A rare bipartisan bill passed in the Senate on Monday aims to make it easier and more affordable for Americans to buy a home by boosting the nation's housing supply.

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act would restrict institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes, remove regulatory barriers to construction and take other steps to expand the availability of affordable housing.

It now heads to the House for a final vote. President Trump is expected to sign the bill into law if it is approved. In a proclamation earlier this month, he urged Congress to pass the legislation, calling it "the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation in the history of our country."

Mr. Trump also pushed for a ban on institutional investors scooping up single-family homes during his January State of the Union address.

Along with the limit on investor ownership, the ROAD Act would seek to boost housing supply by establishing pre-approved home designs, streamlining environmental reviews and encouraging zoning reforms to accelerate homebuilding.

Another provision would create a grant program, the Innovation Fund, that awards $200 million a year for five years to localities with a track record of increasing housing supply.

The bill would also launch a pilot program to help local governments convert vacant commercial buildings into affordable housing; unlock more federal funding for the construction of factory-built homes; and eliminate a rule that requires homes to be built on a chassis, a steel framework used to transport them.

Why have home prices soared?
A major reason home prices have skyrocketed after crashing during the 2007-09 financial crisis is that housing demand across the U.S. has far outstripped supply.

"There's a general recognition that a big part of the reason why home sale prices and rents have gone up significantly is that we have under-built housing by millions of homes since the Great Recession," said Dennis Shea, executive vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank that has expressed support for the ROAD Act.

The median home price in the U.S. now hovers around $403,000, up 77% from roughly $227,000 in 2011, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Americans need an annual household income of $116,780 to afford the average home, according to real estate firm Redfin.

A provision in the bill would cap the number of single-family homes that institutional investors can buy across the U.S. at 350 properties. The goal is to restrict deep-pocketed investors, such as private equity firms and real estate investment trusts, from buying up vast swaths of residential real estate.

During the 2007-08 housing crash, such investors capitalized on low-cost financing to hoover up thousands of foreclosed properties. Although that helped stabilize the housing market at the time, financial firms have continued to expand their holdings in the years that followed.

However, investment firms whose residential real estate portfolios currently exceed the proposed 350-home limit would not be required to liquidate any properties if the bill becomes law.

Investor ownership higher in some cities
A Senate aide told CBS News that the proposed rules for institutional investors are aimed at curbing their control of the housing market, including in metro areas where investors have an outsized influence. The restrictions apply to existing single-family homes, not new construction, a carveout that preserves incentives for financial firms to invest in new housing construction, the staffer noted.

As of 2025, larger institutional investors — those that own more than 1,000 homes — owned a combined 500,000 properties, accounting for 0.34% of U.S. housing stock and roughly 3% of the total single-family rental supply, according to analysts with BofA Global Research.

Yet such investors are a much larger presence in some cities. In Jacksonville, Florida, for example, investors own more than 20% of single-family rental homes, according to a 2026 U.S. Government Accountability Office analysis. Between 2018 and 2024, Dallas and Phoenix each added at least 16,000 investor-owned homes, up 177% and 114%, respectively, over that period.

Institutional investors "don't own a large percentage of all the single-family homes in the United States, but it's concentrated in certain communities throughout the country, and that's the concern," Shea said.

Would limiting investors make a difference?
The bill's legislative backers tout it as an important step in addressing the critical shortage of affordable homes around the country.

"This bill is the result of years of work to lower costs, expand housing supply, cut red tape, protect taxpayers and help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership," Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, one of the main architects of the bill, said in a statement last week.

Experts are more tempered in assessing the bill's potential impact. Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at the real estate firm Redfin, expressed doubt that the bill would meaningfully boost the nation's housing supply, noting that investors could potentially skirt the ownership cap by breaking their holdings into smaller entities.

"A lot of people think that if we get rid of private equity, there will be all these houses available for sale for first-time homebuyers," she said. "But that's not going to happen."

Yet Fairweather noted that the legislation could work to spur new home construction, potentially easing price pressures.

"Developers, they focus on large single-family homes or small apartments and condos," she said. "With these new incentives in the act, we should see developers building more of that missing middle housing like town homes, multi-family or smaller condo buildings," she told CBS News.

Source