Starwood Buys 151 Houses Around Las Vegas for $58 Million

Starwood Property Trust scooped up more than 150 single-family homes across greater Las Vegas for $58.2 million, further squeezing out mom-and-pop home buyers.

The Greenwich, Conn.-based real estate investment bought 151 homes in October in three separate deals, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, citing local property records.

The combined deals work out to $385,430 per home, located in concentrated pockets in North Las Vegas, Henderson and the southwest and northwest Las Vegas Valley.

Dallas-based Invitation Homes, which in 2023 paid Starwood $98 million for 264 Las Vegas-area homes in a large multi-city deal, will manage an unspecified number of the rental properties, according to a spokeswoman.

Starwood, which owns rental homes across the U.S., is among a controversial cohort of institutional investors buying up homes and turning them into permanent rental properties.

Starwood didn’t respond to a request for comment from the Review-Journal about the sale.

Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nevada, said the institutional investors swapping and selling homes are hurting regular people who want to buy into an increasingly expensive housing market.

“This is a disturbing continuation of the practice of major investment companies buying up homes in Southern Nevada that should be going to families rather than into real estate investment portfolios,” Titus said in a statement. “These companies now own more than 15 percent of the homes in Clark County.

“With a new Congress under way, I am looking at the best legislative options to make housing more available and affordable for Southern Nevada families.”

Last fall, Las Vegas had a 27.6 percent year-over-year jump in investor home purchases, the largest of any U.S. city, according to Redfin. In the third quarter, institutional investors bought up more than $1 billion in Las Vegas homes, making up 22.9 percent of all home purchases.

Wall Street-backed hedge funds, corporate landlords and cash-rich investors have been buying up single-family homes across the country since 2009, which experts say means fewer houses on the market for families to purchase.

A MetLife Investment Management study shows these companies could own close to 40 percent of all U.S. houses by 2030.

At the same time, multiple companies are now building homes solely to rent them out, including American Homes 4 Rent, which owns about 2,000 properties around Las Vegas, many of them in North Las Vegas, according to the Review-Journal.

A 2023 study by UNLV’s Lied Center for Real Estate Director Shawn McCoy estimates that investors own 15 percent of all of the single-family homes in Clark County and up to 25 percent of homes in North Las Vegas, a number that has been rising steadily since the Great Recession.

Bipartisan bills are making their way through Congress to address the growing influence of corporate investors in the housing market. Real estate stakeholders are unsure of the direction of the overall residential market under the new Trump administration, according to the newspaper.

In a speech during the 2024 presidential election, Vice President JD Vance repeatedly talked about taking on corporate investors because of their impact on the rental market.

— Dana Bartholomew