Not For Sale: new homesAmerica has the most unsold homes since 2009. Good luck trying to buy one.

Builders have too many new homes on their hands.

Thanks to a construction boom years in the making, homebuilders are sitting on more newly completed homes than at any point since 2009, when the market was reeling from the global financial crisis. Despite the hefty ready-to-sell supply, a sizable chunk of those homes may never be sold to regular buyers. That strange reality says a lot about the hurdles for would-be homeowners right now.

Both builders and buyers find themselves in a tricky position. Prices have continued their climb in most of the country. Mortgage rates dropped steadily over the summer, but that turned out to be a head fake — in the span of a month, the typical rate for a 30-year loan increased by almost a full percentage point, and could rise further. Throwing down for a starter home is about 45% more expensive than renting, a far wider gap than the historical average of about 15%, according to monthly expense data tracked by John Burns Research and Consulting. Builders, meanwhile, are luring buyers with some perks but are barely budging on prices. That’s partly because these companies have another place to turn: the rental market.

Given the strong demand for rentals and a tough sales market, some builders are choosing to convert for-sale homes into rentals or offload inventory to investors who specialize in single-family-home rentals. Opportunistic investors — mostly small and midsize players, who own the vast majority of single-family rentals in the country — are happy to oblige.

Four walls and a backyard are still the bedrock of the American dream. For those who can’t afford to buy a house (or don’t want to right now), the only option is to rent. That simple fact gives builders some breathing room, but it also means that a glut of new homes may not deliver the price cuts buyers have been anxiously awaiting.

Agolden run for homebuilders is drawing to a close. When rising mortgage rates trapped many would-be sellers in their homes two years ago, builders turned out to be the big winners — if you wanted to buy a home, your best bet was probably new construction. One economist told me last year that builders were “the only game in town” in some areas. Builders not only offered a welcome alternative to the frozen resale market but could cut deals to make their homes even more appealing to the average buyer: Mortgage-rate buydowns, in which the builder pays the lender up front in exchange for lowering the buyer’s loan rate, can save a new homeowner hundreds of dollars each month.

Now, even with the freebies, builders are selling homes at a slower-than-expected pace as buyers grapple with worsening affordability, sharp swings in mortgage rates, and general uncertainty — people would rather sit on the fence than leap into a market with so many unknowns. With slower sales across the board, the number of homes on the market has climbed. There were 108,000 finished homes for sale at the end of September, some 48% more than at the same point a year ago. There were 258,000 homes under construction but not yet sold, another sizable figure — at the same point in 2019, there were about 194,000. Builders surveyed by John Burns Research and Consulting said they had an average of about 2.5 unsold homes in each of their communities in October, representing a 47% increase from a year ago. In October 2021, they reported only 0.4 unsold homes per community. Some of this increase is by design. Companies are building more homes “on spec,” or before they have a buyer, to shorten timelines and compete directly with the resale market. But there’s no question that builders have hit a snag.

The answer might seem obvious: Cut prices! But builders will “try a lot of other things first,” says Keith Hughes, an executive at the housing research firm Zonda. “And we’re not seeing drastic price drops virtually anywhere.” Buyers may not be flooding the market, but there are fewer homes out there, too. The number of available homes for sale at the end of October, according to Realtor.com, was about 21% lower than in the same month in 2019. Builders looking to move their product lean heavily on incentives — Lennar, one of the largest homebuilders in the country, said that the average sales incentives per home amounted to $48,100 from June through August, compared with $36,400 a year earlier. Builders are also completing smaller floor plans to match the needs of cost-conscious consumers.

Builders have another fallback: the rental market. Over the past decade, homebuilders have forged relationships with companies that purchase thousands of single-family homes and manage them as rentals — if a builder were looking to move a portfolio of homes, they might find a willing buyer in a company like Pretium, which owns nearly 100,000 homes, or Invitation Homes, which manages a portfolio of more than 85,000 homes. Builders have also started developing entire communities of single-family homes to be rented out rather than sold, a strategy known as build-for-rent. The idea is to meet the demand of renters who want their piece of the American dream — a home with a yard in a safe neighborhood with good schools — but either can’t make a purchase or don’t want to. Builders can sell to a guaranteed buyer willing to purchase in bulk or hold on to the homes and enjoy the steady returns of rental income.

I think investors are more or less saying to themselves, we’re providing a solution here for builders.

Given these advantages, the build-to-rent pipeline has become robust. D.R. Horton, the nation’s biggest homebuilder, recently said it had about $800 million worth of single-family-rental property on its balance sheet, consisting of 3,140 homes and about 1,900 lots on which it can build more. Invitation Homes, one of the largest owners of single-family rentals, recently said it expected to purchase nearly 2,500 homes in the next couple of years from builders in places like Tampa, Florida; the Carolinas; and Houston.

Owners of single-family rentals have been around forever, but large, sophisticated SFR companies arrived after the financial crisis in 2008, when investors began raising billions of dollars to pick up homes on the cheap. Now these companies represent a “new category of buyers that would really help a builder during a downturn unload some inventory,” John Burns, of John Burns Research and Consulting, said in a recent podcast with Don Mullen, the CEO of Pretium. “And you’re playing that out right now, you’re already doing that.”

But big companies actually own a small fraction of all single-family rental homes, and they’ve been much more selective with their purchases as higher interest rates have made it tougher to get strong returns on their investments. The most active buyers right now are small and midsize investors who own anywhere from a handful of homes to several hundred. With builders sitting on more homes, these investors are sniffing around for deals.

“I think investors are more or less saying to themselves, we’re providing a solution here for builders, and that solution is inventory management and getting out of inventory that otherwise they’re having trouble selling,” says Adam Stern, the founder and CEO of Strata SFR, a real-estate brokerage focused on single-family rentals and build-to-rent homes. “We’re that exit option.”

Data from Forecasa, a real-estate analytics firm, indicates investors purchased 3% to 5% of homes sold by builders in the past three months. That may not sound like much, but a year ago that number was closer to 1%. Some builders have recently been shuttling about 10% of their inventory to investors. Even then, these numbers may be undercounts, since some amateur rental owners may not be buying through the kinds of legal entities that tip off analysts to investor purchases.

“It may seem like a small percentage, but if you think about just the sheer volume of properties that are being moved, it’s a fairly large number, especially because it’s growing,” says Sean Morgan, the CEO of Forecasa.

Investors have mostly focused on Sun Belt markets like Nashville and Dallas in the lower half of the US, where new construction is most plentiful. Builders may offer a slight discount, but they get something valuable in return: homes off their balance sheets. Builders often take on loans of 12 to 24 months to construct homes — before time is up, they have to either find a buyer or get a new loan. Local and regional builders are more likely to feel the squeeze than a national company like D.R. Horton, which can afford to keep homes on its books longer. When builders are staring down that ticking clock, “investors are natural buyers,” says Alex Offutt, the CEO of Business Purpose Capital, a capital provider for long-term investor loans.

They know if they work on a rental campaign, they’ve got an exit.

Builders don’t even have to sell, though. Another route is to get a new long-term loan based on the rental income the properties will generate, then find tenants for the homes and wait to sell when the market is more favorable. Both Offutt and Ray Sturm, a managing partner of Tower1, which offers financing for residential lenders, tell me they’ve been having more conversations with builders and their lenders who are seeking out this option.

“They know if they work on a rental campaign, they’ve got an exit,” Sturm says. “It’s early, but it’s bigger than I thought.”

This isn’t the ideal scenario for most builders, especially since many aren’t well versed in the minutiae of managing rental properties. But it could become another valuable off-ramp if they have trouble unloading homes.

Most homebuilders are a long way from hitting the panic button. There’s still a national housing shortage, even if there’s a short-term oversupply in some places, and builders are looking ahead to the spring buying season as the true tell of where things are headed. Their embrace of the rental market says more about the obstacles for buyers than for builders. Prices and borrowing rates haven’t provided relief for those looking to make a purchase. People who already own homes are reluctant to sell and move up, which means they’re not freeing up the starter homes that first-time buyers crave. Would-be buyers have nowhere else to turn but the rental market — Redfin estimates that the number of renter households is growing three times as fast as homeowner households.

The housing market “is in limbo,” says Selma Hepp, the chief economist at the real-estate data firm CoreLogic. “It’s sitting on the sidelines. It’s waiting.”