Institutional Buyers Are a Shrinking Slice of a Shrinking Investor Share
Institutional investors, the large, often fund-backed buyers ATTOM tracks separately from smaller individual investors, made 6.6% of all US home purchases in the first quarter of 2026, down slightly from 6.8% in the first quarter of 2025. Widen the lens to every investor type combined, institutional and individual, and Redfin puts that broader share at 19% of homes sold in the first quarter of 2026, down from 20% a year earlier and the lowest total investor share recorded since 2020.
Both numbers moving down in the same quarter tells a consistent story: investor activity overall is pulling back, not just the institutional slice of it, at a moment when higher financing costs and thinner flip margins are squeezing every kind of investor buyer.
Small Investors, Not Institutions, Still Dominate the Buyer Pool
As reported by The Real Deal, citing a CJ Patrick Company analysis of BatchData data, investor purchases fell roughly 23% year over year in the first quarter of 2026 to just over 236,000 homes, with the investor share of all purchases easing from near 30% at the end of 2025 to 27.7% by March 2026. That 27.7%-to-30% range and Redfin’s 19% all-investor figure above are not the same measurement: the two sources apply different investor definitions and pull from different underlying data, which is why the absolute levels diverge even though both point toward the same pullback in investor buying. The same reporting found 96% of those investor purchases came from small investors owning 1 to 10 properties, not institutional buyers, confirming that whatever is shaping investor demand right now, it is playing out mostly one landlord and one flipper at a time, not through fund-scale acquisition.
That matters for dispo strategy: the buyer most likely to close on a wholesaled deal today is a small, local investor, not an institutional fund or an algorithm-driven iBuyer, a channel that has faded well past its earlier scale and no longer drives these numbers. Selling into institutional and iBuyer channels specifically, when they are available, is its own distinct process, covered in the institutional-dispo breakdown below.
The Numbers
Institutional investors accounted for 6.6% of all US home purchases in Q1 2026, down from 6.8% in Q1 2025.
All real-estate investors combined, institutional and individual, purchased 19% of US homes sold in Q1 2026, down from 20% a year earlier, the lowest investor share since 2020.
Redfin, "Investor Home Purchases Fall to Lowest Level Since 2020"
As reported by The Real Deal, citing a CJ Patrick Company analysis of BatchData data, investor home purchases fell about 23% year over year in Q1 2026 to just over 236,000 homes, with 96% of those purchases made by small investors owning 1 to 10 properties.
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, "Q1 2026 U.S. Home Sales Report"
- Redfin, "Investor Home Purchases Fall to Lowest Level Since 2020"
- The Real Deal, "Real Estate Investor Home Purchases Drop In Q1 2026," citing a CJ Patrick Company analysis of BatchData data