Speculative proposal sketches one million entry‑level homes in a rent‑to‑own program
United States homebuilders quietly work on a sweeping proposal to brand up to one million entry‑level properties as “Trump homes,” tying a rent‑to‑own model to private capital in a bid to tackle the affordability crunch and win favor with the White House.
The concept sits at the intersection of several forces that define today’s housing market: elevated mortgage rates, a multiyear supply shortfall and voter anger over home prices.
Polling for the National Association of Realtors found just 17% of voters thought it was a good time to buy a home, down from 69% in 2013, even as 85% still viewed homeownership as essential to the American dream.
Bloomberg reported that under one version of the proposal, builders such as Lennar Corp. and Taylor Morrison Home Corp. would sell entry‑level homes into a pathway-to-ownership program funded by private investors.
In that model, investors would rent the homes to tenants and apply three years of rent toward a future down payment if the tenants choose to buy. However, people familiar with the talks view the structure as complex and warned it might never attract enough backing to move forward.
A White House official told Bloomberg the administration is not actively considering the plan, and Lennar declined to comment.
Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte struck a similar note of distance.
“The homebuilders are presenting a lot of different ideas. I know that one of them or two of them had floated this ‘Trump homes’ idea,” he told FOX Business. “It’s not something that we’re actively looking at, but, look, we appreciate all ideas. All ideas are welcome.”
The proposal surfaced just weeks after president Donald Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to restrict large institutional investors from buying single‑family homes that could otherwise be purchased by families, part of a broader push to “preserve the supply of single-family homes for American families.”
Rent‑to‑own has a mixed track record. Private programs often struggle with weak property management during the rental phase and with only a small share of tenants ultimately buying their homes. Supporters of a federally backed version, bringing together builders, landlords, lenders and the GSEs, argued it could fix some of those issues. But fundamental questions – including how government-backed mortgages would be used and who would absorb early losses – are still unanswered.
At the same time, affordability could not improve without a sustained increase in supply. “If you want to bring prices down and inventory up, we need more housing units,” Kyle Concannon, a wholesale executive at Constructive Capital, told Mortgage Professional America.
“We need more houses built every year.”
Other experts questioned whether policy energy aimed at Wall Street landlords is missing the heart of the problem. Jessica Bluj of American Pride Bank said “new construction is obviously great” but warned that most investors in today’s market are “regular people” with only a handful of properties, limiting how much an institutional‑buyer ban alone could shift affordability.
Stephen Scherr, co‑president of Pretium and one of the country’s largest single‑family landlords, sketched the broad contours of a rent‑to‑own framework earlier, saying: “Imagine a scenario in which rent is paid; money is held back to provide against a deposit account for a down payment. Imagine where we were to link arms with homebuilders who could build smaller, more affordable homes.”
Lennar’s chief executive, Stuart Miller, told investors on a conference call in December that his company is “very well positioned to provide the affordable supply that the market needs when demand is ultimately activated by either lower interest rates or government-sponsored programs to enable affordability.”
