Updated October 16, 2026
A few years ago, the honest answer to this question was “no, not nationally, and probably not in your neighborhood.” The national part still holds. Memphis is different, and 2026 changed the rules for the biggest buyers.
Investors buying homes in Memphis made up a larger share of the market last year than in any other major U.S. metro. Congress then passed a law this summer that will stop the largest corporate landlords from buying more single-family homes, starting in January. If you’re shopping in Germantown or Collierville, both facts sound like they should matter to you. Mostly, they don’t, and the reason is the price of the house you’re looking at.
The data on who’s buying is better than it used to be, and so is the paper trail on the new law. Both are below, along with what they mean if you’re buying, selling, or renting on the east side of the county.
How many homes investors buy in Memphis
Realtor.com’s annual investor report, released in June 2026, found that investors bought 11.3% of homes sold nationally in 2025, about 534,000 homes. The Memphis metro led the 50 largest metros at 23.7%, ahead of Kansas City and St. Louis, according to the Realtor.com report. Close to one in four homes sold in the area went to a buyer purchasing through a company.
That definition is broad. Realtor.com counts any buyer using a corporate structure for a home that won’t be owner-occupied, so a Bartlett dentist who owns three rentals through an LLC counts the same as a private equity fund. Nationally, small investors with 10 or fewer purchases made up nearly two-thirds of investor buying. The “mega” investors, the ones people mean when they say Wall Street, accounted for 7.5% of investor purchases.
Those big players still have a bigger footprint in Memphis than in most places. A 2024 Government Accountability Office report, using Urban Institute data, estimated that companies owning more than 1,000 homes held about 3% of single-family rentals nationally as of 2022. In the Memphis metro, the same group held an estimated 10.7%. That’s a real concentration of corporate landlords, built up mostly after the 2008 foreclosure wave, when Memphis houses were cheap, rents were steady, and big funds could buy by the hundreds.
Where investors buy, and where they don’t
Price is what tells you whether investors are in your market. In that same Realtor.com report, the median investor purchase in the Memphis metro was $126,000. That was 46.4% below the median for the metro as a whole.
A rental company’s math works on the gap between price and rent. On a $126,000 house, ordinary Memphis rents can cover the mortgage, taxes, and repairs with something left over. A $550,000 house in Germantown rents for more, but nowhere near four times more. So most investor money goes where homes are cheapest: much of Memphis proper, parts of Raleigh, Frayser, Whitehaven, and the older starter-home pockets around the city’s edges.
Most homes in Germantown and Collierville sell far above that range, and that has two consequences:
- A buyer looking at a four-bedroom house in a Collierville subdivision is rarely bidding against a national rental company. The competition there is other families, often relocating or moving up with cash from a home they just sold.
- Overlap does exist at the lower end of the east-metro market. Entry-level homes and townhomes in Cordova, parts of Bartlett, and the older, smaller houses on the edges of the suburbs are where an owner-occupant is most likely to run into an investor offer.
If you’re still deciding which suburb fits, our comparison of Collierville, Germantown, and Bartlett covers price ranges, schools, and commute tradeoffs.
The 2026 federal investor ban
The headlines this year said “ban.” The fine print is narrower.
The executive order
On January 20, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14376, “Stopping Wall Street From Competing With Main Street Homebuyers.” It didn’t ban anything outright. It told federal agencies, including HUD, the VA, USDA, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to stop federal programs from financing, insuring, or otherwise helping large institutional investors buy single-family homes that owner-occupants could buy instead. It also asked Congress for an actual ban.
The law Congress passed
Congress delivered. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed the Senate and House by wide bipartisan margins in June and became law on July 11, 2026, as Public Law 119-101, according to the Congressional Research Service. Section 1001 bars any “large institutional investor,” defined as an entity that controls 350 or more single-family homes, from buying more. In plain terms:
- The ban takes effect January 7, 2027, and runs for 15 years.
- It doesn’t force anyone to sell homes they already own. An earlier version required sales within seven years, and that was dropped.
- Build-to-rent communities, renovate-to-rent programs, foreclosures, and several other purchases are exempt.
- Violations carry a civil penalty of up to $1 million per violation or three times the purchase price, per a Mayer Brown summary of the final text.
The Treasury Department still has to write the rules that put the law into practice. As of early October, Bloomberg Government reported that Treasury’s first proposed rule had gone to the White House for review on October 2. How the rules handle affiliated companies and the exemptions is still open, so expect some of this to shift before January.
What Tennessee did
Nothing passed at the state level. The “Homes Not Hedge Funds Act” would have barred owners of 100 or more single-family rentals from buying more homes in counties over 150,000 people, which includes Shelby. The state Senate passed its version 31-1 on March 9, 2026. Two days later, the House version failed for lack of a second in a subcommittee, and it died there.
What the ban will and won’t change here
Our view: the ban won’t make Germantown or Collierville homes any cheaper, and buyers there shouldn’t plan around it.
It only reaches companies with 350 or more homes, and those companies were a small slice of buyers to begin with. They had also mostly stopped buying. Parcl Labs, which tracks institutional listings, reported in July that the big operators’ for-sale listings more than doubled between early March and mid-July, and it counted 343 institutional listings in the Memphis market. Meanwhile the local LLC buyer and the house flipper aren’t covered at all, and they’re most of the investor volume.
Where the law could make a difference is in the Memphis neighborhoods with the most corporate ownership. If the largest landlords keep listing homes and can’t buy replacements, more entry-level houses come up for sale to people who will live in them. That’s good news for first-time buyers in the city’s lower price ranges. It won’t do much for someone shopping at $500,000 in Collierville.
How to compete with a cash offer
Wherever you shop, you’ll run into cash offers sometimes. In the east metro, that cash is more often equity from a buyer’s last house than money from a fund, but the seller sees it the same way: fewer things that can go wrong.
You can close most of that gap with preparation. Get your loan fully underwritten before you write offers, so the seller sees a file a lender has already reviewed instead of a prequalification letter. Ask your lender how fast they can close with a clean file, and put that date in the offer.
Keep the inspection. Shorten the window if you need to, but don’t waive it. Waiving an inspection on a 1980s house to beat a cash buyer is how people end up paying for a roof in year one.
Then find out what the seller cares about besides price. A leaseback, a move-out date that matches their new closing, or taking a repair they dread off their plate can beat a slightly higher number. Deciding ahead of time how much of an appraisal gap you’d cover helps too.
We go deeper on terms like these in our guide to winning against multiple offers without overpaying.
If you’re selling
Investors are one more buyer option, and sometimes the right one: an inherited house that needs $60,000 of work, a tight timeline, or a property you’d rather not prep and show. In those cases, the buyer is almost always a local investor or flipper, not a national fund, and the offer is built around their renovation budget and profit margin.
Run the numbers before you take one. Our post on whether to take a cash offer for your home walks through how investors price offers and which tactics to watch for. For a typical, well-kept Germantown or Collierville house, listing on the open market will usually net more than an investor sale, because your buyer pool is families, not spreadsheets.
If you’re renting right now
Plenty of Memphis-area renters live in houses owned by large rental companies. The new law doesn’t change anything about an existing lease, and it doesn’t force anyone to sell the house you live in.
What it may change is supply. If the big owners keep selling, some of those listings will be on streets renters already know, maybe their own. If your landlord is a large company, ask whether it would sell you the house before listing it. The worst answer is no. Our breakdown of the net worth gap between renting and buying shows what’s at stake over ten years.
Compete with the buyer who’s really there
“Wall Street is buying all the homes” makes a better headline than a description of a Collierville cul-de-sac. The corporate buyers are real, and in Memphis they’re more concentrated than almost anywhere. They just mostly shop at a price point most east-metro buyers left behind a while ago.
So look at who bought on your target street over the last year or two. In most of Germantown and Collierville, it’ll be families, and families are the people you’ll be writing offers against. Get in touch and one of our agents will show you what recent sales in your neighborhood looked like.
