Corporate landlords have become a fixture of the Atlanta rental market.

An October 30th article in the Atlanta Business Chronicle detailed that American Homes 4 Rent (AMH), a real estate investment trust out of Las Vegas, manages nearly 6,000 single-family rental homes in metro Atlanta. And in a June 4th article, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution named Atlanta as a “top city” for investor-owned rental homes. And back in February of this year, Taylor Shelton at Georgia State published findings that three corporate landlords owned more than 19,000 single-family rental homes in metro Atlanta.

As a follow-up to these articles, we are taking a broader view of investor activity in the regional housing market. Using Parcl Labs, a new data source, we can track address-level real estate information, such as property ownership. From the methodology documentation, Parcl Labs “uses an advanced algorithm to identify and track ‘true owners’ in the housing market (such as corporate LLCs)…by integrating multiple data sources to link these LLCs to their associated portfolio owners.” The findings for the 21-county Atlanta region using Parcl Labs’ data look similar to other efforts to spatially define the landscape of investor-owned housing. In its documentation, Parcl Labs identifies seven nationwide corporate landlords:

  • AMH
  • Tricon
  • Invitation Homes
  • Home Partners of America
  • Progress Residential
  • FirstKey Homes
  • Amherst

These seven corporations own 51,252 single-family homes in the 21-county region, which accounts for just over 97% of their collective statewide portfolio. And according to their respective websites, each of these corporations’ primary business model is leasing single-family homes, some of which may later be sold to the tenant. These rental homes account for a varying percentage of the total single-family housing stock in the region, but the spatial patterns become clear when mapped as a percent of all single-family units and aggregated to the Census tract level, as shown below.

Figure 1: Corporate-Owned Single-Family Homes as a Percent of All Single-Family Homes

The greatest concentration of investor-owned housing stock (the yellow Census tracts in the map above) in the 21-county region are found in Paulding, Douglas, Henry, and Gwinnett Counties. At the county level, Henry County features the greatest concentration of investor-owned single-family units in the region, while Hall, Dawson, and Spalding Counties feature the lowest concentration.

Figure 2: Corporate-Owned Single-Family Rentals as a Percent of All Single-Family Units by Count

While Henry County features the greatest concentration of these units as a percent of the total, Gwinnett County is tops in the region in total single-family units owned by a corporate landlord, with nearly double that of second-place Henry County, as shown below.

Figure 3: Corporate-Owned Single-Family Rentals by County