Treasury’s First Rule on the 350-Home Investor Ban Reaches the White House

The Treasury Department has sent the White House its first proposed rule implementing the federal ban on large institutional investors buying single-family homes — the provision of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that takes effect on Jan. 7, 2027.

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House office inside the Office of Management and Budget that clears significant regulations before agencies publish them, received the draft on Oct. 2. Its entry lists Treasury’s Departmental Offices as the author, RIN 1505-AC96, and the title “Implementing the 21st Century Road to Housing Act’s Ban on Large Institutional Investor Purchases of Single-Family Homes; Part 1.” The review record marks it a proposed rule, carries no legal deadline, and does not classify it as economically significant.

Two things in that record matter for anyone tracking the ban. The first is the timing: a proposed rule still has to clear review, publish for comment, and then be finalized, and the statutory prohibition arrives in three months whether or not that is done. The second is the phrase “Part 1,” which signals Treasury expects to write more than one rule on a provision Congress gave it thin authority over.

What the statute already does on its own

The relevant language is Section 1001 of the act, titled “Homes Are for People, Not Corporations” and codified at 42 U.S.C. 19521. H.R. 6644 became Public Law 119-101 on July 11, 2026, without the president’s signature, after being presented on June 29 and not returned within the constitutional period.

The prohibition itself is short: no large institutional investor may purchase, or contract to directly or indirectly purchase, any single-family home. The definitions do the work. A “large institutional investor” is a for-profit entity engaged, in whole or in part, in investing in, owning, renting, managing or holding single-family homes that — alone or acting with one or more other entities — has direct or indirect investment control of at least 350 single-family homes in the aggregate. Government entities at every level are excluded.

“Investment control” reaches well past title. It covers an entity that owns the home, that has primary authority or fiduciary responsibility for material investment or management decisions about it, that is or controls the general partner or managing member of the owner, that is or controls the owner’s investment manager or advisor, that owns or controls more than 25% of any class of the owner’s equity interests unless it is a passive investor, or that otherwise controls the owner. “Purchase” likewise includes transfers and acquisitions through mergers, foreclosures and bulk purchases, cash or no cash. A “single-family home” is a structure with two or fewer dwelling units, each meant for one household; manufactured homes are carved out.

The act does not require anyone to sell. Homes bought on or before enactment may be kept, and reorganizations of ownership of those homes are exempt. So are the “excepted purchases” the statute spells out — new construction, renovated homes and rental conversions offered for sale; build-to-rent; renovate-to-rent programs that rehabilitate homes failing structural or core-system code elements and spend at least 15% of the purchase price on improvements; defined rent-to-own and homeownership programs, including one that must give renters a right of first refusal and a 30-day “first look”; and acquisitions tied to debts previously contracted or to loss mitigation by a servicer or lender.

How narrow Treasury’s authority is

Congress wrote the implementation clause permissively: the Treasury secretary may issue regulations under ordinary notice-and-comment procedures, in consultation with the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The stated purposes are to minimize market disruptions where there is a risk of material negative impact on the housing market — including on participants’ ability to dispose of homes in an orderly fashion — and to mitigate harm to consumers and communities.

Then come the guardrails. No regulation may amend the statutory definitions. It may not alter the scope or any type of excepted purchase in a way that would undermine the goal of expanding the supply of homes available to individual buyers, add a category of large institutional investor, or change the 350-home threshold. On our reading, that leaves the provisions the industry has argued about most — the threshold, the definitions and the exceptions — outside what this rulemaking can change.

Enforcement sits with Treasury as well. The secretary, or the attorney general at the secretary’s request, may sue a violator for a civil penalty of up to $1 million per violation or three times the purchase price of the property, whichever is greater. Starting in fiscal 2027, and to the extent appropriations allow, penalties collected are to be transferred to HUD for the HOME Investment Partnerships program, earmarked for new construction, acquisition and rehabilitation of single-family homes and for first-time buyer assistance including down payments, closing costs and rate buydowns.

Separate obligations run through HUD. Within 180 days of enactment the department must stand up a renter outreach resource — a toll-free number and public website for renters of institutionally owned homes to raise disputes — and by the same date, and by Dec. 31 each year after, every entity meeting the 350-home definition must tell HUD that it does and report how many homes it controls and the city and state of each, unless it owns 10 or fewer in a given city. The Government Accountability Office and HUD each owe Congress reports two years and 10 years after the ban takes effect, HUD’s to include whether the definition should be adjusted.

The prohibition and the penalty provisions are repealed 15 years after the effective date.

The market the rule lands in

Institutional buying was already slowing before the law arrived. Investors accounted for 27% of U.S. single-family purchases from March through June 2026, down from 28% at the end of the first quarter, and mega investors owning 1,000 or more properties cut their buying by roughly 10,000 deals year over year, according to Cotality’s second-quarter update. Invitation Homes chief executive Dallas Tanner told CNBC in August that he expects the ban to lower prices over the medium to long term rather than immediately, pointing to rates, construction costs and zoning as the nearer-term constraints.

What the proposed rule will actually say is not public: OIRA review records list the title and status, not the text. Reading the review entry alongside the statute, the space Treasury has to work in is mostly procedural — how entities certify their status, how the exceptions are documented, how orderly-disposition concerns get handled — rather than who the ban covers. For owners near the 350-home line, the definitions that already took effect on July 11 are the ones that bind, and the deadline that matters is Jan. 7.