Scarlet Fu

President Trump says he wants to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes in a truth social post.

Yesterday, he said that housing should be for people and not corporations.

His proposal sparked market reaction, of course, on homebuilder stocks and landlords of single-family homes.

Let's bring in Jonathan Miller.

He is president, CEO, and co-founder of the real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel.

And Jonathan, you and other experts in this space have made the point that institutional investors are not a big player in the single-family rental market, yet they make for a convenient scapegoat.

Why is that?

You make a lot of important points, and it's a reminder of how, at the end of the day, real estate is very local.

Housing supply and housing demand is very local to each specific market.

When it comes to perceptions, there is this sense that these institutional investors, Wall Street type of firms like a Blackstone, play this outsized role.

And part of it is because they came in during the financial crisis or in the wake of the financial crisis and did swoop in and buy a lot of single family homes at a time when Americans were losing their homes.

So that looms large in the public consciousness.

Right, well, to be fair, President Trump is not the only one who has suggested something like this.

Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, has also said something similar.

So this is a bipartisan kind of approach to trying to tackle affordability in the housing market.

You say the solution is to build more housing, but that takes a long time.

That's not something that happens overnight.

What kind of timeline are we talking about, even if you could open the spigot and just allow builders to start building more homes?

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