We examine rental landlords’ decisions to buy and sell investment properties. We use the results of a new survey of owners of rental properties in nine major US cities, focusing on a subset of rental investors who own properties themselves, where we ask questions about their demographic and economic backgrounds, rental portfolios, and business management practices, and questions about their interest in acquiring new investments and plans to sell properties currently in their portfolio. We use these data to specify a series of regressions examining the factors that shape owners’ decisions to grow or shrink their businesses. First, we examine whether financial factors affect acquisition and disposition decisions. In this category, we include a variety of measures, including rents, external shocks, the owner’s reliance on rental income, debt, and portfolio characteristics. Second, we examine the impact of the owner’s personal characteristics—including age, gender, race, and ownership length—on investment behavior. Finally, we examine the influence of operating experience on future investment decisions, including interactions, vacancies, evictions, property investment, and business impacts from COVID-19 and other external events. Our analysis contributes to a growing body of research on the businesses of small landlords and their impact on the housing system.

This supplemental document provides a detailed explanation of the methodology we used for our working paper, "Providing Rental Housing: A systematic literature review of residential rental property owner decision making." Taylor Cook, who took the lead on the article, also shares her reflections on the process of developing and implementing the methodology.

This supplemental document provides a complete list of the articles we reviewed for our working paper, "Providing Rental Housing: A systematic literature review of residential rental property owner decision making."

Undergraduate researcher Quinn Margrett presented this poster at the Iowa State University Undergraduate Research Symposium, August 2023. His poster reports on the project’s summer work, which focused on two main research questions: (1) How do RRPO business operations, including tenant relations, change as a result of a disaster/shock? and (2) How do RRPO career paths and their perceptions of the viability of their residential rental businesses change as a result of a disaster/shock?

In this article, we describe our process to identify likely rental properties from publicly available property tax assessors and the US Census data. This process allowed us to assess the probability that a property is owned by a rental investor based on its location, physical attributes, and ownership characteristics. Our method is particularly useful to identify rental properties in cities lacking or with incomplete rental registries.

Residential rental property owners are a major stakeholder in the U.S. housing market, yet remain relatively understudied. This study focused on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on this group in four cities across the U.S. and examined the level of financial stress that different strata within the group experienced. Recognizing the key role that University extension plays in addressing housing issues across the nation, we utilize survey findings of the study to recommend rental housing and rental registry as key areas that can enhance impactful programmatic opportunities. The study offers recommendations to meaningfully engage communities.

Undergraduate researcher Kristen Hoss presented this poster at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire in March 2023. Her research investigated two questions: (1) How did the rental housing industry respond to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic? and (2) How has the industry changed as a result of these experiences?

Despite the central role that landlords, or residential rental property owners (RRPOs), play in housing, important areas of RRPO decision making are not well understood. These gaps leave planners at a disadvantage when creating effective policy. This article is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary review of the RRPO literature framed around three decision points: career lifecycle; portfolio decisions; and decisions about property operations. Three meta-categories emerged in the literature: work concerned with types of RRPOs, about local markets, and on economic shocks. The framework revealed gaps that can guide an RRPO-focused research agenda.

The Covid-19 pandemic has placed a unique strain on the US housing system. Unprecedented job losses combined with a public health imperative to keep people housed pushed policymakers to issue a series of orders pausing residential evictions. These moratoria kept people in their homes but did little to address underlying housing stress. In this paper, we document the early impact of the pandemic on private rental housing owners with the results of a new survey. Between December 2020 and January 2021, we surveyed rental property owners in Minneapolis, Minnesota, asking questions about their businesses and about how the pandemic has affected their ability to operate rental properties. In this paper, we present a descriptive analysis of their responses. Nearly half of the respondents to our survey reported that the pandemic affected their business in some way. The most commonly reported impacts were an anticipated decline in cash flow and increases in rent arrears across their portfolios. We find associations between property owner stress and rents, portfolio size, race, and owning physically deficient properties. The results of our analysis will be useful for policymakers as they continue to confront housing insecurity generated by the Covid-19 pandemic.