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Research & Publications 2025

Corporate Investors in Single Family Homes in Philadelphia

Topic Housing
Geography Pennsylvania
Written By
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Cover photo from the report.Philadelphia is a city with a proud legacy of affordable homeownership opportunities and an expanding set of tenant protec­tions. In recent years, concerns about the impact of corporate investors purchasing single fam­ily homes in the city have grown, even as there is an evident need for capital investment in our aging housing stock.

We teamed up with Rutgers-based researcher Katharine Nelson to identify the investors who have been buying single family homes in the city, examine their business models, and explore what happens to their properties post-sale. Our goal is to inform policy interventions to mitigate any negative impacts and promote stable neigh­borhoods, affordability, and high-quality housing options for all Philadelphians.

In this brief, we analyzed purchases of residential buildings from 2017 through 2022, looking at sheriff sales, rental licensing, renovation permits, evictions, and code violations to determine the impact of these pur­chases on Philadelphia housing markets.

For the period studied, we found that roughly one in four home purchases were made by corpora­tions, most of which we labeled smaller investors (that purchased fewer than 100 properties). Both large and small investors were most active in the parts of the city where prices are lowest, and which are predominantly home to Black and Hispanic residents.

Additionally, we found that:

  • Larger corporate landlords were much more likely to evict tenants than smaller investors.
  • Larger in­vestors more often took out permits to alter or improve their properties than smaller inves­tors.
  • Investors large and small were much more likely to amass code violations than individual homebuyers
  • The largest corporate investors obtained rental licenses on 67% of the properties they acquired, compared to just 43% among smaller investors
  • The character of the highest-volume investors changed with the pandemic. From 2017 through 2019, eight of the top ten largest investors by volume were locally based. From 2020 through 2022, the four highest volume investors were either new to Philadelphia or had scaled up dramatically from the earlier period.
About the Authors
    Emily Dowdall
    President, Policy Solutions

    Emily Dowdall is President of Policy Solutions at Reinvestment Fund. She works with government, philanthropic, nonprofit, and other civic leaders across the country to support strategic decision-making to strengthen communities. Ms. Dowdall leads a team of skilled analysts in conducting research and building analytic tools that help stakeholders implement effective interventions and address entrenched challenges. Her expertise includes approaches to understanding and intervening in housing markets, strategies to stabilize households and neighborhoods, affordable housing needs, fair housing, early child education access, and program evaluation.

    Michelle Schmitt
    Senior Policy Analyst

    Michelle Schmitt uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to help clients assess their impact, evaluate their programming, and clarify their policy goals for Reinvestment Fund. She is currently working on a national study supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to understand the different ways museums and libraries contribute to the quality of life in their local communities, in addition to working on an analysis of minority homeownership in Pennsylvania, and a Market Value Analysis of St. Louis, Missouri.

    Katharine Nelson
    Assistant Director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME)

    Katharine (Katie) Nelson is the Assistant Director of the Rutgers Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity (CLiME). Her primary role is the build out and oversee CLiME’s Housing Studies Initiative. Katie is a housing and community development expert, with sophistication in GIS, program evaluation, spatial analysis, and quantitative and mixed methods research. Her work emphasizes the role of finance in ongoing segregation and inequality, particularly in access to affordable housing and mortgage credit.

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