Between 2015 to 2023, the U.S. added more than 4x more new homeowner households than we did renter households. This is an important datapoint that has gone largely ignored by policymakers and headlines fearmongering about the U.S. becoming a "renter nation" due to investor purchases of single-family homes.
In fact, over these past nine years, we added more homeowners than we built for-sale homes-- which meant millions of single-family rentals were sold off to individual owner-occupants.
Renter nation? Nah.
Furthermore, the U.S. homeownership rate has increased 270 bps since bottoming out in 2016. Homeownership remains below the all-time highs of the bubble era, but also still above the long-term median -- and too few people are aware of the gains made since 2016, in part due to a deeply misleading narrative.
Of course, some of these numbers might move backward in 2024 due to high mortgage rates and sticky home prices. But it's critical to understand that, over the past decade, headlines and policymakers grossly understated the resiliency of individual homebuyers. So, therefore, any potential change in direction will have little/nothing to do with boogeyman investors, and more to do with mortgage rates, home prices and ho-hum new construction numbers.