Corporate Investors in Single Family Homes in Philadelphia
Katharine Nelson
Emily Dowdall
Michelle Schmitt
October 2025
For this Report, CLiME teamed up with the Reinvestment Fund and Housing Initiative at Penn, who are based in Philadelphia. The Report explores investor activity in Philadelphia, where corporate buyers are most active in the parts of the city which are predominantly home to Black and Hispanic residents—in West, North and Northeast Philadelphia.
We identify the largest investors buying up the most single family homes, who operate primarily as large-scale corporate landlords. The companies purchasing these homes changed during the pandemic, shifting from more local investors to entities new to Philadelphia but already active in other places.
We analyzed purchases of residential buildings before and during the pandemic, looking at sheriff sales, rental licensing, renovation permits, evictions, and code violations to determine the impact of these purchases on Philadelphia housing markets. We found that:
Larger corporate landlords were much more likely to evict tenants than smaller investors.
Larger investors more often took out permits to alter or improve their properties than smaller investors.
Investors large and small were much more likely to amass code violations than individual homebuyers.
The largest corporate investors obtained rental licenses on 67% of their acquired properties, compared to just 43% among smaller investors.
The character of the highest-volume investors changed with the pandemic. From 2017 through 2019, eight of the top ten largest investors by volume were locally based. From 2020 through 2022, the four highest volume investors were either new to Philadelphia or had scaled up dramatically from the earlier period.
Philadelphia is a city with a proud legacy of affordable homeownership opportunities and an expanding set of tenant protections. In recent years, concerns about the impact of corporate investors purchasing single family homes in the city have grown, even as there is an evident need for capital investment in its aging housing stock. This report aims to inform policy interventions to promote stable neighborhoods, affordability, and high-quality housing options for all Philadelphians.
A few years ago, CLiME published Who Owns Newark? which showed that corporations were buying half of all 1-4 unit homes in the city. We continue to investigate and explore these issues throughout the region.
Read the report in its entirety below: