By now it is common knowledge that America's biggest landlord, following a Fed-subsidized scramble for distressed and multi-famility proprties over the past 3 years, is none other than Wall Street in general, and Blackstone in particular. Why did the smartest (and soon to be bailed out) people in the room rush to build an army of rental properties in recent years? Aside from the relatively stable cash flows, which as recent years have shown can also be securitized and sold off to greater fools for when they finally go bad, the flow chart below should explain it.

As RealtyTrac further revealed a month ago, four of the largest investors involved in the single family rental market have a potential of $1.2 billion in gained equity, or a 23 percent return, on properties purchased in the last three years (and that is just among the subset of properties with sufficient sales price and valuation information available)… assuming they don't all liquidate at the same time into a bidless market of course. 

Among the largest institutional investors involved in the single family rental market, Blackstone/Invitation Homes had the most purchases with price and value information available over the past three years with 14,108, followed by American Homes 4 Rent (12,811), Colony American Homes (4,935) and Fundamental REO/Progress Residential (3,208).

Now as a follow up, RealtyTrac has analyzed nearly 10 million sales of single family homes in 2012 to 2014 and the nearly 500,000 among those that sold to institutional investors (entities that bought 10 or more single family homes in a calendar year) to identify where institutional investors have purchased the most single family homes.

The report seeks to identify where the four biggest institutional investors backed by Wall Street and private equity have purchased the most and are most likely to be landlords of single family homes – both at the county level as well as the zip code level. Those top four investors are Invitation Homes (backed by Blackstone), American Homes 4 Rent, Colony American Homes and Fundamental REO.
 
So what did the analysis find? The short answer is in parts of Seattle, Charlotte, Phoenix, Atlanta, Tampa, Cincinnati, Raleigh, N.C., Houston, Denver, Columbus, Ohio, Sarasota-Bradenton, Fla., Raleigh, N.C., Chicago, and Winston-Salem, N.C. Among the 2,490 zip codes nationwide with at least one single family purchase by the top four institutional investors between January 2012 and October 2014, the top 50 zip codes with the highest percentage of purchases by the four largest institutional investors were in those metro areas.