Corporate Landlord Legislation Tracker

Introduction

Private equity and related corporate landlords have received more attention from elected officials, community organizers, tenant unions and the media in recent years. News story after news story reveals the negative impact of institutional real estate investors on society and the economy. As a result, there are widespread calls for urgent government action.

In states across the country, legislators are taking action on the issue of corporate landlords. Interventions span a wide range of issues from banning the use of algorithms to artificially inflate rent to blocking corporations from buying housing entirely. While the bills vary massively in scope and effectiveness, a widespread legislative push towards protecting tenants from the worst impacts of financialization is beginning to crystalize. 

This policy tracker is a centralized information resource featuring bills that seek to regulate corporate landlords such as private equity, hedge funds, REITs, real estate investment firms, large publicly traded landlords, and/or landlords that make use of the limited liability corporation tax structure. Most of the featured bills focus specifically on these landlord types, though some bills included may be especially helpful for tenants of corporate landlords while also regulating landlords more broadly. The tracker includes state-level bills from 2026 and onward, and is updated quarterly. 

Key policy approaches

The legislation featured here falls into four main categories:

• Anticonsolidation: These bills seek to reduce the concentration of property ownership in the hands of large landlords. A broad range of measures live in this category, including policies that make the homebuying process more competitive for individuals and policies that ban or substantially reduce the number of allowed corporate-owned properties. 
• Transparency: These bills all involve some sort of information gathering or disclosure requirement, ranging from a requirement for landlords to provide certain information to the government to fully developed landlord and rental registry requirements.
• Antitrust: Legislation in this category bans landlords from sharing private rent price and vacancy data, outlaws noncompete agreements, and usually also bans the use of algorithms in the leasing process. 
• Tenant protections: The broadest category, the tenant protections bucket includes measures that provide additional rights to tenants. These measures include tenant opportunity to purchase, rent control, increased enforcement around habitability standards, rental licensing requirements, relocation support funding, fee regulation, and more.

Some bills fall into more than one category, while a few represent concepts that do not fit neatly into these categories such as vacancy taxes and report/study initiatives.

Explore the tracker