Institutional investors have long been cast as the boogeyman of the housing market. But the data suggests institutional investors are more like shark attacks: rarely encountered in real life, and not especially deadly. Large institutional investors own fewer than 500,000 single-family rental homes nationwide, or about 3% of the rental stock and less than 1% of all housing stock. In 2021, investors’ share of single-family purchases surged to roughly one-quarter of the market. Investors now account for roughly 1 in 3 purchases.