Invesco To Back Property Manager Mynd On $5B Single-Family Rental Play

Invesco Real Estate is partnering with Mynd Management to acquire about 20,000 single-family U.S. rental homes over the next three years. Invesco is backing Mynd to spent as much as $5B on the properties, Bloomberg reports.

Under the terms of the deal, Mynd will buy assets exclusively for funds managed by Invesco. Oakland, California-based Mynd will also continue to beef up its single-family management platform, which oversees about 7,000 properties in 25 cities. 

“As traditional commercial real estate investors that invested in multifamily as their key strategy have moved into single-family rental, we’re seeing the market flooded with institutional capital,” Mynd CEO Doug Brien told Bloomberg. 

Invesco is the lead investor in a $40M financing round to facilitate the further development of Mynd’s tech platform for finding, purchasing and managing single-family rental properties, helping Mynd expand its acquisitions and renovations arm.

Invesco is the latest to invest in single-family rental housing, interest in which has expanded since the Great Recession. In March, homebuilder Lennar launched a single-family rental joint venture called Upward America Venture with $1.25B of equity from investors led by Centerbridge Partners. In January, JLL unveiled a single-family rental advisory arm and soon after took a minority ownership stake in single-family rental platform Roofstock.

Demand for single-family rentals has been roughly steady during the coronavirus pandemic. Vacancy rates for U.S. single-family rental properties averaged 6.8% in Q1 2021, according to the Census Bureau, up from 6.5% in Q4 2020 and up from 6.6% a year earlier. 

Development of single-family houses for rent has increased over the past decade, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, tabulating Census Bureau data. Last year, 49,000 single-family rentals were started, up from the slowest year in 2009 when 14,000 units started and besting the previous high of 47,000 units in 2003.

Single-family rentals represent a little less than 4% of total housing construction and about 12% of residential rental construction. Households with young adults, modest incomes and children are more likely to live in single-family rental units, the Joint Center for Housing Studies reports.