Guest: Scott Eisen, EVP and Chief Investment Officer, Invitation Homes
Scott Eisen is executive vice president and chief investment officer of Invitation Homes, the largest owner and operator of single-family rental homes in the United States, with more than 80,000 homes across 16 major markets. He joined the company in 2023 after more than 25 years in real estate investment banking, M&A and corporate finance, most recently as head of North American real estate investment banking at Citi.
Eisen explains how single-family rentals went from a post-crisis trade to an institutional business, and why institutions still own only about 3% of the market. He breaks down scattered-site SFR versus build-to-rent, how Invitation Homes sources deals through construction lending and third-party management, and what the Road to Housing Act means for the sector. He also covers rates, Sun Belt markets and why he sees SFR as still in its early innings.
Key Takeaways
Institutional investors, Invitation Homes included, own only about 3% of U.S. single-family rentals. The rest sits with mom-and-pop owners, which Eisen says makes SFR the youngest of the alternative real estate sectors.
“If you took all of the institutional owners today, including ourselves, we only own 3% of the entire market.”
Scott Eisen, [21:36]
After the financial crisis, the open question was whether SFR was a trade or a business. Eisen says scale operations, from technology to maintenance fleets restocked nightly, answered it.
“It’s a business and it’s a business we spent the last 12 years building.”
Scott Eisen, [26:30]
Invitation Homes buys communities of 50 to 200 homes, often infill sites that homebuilders and multifamily developers pass on, and leans on the thousands of homes it already operates nearby.
“Our buy box is anywhere from 50 to 200 homes in terms of our community size.”
Scott Eisen, [36:08]
Instead of taking equity risk with local developers, Invitation Homes lends on construction and keeps an option to buy. The loans are for the same three- and four-bedroom product it already owns.
“Instead of putting equity into these deals, we would be a construction lender and we have an option to buy on all of those loans.”
Scott Eisen, [37:36]
Eisen calls the Road to Housing Act helpful mainly for the regulatory certainty, noting the company was already operating within most of its guardrails. He says Treasury rules are still pending.
“A lot of what the bill was enforcing we were already doing.”
Scott Eisen, [42:09]
