Invitation Homes (NYSE: INVH), the single-family rental REIT, is selling its rental houses mostly to people who plan to live in them. It is using the money to buy back its own stock, which it argues prices the same houses far below what buyers pay for them. On Oct. 26 its board authorized another $500 million of repurchases. The company also raised its full-year targets for home sales and core earnings.
The gap the company is trading on is large. From Dec. 1, 2025, through Oct. 27, 2026, Invitation Homes said it bought back nearly $1 billion of stock, or 36,923,753 shares at an average of $26.78. By its math, that price implied a value of about $280,000 per home. Over the same period, the homes it sold went for an average gross price of about $460,000. The figures come from the third-quarter earnings release and supplement the Dallas-based company filed with the SEC on Oct. 28, 2026.
“Since December 2025, we’ve repurchased nearly $1 billion of our stock at a substantial valuation discount. We believe that is more than any other residential REIT,” Chief Executive Officer Dallas Tanner said in the release. The company intends “to keep funding buybacks with home sale proceeds whenever our stock trades at a meaningful discount to the value of our homes,” he said.
Shrinking by design
In the third quarter Invitation Homes sold 658 wholly owned homes for about $318 million in gross proceeds and bought 216 for about $74 million. That left net dispositions of 442 homes and net proceeds of about $245 million, which it said it used to fund buybacks. It repurchased 8,874,903 shares for about $250 million in the quarter. The company said most of the homes it sold went “to families purchasing for their own use.”
Year to date it has sold 1,798 wholly owned homes for about $833 million and acquired 673 for about $239 million. It raised its full-year target for wholly owned home sales to $900 million to $1 billion, with a midpoint of $950 million, up from an $850 million midpoint. Its acquisition target is unchanged at $250 million.
The wholly owned count still rose slightly, to 85,961 homes at Sept. 30 from 85,509 at the end of June. That is because it absorbed 894 homes when it dissolved its Pathway Homes joint ventures on Sept. 15. The company recorded a $30.4 million non-cash net loss on that transaction, which it excludes from core funds from operations. Including joint-venture and managed homes, it owned or managed 108,760 homes, down from 109,217.
Rents: renewals up, new leases flat
For the 76,687 homes in its same-store pool, blended rent growth was 3.0% in the quarter, up from 2.9% a year earlier. Behind that average is a split. Renewing tenants paid 4.3% more, while new leases were signed at 0.2% below the previous lease on the same home. That was better than the 0.7% decline a year earlier but still negative. Average occupancy slipped 10 basis points to 96.4%, and bad debt rose to 0.8% of gross rental revenue from 0.7%.
That left modest growth at the property level. Same-store core revenues rose 1.6% and core operating expenses rose 2.5%, producing net operating income growth of 1.1%. Average monthly rent in the same-store pool was $2,492, up 1.8% from $2,448.
The regional picture shows where pricing power has moved. The Midwest led, with average rent up 4.7%: Chicago rose 5.0% to $2,643 and Minneapolis 3.8%. Southern California was up 3.0% and Seattle 2.6%. Many Sun Belt markets lagged. Rents rose 0.5% in Tampa, Fla., 0.6% in Dallas, 0.8% in Houston and 0.8% in Phoenix. Atlanta and Phoenix, its two largest same-store markets with 11,660 and 8,703 homes, grew rents 1.9% and 0.8%. Atlanta’s occupancy fell 80 basis points to 95.5%.
Earnings and guidance
Total revenue rose 6.3% to $731 million. Net income available to common stockholders rose 15.6% to $158 million, or $0.27 a diluted share, from $0.22. Core funds from operations, the REIT industry’s main earnings measure, rose 2.4% to $0.48 a share. The company attributed the gain mainly to a lower share count from buybacks plus same-store NOI growth. Adjusted funds from operations was $0.38 a share, up 0.1%.
The company raised its 2026 core FFO guidance midpoint by a penny to $1.96 a share, within a range of $1.94 to $1.98. It nudged its same-store NOI growth midpoint to 1.2% from 1.15% and cut its expense-growth midpoint to 3.2% from 3.5%. Its AFFO and revenue-growth midpoints were unchanged. It ended September with $1.344 billion of available liquidity and $8.81 billion of debt, 89.8% of it unsecured. Net debt was 5.5 times trailing adjusted EBITDA.
The policy backdrop
The selling program comes as Washington moves to limit large investors in single-family housing. The release’s risk factors cite the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, related rulemaking and “any limitations on institutional participation in the single-family housing market.” Treasury has proposed rules for the 350-home investor ban. Tanner said in August that the ban would not lower prices right away.
On our reading, the third-quarter numbers show the company already behaving like a net seller to owner-occupants. With the stock trading well below the private-market value of its homes, it has a financial reason to keep selling regardless of the policy outcome. A quarter earlier, Invitation Homes was raising guidance on accelerating new-lease rent growth. New leases are still slightly negative, which leaves renewals, buybacks and home sales carrying the per-share growth.
