High housing costs, a cloudy economic outlook and stubborn interest rates led to a 6 percent year-over-year dip in investor home purchases in the second quarter, the biggest drop since the fourth quarter of 2023, online real estate brokerage Redfin reported on Sept. 4.
U.S. investors purchased roughly 52,000 homes in the quarter, the lowest number since 2020, Redfin said in its quarterly report of county-level housing sales data from 39 of the country’s largest metropolitan regions. The pullback is due largely to high home prices and elevated interest rates that make it more expensive for investors to fund loans for mortgages or renovations.
Redfin senior economist Sheharyar Bokhari said the math just doesn’t work out the way it did several years ago regardless of whether investor intent is to quickly flip the home for profit or build a portfolio of rental properties—and tightening regulations on short-term rentals in many areas has led to further cooling in investment sales….