Invitation Homes Buys Rental-Home Portfolio for $650M

The nation’s largest owner of rental houses continues to fatten its portfolio having dropped wads of cash to acquire a massive Sun Belt portfolio.

Dallas-based Invitation Homes, whose CEO is Dallas Tanner, paid $650 million for almost 1,900 single-family homes, including $495 million in cash, the Dallas Morning News reported. The sale equated to about $340,000 per home.

The seller wasn’t revealed, but it’s highly likely that it was Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital Group. Invitation was nearing a deal to buy Starwood’s roughly 2,000-home portfolio a month ago. Starwood, which bought the portfolio for more than $1 billion in 2021, was looking to offload the assets to bolster its real estate investment trust.

Invitation purchased the homes at a discounted price that wouldn’t have been possible through one-off buying, Tanner said.

“Essentially, this is a high-growth portfolio of exceptionally well-located homes that we bought at a pretty attractive price,” he told the outlet.

Over 90 percent of the acquired properties are in the Sun Belt, including homes in Texas, Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

By the end of June, Invitation owned nearly 3,000 rental homes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, making up 4 percent of its portfolio. Most of the company’s holdings are in Atlanta, Phoenix and South Florida. Invitation had over $1.4 billion in liquidy at the end of last quarter, the outlet said.

Last year, Invitation formed a $750 million joint venture with Boston-based Rockpoint Group to aid its single-family acquisition plans. The venture was formed to pursue homes in the $500,000 to $800,000 price range, whereas Invitation typically targeted homes hovering around $450,000.

—Quinn Donoghue