The true owners of US rental homes can now be seen

Researchers developed a new way to track who truly owns rental properties in the United States. This method combines public records with tax and business filings to reveal that individual landlords own most units, not large corporations, and corrects previous measurement errors.

For years, it was nearly impossible to know who actually controlled the vast majority of rental housing in the US. This new method makes that ownership visible, allowing anyone to see the true scale of individual versus corporate landlords. This means urban planners, housing advocates, and tax authorities can now work with accurate data on a huge part of the economy.