Donald Trump just threw a grenade into the housing debate. Last week, he announced plans to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, claiming corporations are pushing the American Dream out of reach. "People live in homes, not corporations," he posted on Truth Social.

The announcement sent shockwaves through financial markets. Blackstone shares dropped more than 4%. Invitation Homes, America's largest single-family rental company, plunged 7%. Trump says he'll provide more details at the World Economic Forum in Davos later this month and is pushing Congress to codify the ban into law.

So here's the question: Should Canada do the same?

The federal NDP thinks we should, at least for rental housing. Housing critic Jenny Kwan told iPolitics that Canada needs a moratorium on corporations purchasing new rental properties, or at minimum, strict limits on how many units they can own. "Financialization of housing is happening here in Canada," she said. "They're using housing as a commodity instead of a necessity."

But before we get caught up in the populist appeal of banning Wall Street from buying homes, we need to understand what's actually happening in both countries. The answer isn't as simple as you'd think.

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The Numbers Tell a Different Story Than the Headlines

Here's what most people don't know: institutional investors own a tiny fraction of the U.S. housing market. According to housing consultancy John Burns Research and Consulting, giant landlords with over 1,000 homes own around 3.4% of all rental homes, and landlords with 100 or more homes make less than 1% of all purchases.

The U.S. rental market is still dominated by mom-and-pop investors who own fewer than 10 homes. They bought around 14% of homes in the third quarter of 2025, while the largest investors made just 2.5% of purchases.

But those numbers don't tell the whole story. Corporate presence is uneven. A Government Accountability Office study found that large investors held 25% of the single-family market in Atlanta, 21% in Jacksonville, and 18% in Raleigh as of 2022. They've concentrated their investments in fast-growing southeastern metro areas where they can achieve maximum scale.

Canada's situation is different, but in some ways more concerning.

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What's Actually Happening in Canada

Data on corporate ownership in Canada is spotty, which is part of the problem. A 2023 Statistics Canada report found that over 80% of residential property owners owned only one property. Just under 2% of owners were businesses or government entities. That sounds reassuring until you dig deeper.

Multiple reports estimate that 20-30% of Canada's purpose-built rental housing is now owned by institutional investors. REITs went from owning zero rental units in 1996 to controlling nearly 200,000 suites by 2021. The top 25 financial landlords now hold more than 330,000 rental units across the country.

That's a massive shift in a relatively short period. And unlike single-family homes, where institutional ownership remains low, rental apartments are increasingly concentrated in corporate hands.

Martine August, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo who has studied this extensively, estimates that REITs own about 10% of Canadian rental apartments. But again, the distribution isn't even. In Edmonton, financialized firms control 48% of purpose-built rentals. That kind of concentration gives these companies real pricing power.

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The Real Question Isn't Ownership, It's Impact

Housing expert Mike Moffatt made a crucial point: who owns a rental property isn't as important as the cost of a unit, which is driven by basic supply and demand.

"Over the last 20 years, we've made it harder to build while increasing the demand for construction," he explained. "If you go back to the early 2000s, we didn't have a Greenbelt in Ontario, we had a far less restrictive building code, zoning rules were more flexible, development charges were, in the case of the City of Toronto, 1/50 of what they are today."

Let's talk about those development charges for a second because they're a huge piece of this puzzle. CMHC's latest data shows that development charges can represent 8-16% of a new condo price in Ontario, and up to 9% of a single-family home cost in Toronto.

For a two-bedroom apartment, charges range from $39,600 in Ottawa to $121,500 in Markham. In Toronto, development charges on a single detached unit rose from $14,025 in 2011 to $97,041 in 2023, a 592% increase. They're now $137,846.

Those costs get passed directly to buyers and renters. And they're hitting homes that haven't even been built yet, asking younger households to prepay for infrastructure that previous generations paid for gradually over time through property taxes.

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The Case Against Institutional Investors

There are legitimate concerns about corporate landlords. Research shows they're more likely to raise rents and file for evictions compared to smaller landlords. A 2025 CMHC report found that REIT rents were 2-5% higher in Toronto and Vancouver than in buildings owned by other landlords, and 25% higher in Montreal.

The business model is straightforward and profit-driven: buy older buildings where tenants pay below-market rents, renovate, and jack up prices. Kwan from the NDP said Canada lost over 200,000 affordable housing units between 2016 and 2021. She claims that for every one affordable unit added to the market, eight are lost.

That math is devastating. And it's not just about higher rents. It's about security of tenure. When a REIT buys a building and decides to "reposition" it, existing tenants often face renovictions or rent increases they simply can't afford. Communities get disrupted. People lose their homes not because they can't pay rent, but because their rent suddenly doubles.

Ricardo Tranjan, an economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, compared the "just build more" approach to trickle-down economics. "I think the argument ignores the fact that a house can be renovated and repositioned," he said. "What corporations do when they're only acquiring housing is that they don't build new houses. The profit opportunity will always be in buying stuff that is cheaper now, and in bringing the price up."

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The Case for Keeping Them in the Game

But here's the flip side. Moffatt warned that many buildings purchased by REITs and other corporate investors were basically falling apart. The previous owners had been neglecting maintenance for years, running what he called "basically slums" while keeping rents artificially low by not investing anything in the property.

"These places became basically, in many cases, like slums, that were basically falling apart," he explained. "There is this business model that some of the REITs and others do that they look for these buildings, they buy out the owners and then they fix them up and charge higher rents."

Is that better or worse? It depends on your perspective and your income level. Tenants who can afford the higher rents after renovations get better housing. Tenants who can't afford the increase lose their homes.

Tsur Somerville, a professor of real estate finance at UBC's Sauder School of Business, pointed out a practical problem: Canada needs to essentially double its pace of homebuilding to restore affordability. CMHC says we need to build between 430,000 and 480,000 new housing units per year by 2035. We're only adding around 220,000 to 240,000 units annually right now.

"We need a lot of capital flowing into real estate if we're going to build 400,000 homes," Somerville said. "So, saying, 'oh, you can't invest,' seems a little bit problematic. Particularly in the rental market, if you think who has $35 million available to buy a rental building, that's not a lot of moms and pops."

That's the uncomfortable truth. Mom-and-pop landlords don't have the capital to build or renovate large rental buildings at scale. If we freeze out institutional investors without providing an alternative source of capital, we're not going to hit our housing targets. We might make the supply problem worse.

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What the Research Actually Shows

Joshua Coven, an assistant professor at Baruch College, has worked to quantify the impact of institutional investors. His research found that large landlords actually decrease rents by contributing to rental supply, and policies that ban them or force them to cap rent increases could hurt supply and push up rents.

But he also found that by buying homes, large landlords account for about 20% of price increases in markets where they're most active. "This makes it harder for people to buy homes, because it does raise prices," Coven said.

So the impact isn't one-directional. Institutional investors add rental supply, which helps renters. But they reduce ownership supply, which hurts would-be buyers. The net effect depends on which market segment you're looking at and which one you care more about.

Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, was direct about what really matters: "The reason housing has gotten so unaffordable is because there is a shortage of homes. It's the shortage of homes that makes investors want to buy the homes because they see that there's scarcity."

Banning institutional investors treats a symptom, not the disease.

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What Ottawa Is Actually Doing

The federal Liberals aren't moving toward banning corporate ownership. They're focused on supercharging construction through a multi-pronged approach.

Budget 2025 committed to establishing a $51 billion fund to help provinces and municipalities cover infrastructure costs without resorting to developer charges. Part of this funding would be contingent on cutting those fees, which add tens of thousands of dollars to every new home.

The government also plans to resurrect the decades-old multiple unit rental building (MURB) scheme that allows investors in new apartment construction to lower their tax bills by claiming depreciation and building costs. The goal is to encourage investment in rental construction.

And then there's Build Canada Homes, a new housing agency aimed at getting Ottawa back into the business of building affordable homes at scale. The agency would provide $10 billion in low-cost financing and capital to affordable home builders, develop projects on federal lands, and partner with builders using prefabricated construction to speed up timelines.

The first Build Canada Homes project will add 540 units at Arbo Downsview in Toronto, with at least 40% designated as affordable housing. The agency has already submitted requests for proposals that would see 4,000 homes built on federal lands across five provinces.

The federal government also launched a $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund in 2024 to help the community housing sector acquire at-risk rental apartment buildings and ensure they remain affordable long-term.

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The Foreign Buyer Angle

There's another piece to this: the federal ban on foreign buyers expires in 2027. B.C. still has its 20% foreign buyer tax, but the lifting of the federal ban could shift international attention back to Canadian real estate.

Some view this as a potential problem that could drive prices up again. Others see it as a source of capital that could fund new construction. The impact will depend largely on whether foreign buyers are primarily purchasing existing inventory or funding new development.

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So What Should Canada Actually Do?

This is where things get complicated, because there isn't one simple answer.

Banning institutional investors from single-family homes wouldn't do much in Canada because they're not buying many to begin with. The real action is in rental apartments, where corporate consolidation is significant and growing.

Kwan's proposal for a moratorium on corporations purchasing affordable purpose-built rentals has merit, but only if paired with alternative sources of capital for building and renovating rental housing. You can't just remove $35 million players from the market without replacing them.

Tranjan supports both a rental moratorium and Trump's single-family ban. His reasoning makes sense: even if it's not a problem in Canada right now, preventing it from becoming one is smart policy. Once institutional investors establish a foothold in single-family homes, dislodging them becomes much harder.

But ultimately, the experts agree on one thing: supply is the core issue. Somerville from UBC said Canada needs to do "a lot of things" to restore affordability, and it all needs to focus on making housing construction cheaper and easier.

"I really think that you got lots of levers you need to pull, and it's a lot of coordination," he said.

Those levers include cutting development charges, streamlining approvals, updating zoning to allow more density, investing in infrastructure, providing capital for non-profit and co-op housing, and yes, potentially limiting how much of our rental housing stock can be controlled by profit-maximizing corporations.

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The Bottom Line

Trump's ban on institutional investors buying single-family homes is politically popular. It polls well. It feels satisfying to tell Wall Street they can't buy up neighborhoods. And there's genuine frustration about housing affordability that needs to be addressed.

But in the U.S., where institutional investors own less than 4% of rental homes overall, it's largely symbolic. The real drivers of unaffordability are supply constraints, zoning restrictions, and construction costs, not Blackstone.

Canada's situation is more nuanced. We don't have a major institutional investor problem in single-family homes. But in rental apartments, corporate consolidation is real and growing, and it's having measurable impacts on affordability and tenant security.

The solution isn't picking one approach and running with it. It's recognizing that housing is complex, that different policies work for different housing types, and that banning investors without addressing supply will just make things worse.

We need more supply. We need it to be affordable. We need tenant protections that prevent renovictions and excessive rent increases. We need capital to build and renovate rental housing. And we need transparent data on who owns what so we can actually measure the problem.

What we don't need is simple answers to complicated questions. If you're thinking about buying, selling, or investing in the Okanagan's evolving real estate market, Coldwell Banker Horizon Realty can help you navigate these changes with strategies grounded in market fundamentals rather than political rhetoric.