 year hold, nothing for the roof, nothing for the agent's commission, and nothing for capital gains tax. The same is true of the 25.4 percent flip return and of Redfin's $196,618 median investor capital gain. Two investors can post identical gross numbers and end up on opposite sides of break-even once financing and capex are counted.

The measure that actually tells you whether a rental is working is cash-on-cash return, which divides annual pre-tax cash flow by the cash you put in. You can run it on a single deal with SealedFolio's free cash-on-cash return calculator, and factor in the deduction that most often separates gross from net with SealedFolio's guide to rental property depreciation.

Home Flipping Activity and Returns

Flipping is the most cyclical corner of real estate investing, and the latest data shows it stabilizing after a long slide. The figures below come from ATTOM Data Solutions, which publishes the most widely cited home flipping data in the country, and cover the first quarter of 2026.

The flipping numbers are a warning about gross versus net. A typical gross profit of $66,000 sounds healthy until you remember that the figure does not subtract renovation costs, financing, holding expenses, agent commissions, or closing costs. ATTOM's 25.4 percent gross return on investment is calculated before those deductions. It ticked up in the first quarter of 2026 for the first time in nearly two years, but it remains close to the lowest readings since 2008 and below the 29.6 percent of a year earlier. Once the real costs of a 165-day project come out, the net margin on many flips is thin.

That is why flip volume kept falling year over year, to 64,348 homes, even as the flip share of all sales rose to 8 percent from 7.2 percent the prior quarter. The math is still tight. Investors who flip in this environment cannot rely on a rising market to bail out an over-budget rehab; they have to know their renovation costs, holding costs, and exit price to the dollar before they buy. The gap between a profitable flip and a losing one is now small enough that careful, property-level cost tracking is the difference between the two.

Hold Periods: How Long Owners Keep a Property Before Selling

Hold period is the real estate investment statistic most often left out of a market roundup, and it decides more about your return than the headline appreciation rate does. ATTOM tracks it for every US home sale, and SealedFolio pairs it below with the investor-specific listing data from Redfin.

One caveat on the 8.44 year figure: ATTOM measures every seller, owner-occupants and investors together, so it is a market-wide tenure rather than an investor-only hold period. It still sets the frame. Tenure has roughly doubled since the early 2000s, and the reason is the mortgage rate people are sitting on. An owner holding a sub-4 percent loan gives that up the day they sell, which is why so few homes reach the market and why the 4.6 months of supply noted earlier is loosening slowly instead of quickly.

For an investor, a longer hold changes the arithmetic in two directions. Depreciation and principal paydown compound in your favour across eight years, but so does deferred maintenance, and the capital gains bill grows with the gain. The 7.8 percent investor listing share says most investors have already made the call to wait. If you are weighing an exit against a deferral instead, run the numbers with SealedFolio's free 1031 exchange calculator.

The Small Investor and Build-to-Rent

The small, individual investor is the backbone of US real estate investing, and the build-to-rent segment shows how the supply side is responding to durable rental demand. Redfin's investor research and data from the National Association of Home Builders fill in the picture.

The Redfin data sharpens the warning from the flipping section. A median capital gain of $196,618 on a resale, up 5.3 percent from a year earlier, still looks strong, but the trend underneath it is what to watch: investor home purchases fell 6 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026 to their lowest level since 2020. Investors are pulling back as high prices and financing costs squeeze the returns on offer, and the share of homes listed for sale that investors own has slipped to 7.8 percent, the smallest in five years, a sign that many are choosing to hold rather than sell into a thinner market.

Build-to-rent tells the supply-side version of the same story. Builders ramped up purpose-built rental homes far above the historical norm, to just under 7 percent of single-family starts against a long-run average of 2.7 percent, because they see lasting renter demand. But starts over the four quarters through the second quarter of 2026 fell 16 percent to 63,000 as financing costs and policy uncertainty bit, with roughly 15,000 starts in the second quarter itself against 18,000 a year earlier, a reminder that even a structurally sound segment is sensitive to the cost of capital. For the individual investor, the message across both data sets is consistent: demand for rentals is real and durable, but the era of effortless returns is over, and the operators who succeed will be the ones who track performance property by property.

What These Numbers Mean for Investors in 2026

Read together, the data describes a specific kind of market. Investors still buy close to three in ten homes, though their share eased in early 2026 as the largest funds pulled back, not because ordinary buyers came storming back. The market is dominated by small and individual investors, with institutions concentrated in a few Sun Belt metros and largely absent everywhere else. Price appreciation has slowed to low single digits, flipping returns remain near a multiyear low even after a small first-quarter uptick, and investor home purchases have dropped to their lowest level since 2020.

The common thread is margin compression. Returns can no longer be left to a rising market; they have to be earned through cash flow, operating discipline, and buying well. That puts a premium on knowing your numbers, every property's income, every expense, every mortgage balance, every depreciation schedule, accurately and continuously rather than scrambling once a year at tax time.

That is the gap SealedFolio is built to close. SealedFolio is a private, local-only app, with no cloud, that helps real estate investors track their property portfolio. Your property data, financials, and documents stay on your own device. If you are managing a growing portfolio in a tighter market, see SealedFolio for real estate investors, or estimate a deal with the free rental ROI calculator and cap rate calculator. Tax season maths is covered too, with a Schedule E calculator and a depreciation calculator, alongside the rest of SealedFolio's free calculators. Weighing SealedFolio against the cloud platforms first? SealedFolio's ranked guide to the best rental property software in 2026 compares seven of them side by side.

Sources

Every statistic on this page is drawn from the following public reports. Figures are reproduced as published; follow the links for full context.

1. Cotality, Home Investor Report Q1 2026, published June 5, 2026 and the most recent edition available (cotality.com)
2. US Census Bureau, 2024 Rental Housing Finance Survey (census.gov)
3. US Census Bureau, Q2 2026 Housing Vacancies and Homeownership (Housing Vacancy Survey), released July 28, 2026 (census.gov)
4. National Association of Realtors, July 2026 Existing-Home Sales (nar.realtor)
5. Redfin, Q1 2026 investor activity report (redfin.com)
6. ATTOM Data Solutions, Q1 2026 US Home Flipping Report (attomdata.com)
7. ATTOM Data Solutions, Q1 2026 US Home Sales Report, published April 23, 2026, source of the 44.1 percent resale profit margin and the 8.44 year average hold period (attomdata.com)
8. FHFA House Price Index, Q2 2026 report, released August 25, 2026 (fhfa.gov)
9. US Government Accountability Office, Rental Housing: Information on Institutional Investment in Single-Family Homes (gao.gov)
10. National Association of Home Builders, single-family built-for-rent analysis, Q2 2026 (eyeonhousing.org)
11. Pew Research Center, analysis of household assets and rental property ownership (pewresearch.org)
12. Chandan Economics and Arbor Realty Trust, rental household estimates from Census Bureau data (arbor.com)