Private equity firms now own 1 in 8 American apartments

Updated research shows private equity owns about 13% of American multi-family housing, with some metro areas reaching nearly 40% PE-owned

ATLANTA, GA, UNITED STATES, May 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Updated analysis from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) reveals that at minimum, private equity firms now own 11,800 apartment buildings with almost three million units in the U.S., representing about 1 in 8 (13%) apartment units in the country. The updated Private Equity Multi-Family Housing Tracker also shows that about half of those units were acquired just since 2021, illustrating the industry’s rapid incursion into apartment ownership.

Across the country, tenants of private equity-owned properties have reported problems such as large rent increases, hidden fees, poor maintenance and repairs, lack of responsiveness to tenant concerns, and aggressive eviction practices. Because the private equity business model needs to generate high returns on a short timeline, private equity landlords generally do everything possible to maximize cash flow to themselves while cutting costs, including deferring maintenance, skirting regulations, and saddling tenants with junk fees.

“Our country is in the midst of a housing affordability crisis. The last thing we need is private equity billionaires extracting wealth from tenants through unaffordable rents and junk fees,” said Jordan Ash, lead author of the report and director of housing research at PESP. “Now more than ever, policymakers should take action to protect tenants from the private equity industry’s widespread infiltration of the U.S. housing market.”

Key findings of the updated analysis include:

- Private equity firms own at least 11,800 apartment buildings with almost 3 million units, representing about 13% of the total number of apartment units in the United States.
- Of the almost 3 million apartment units that private equity companies currently own, they have acquired almost 1.7 million of them (57 percent of the total) since 2018 and over 1.3 million of them, (45 percent of the total), just since 2021.
- More than two-thirds (70%) of the total units currently owned by private equity companies are in just ten states – Texas, Florida, California, Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, New York, Arizona, Virginia, and Washington state. Texas has by far the largest number of private equity-owned apartments in the country, with over 1,900 properties and almost 580,000 total units.
- Private equity companies own almost one in every three apartment units in Georgia (31 percent) and almost one in every four in North Carolina (24 percent).
- The ten metropolitan areas with the largest number of private equity-owned apartment units are Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, Denver, Austin, Phoenix, Orlando, Charlotte, Seattle-Tacoma, and Washington, DC/ Suburban Maryland/Northern Virginia, which have a total of over 1.1 million units, more than a third of the total private equity-owned units in the country.
- Private equity-owned apartments account for more than 30% of the overall apartment units in the Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Orlando, and the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan areas.

Notably, private equity ownership of apartment housing was concentrated in the Sunbelt states, where many of the same markets have the highest concentration of private equity-owned single-family rental homes. Sunbelt states have some of the weakest tenant protections in the country and experienced the largest population growth from 2020 to 2024.

“It’s never good for tenants when private equity takes over,” said Tara Raghuveer, Tenant Union Federation director. “Their focus is maximum profit and the private equality business model is predicated on regular rent hikes and aggressive cost cutting. This is the model that has resulted in millions of tenants paying the highest rents they’ve ever paid for worse conditions than they’ve ever endured. The price of their profit is tenant pain.”

Sam Garin
Private Equity Stakeholder Project
+1 248-303-7020
email us here

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