By Mike Lentz | The Mike Lentz Team – Keller Williams Realty
Less than the headlines suggested. Investor home purchases just hit their lowest level since 2020 nationwide, and the largest operators are now selling more homes than they buy. In New Jersey, corporate owners still hold under 4 percent of homes, and most are local landlords with a few doors.
For years, first-time buyers worried about the same challenge. How do you compete with cash investors who can close fast and pay over asking? That answer is changing fast, and investor home purchases in South Jersey were never quite what the national headlines claimed.
The good news: those big investors aren’t buying up the market anymore. They’re backing out of it.
Investor Home Purchases Drop to Multi-Year Lows
According to Redfin, investor home purchases just hit their lowest level since 2020. That was when the pandemic temporarily froze nearly all homebuying activity. Before that, you’d need to go back to 2016 to find a time when investors bought this few homes.
Two big reasons explain the pullback.
First, Washington passed a housing law targeting large institutional investors. These mega investors were never as dominant as headlines suggested. They always represented a relatively small slice of the housing pie. But the law focused on the largest operators, and it worked quickly. According to Thom Malone, Principal Economist at Cotality:
“When Washington announced its intention to curb institutional investors’ homebuying, the market reacted… Cotality data shows that investment by mega investors who own 1,000 or more properties retracted almost instantly.“
Second, the housing market cooled. Price growth slowed across much of the country. In some markets, prices dipped. That makes the math far less attractive for investors betting on quick gains. Lance Lambert, CEO of ResiClub, explains:
“Ever since rates spiked and the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in spring 2022, institutional single-family rental (SFR) operators have pulled way back from buying up homes on the resale market – the math just isn’t as appealing right now. Home prices and rents are no longer ripping, holding costs (property taxes and insurance) have jumped, capital markets have shifted their attention elsewhere, and elevated materials prices make renovations expensive.”
Big Investors Are Selling More Than They’re Buying
Here’s the part most buyers miss. Large investors aren’t just slowing their purchases. They’re actively selling homes, creating new opportunities as investor home purchases decline and inventory returns to the market.
Data from Parcl Labs and ResiClub shows the largest institutional investors now sell more homes than they buy. That gap has grown over the past four quarters.
Every one of those homes goes back into the market for individual buyers. And since big investors tend to own homes at the lower end of the price range, much of what they’re selling matches exactly what first-time buyers want. As Malone puts it:
“… this sudden dropoff in institutional investment is a signal to first-time homebuyers that there’s an opening.”
What This Means for Buyers Right Now
Less competition from deep-pocketed buyers. More homes hitting the market. Many of them priced for a first purchase. That’s a shift working in your favor.
If you’re shopping in Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, Salem, or Cumberland counties, you’re likely to see more inventory options without the cash-buyer pressure that dominated recent years. Understanding current market conditions helps you time your offer strategy better.
What Investor Home Purchases in South Jersey Actually Look Like
The national numbers are real. The South Jersey version of this story has always been smaller than the headlines suggest, and that matters if you are trying to figure out who you are actually bidding against.
Rutgers researchers at the Voorhees Center published a study in December 2025 that tracked parcel-level tax records on one-to-four family homes across New Jersey from 2012 through 2022. Corporate ownership more than doubled over that decade. It still finished under 4 percent of the state’s housing stock. Most of those corporate owners hold one property or a handful. Local and in-state owners make up the bulk of them. The Wall Street landlord buying a whole street was never much of a New Jersey story.
A broader look from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs counted every corporation, trust, and bank on a deed and still landed around 6 percent of one-to-four family homes statewide as of 2020. County by county, the DCA report put Gloucester at 6.8 percent, Camden at 6.6, Cumberland at 6.1, Salem at 5.9, and Burlington at 5.0. For comparison, Hudson County came in at 10.6 percent and Ocean County at 9.1. South Jersey sat squarely in the middle of the pack. Worth saying plainly: those figures include the small local LLC that owns two rentals in Woodbury, not just the mega investors the national coverage is about.
In This Region, the Investor Story Is Mostly a Philadelphia Story
Look across the river and the picture changes fast. The Pew Charitable Trusts went through two decades of Philadelphia deed transfers and found investors took roughly a third of arm’s-length sales, with cash buyers accounting for another 16 percent. The median investor purchase ran about $100,000 against $265,000 for a traditional buyer, and the activity clustered in the lowest-priced sections of North, West, and Southwest Philadelphia.
That is a rowhouse economy built on price points that barely exist here. Cross into Cherry Hill or Washington Township and the buyer on the other side of your offer is far more likely to be a family with a mortgage and a commute to Center City than an investor with a spreadsheet.
Trenton is paying attention to the national conversation too. Assembly bill A5143, introduced in May 2026 and now sitting in the Assembly Housing Committee, would restrict purchases of single-family homes by certain institutional investors. Whether it moves is an open question. Either way, the pullback described above is already happening on its own.
So here is the practical read if you are shopping in Deptford, Glassboro, or Mount Laurel. The competition you have been losing to was rarely a hedge fund. It was another family, or a local landlord with a few doors. Big investors stepping back nationally helps you at the margin, and the homes they are unloading do land in the price range first-time buyers shop. But the bigger lever in South Jersey is inventory and how sharply a given home is priced, which is why the county numbers are worth checking before you write an offer.
Bottom Line
Big investors are stepping back and adding homes to the market as they go. With investor home purchases at their lowest point in years, individual buyers now have their best chance since before the pandemic. If you’ve been waiting for a better shot at buying, this could be it.
If you want to talk through what this means for your situation, schedule a quick call and we’ll walk through it together.
For the full picture in your county, see our county market reports for Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland counties.
