Nearly a Quarter of US Homes Are Owned by Someone Who Doesn’t Live There
ATTOM’s second-quarter 2026 vacancy tracking puts investor-owned properties at 25.1 million of the nation’s 104.9 million residential properties, 23.9% of the total housing stock. That figure is worth reading carefully: ATTOM’s own report text labels this cohort "institutional investor-owned homes," but the underlying dataset spans investor ownership broadly, not only large-scale institutional buyers. It is a much wider net than the roughly 6.6% of individual home purchases institutional investors make in a given quarter, a purchase-flow number, not a housing-stock number, and the two should not be read as the same statistic.
What the 23.9% figure does establish cleanly is scale: close to one in four US homes is held by an owner who is not living in it, a population that includes everyone from a single landlord with one rental to a fund holding hundreds of doors.
Why Investor-Owned Homes Sit Vacant at Twice the Normal Rate
Investor-owned homes were more than twice as likely to sit vacant as residential properties overall in the second quarter of 2026: 890,135 of them, 3.5%, compared with a 1.3% national vacancy rate across all residential properties. A vacant rental is a cost center the moment it stops producing rent, taxes, insurance, HOA dues, and maintenance keep running regardless, and an out-of-state or out-of-country owner managing that gap remotely is often the last to notice a property has gone dark.
That 1.3% figure measures overall residential vacancy, a different, narrower reading than the national rental vacancy rate, which the Census Bureau separately put at 7.3% in the same quarter, since rental vacancy only counts units actively being marketed for rent. The two series are not interchangeable, but both point the same direction: investor-owned housing carries more vacancy risk than the broader housing stock.
That combination, an owner who is not physically present and a property that is not producing income, is the exact profile a cold-calling operation is built to reach before the owner reaches a listing agent instead. VA Horizon’s trained callers work absentee-owner lists specifically because the mailing address and the property address rarely match, and that mismatch is itself a qualifying signal an in-house SDR can act on once a caller gets the owner talking.
The Numbers
25.1 million of the nation’s 104.9 million residential properties, 23.9%, were investor-owned as of Q2 2026 (ATTOM’s report text labels this cohort "institutional investor-owned homes").
890,135 investor-owned homes, 3.5% of the investor-owned stock, sat vacant in Q2 2026, more than twice the 1.3% national vacancy rate across all residential properties.
For comparison, the national rental vacancy rate, a narrower measure covering only units actively marketed for rent, was 7.3% in Q2 2026, not statistically different from 7.0% in Q2 2025.
US Census Bureau, Quarterly Residential Vacancies and Homeownership, Q2 2026
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- ATTOM, Q2 2026 Vacancy and Zombie Foreclosure Report
- US Census Bureau, Quarterly Residential Vacancies and Homeownership, Q2 2026