Wall Street is buying your neighborhood.

1. Cost of capital

Large firms access credit at rates unavailable to individual buyers, letting them make all-cash offers above asking price. A Kansas family with a conventional mortgage is bringing a contingent offer to a bidding war the other side has already won on paper.

2. Algorithmic rent-setting

Revenue-management software like RealPage and YieldStar lets corporate landlords coordinate rent increases across a ZIP code by feeding non-public rent data into a shared algorithm. The Department of Justice sued RealPage in 2024 for exactly this conduct and reached a proposed settlement in November 2025.¹ If two human landlords sat in a room and agreed to raise prices, it would be illegal price-fixing. Laundering the same decision through a black-box algorithm should not rewrite the rule.

3. Asset scalability

Private equity treats a neighborhood in Johnson County as a line in a diversified portfolio, not a community. The incentive is quarterly yield and asset appreciation, not long-term maintenance, not neighborhood stability, and not the kind of ownership that keeps a block functioning.

1. Tax mass acquisition

An anti-consolidation excise tax on entities that own more than a threshold number of single-family residential units nationwide.

• The mechanism. Support the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act (S.3402 / H.R.6608), which imposes a 50% excise tax on any future hedge fund purchase of a single-family home and a $50,000-per-home annual penalty on portfolios above the statutory threshold, with a ten-year divestiture schedule.⁵
• The logic. Make the mass-ownership model less profitable than selling homes back to individual families. The tax code already shapes behavior everywhere else in real estate. This aligns the incentive with the public interest.
• Where the revenue goes. Into a housing downpayment trust fund for first-time and lower-income homebuyers. The distortion pays to unwind itself.

2. Ban algorithmic collusion

Antitrust law was built for human conspirators in smoke-filled rooms. Update it for software that does the same job faster and at scale.

• The mechanism. Pass the End Rent Fixing Act (the 2025 reintroduction of the Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act, S.3692 / H.R.8622 in the 118th Congress), which prohibits the use of pricing algorithms trained on competitors' non-public rent and occupancy data.⁶
• The logic. The DOJ's November 2025 RealPage settlement requires the company to stop using non-public competitor data in its pricing product and to cooperate in ongoing cases against landlords.¹ That's a floor, not a ceiling. Federal statute should codify the prohibition so the next vendor can't rebuild the same scheme under a different name.
• The result. Restore actual competition to rental markets. Let landlords compete on price and service, not on coordinated data feeds.

3. Right of first refusal for families

Bulk portfolio sales between hedge funds happen in private. The homes never hit the open market. Change that.

• The mechanism. Federal law mandating a 90-day window, before any bulk institutional sale of single-family homes, in which individual buyers, local housing authorities, and community land trusts have an exclusive right to purchase at appraised value.
• The logic. Prevent the closed trades where thousands of homes move between funds without a single for-sale sign. Families, non-profits, and land trusts get a real shot at the homes in their own neighborhoods before Wall Street moves them to another balance sheet.
• The result. Inventory that would have stayed institutional for another cycle gets returned to owner-occupants and mission-driven stewards.