REPORT: D.R. Horton Selling $1.5B In Houses To Single-Family Rental Giant Pretium

Homebuilding giant D.R. Horton inked a deal to sell about 4,000 completed and partially completed houses to Pretium Partners, which specializes in single-family rentals.

Pretium will pay Arlington, Texas-based Horton $1.5B for the houses, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources close to the deal. Most of the properties will be in high-demand markets in the Southeast and Southwest.

Buying from builders isn't unusual for Pretium, which owns about 100,000 houses nationwide, as the demand for single-family houses has outpaced many Americans' ability to afford them.

Other investors have been in on the single-family rental action in recent years, though the pace of sales has slowed as interest rates have risen, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Late last year, J.P. Morgan Global Alternatives and rental specialist Haven Realty Capital partnered to develop or acquire more than $1B worth of homes for rent.

Single-family rent growth has been slowing as well. In March, rents for houses were up 4.3% year-over-year, which was the lowest annual rent growth in the sector since early 2021, according to CoreLogic.

Las Vegas and Phoenix, two major markets for single-family rentals, saw single-family rents decline slightly year-over-year, mirroring trends in for-sale residential prices, CoreLogic reports.

Even so, rents are still growing for some kinds of single-family houses.

“The slowdown is more pronounced in the higher-priced tier, where growth is now about the same as it was before the pandemic,” CoreLogic Principal Economist Molly Boesel said in a statement. “However, gains in the lower tier are still twice the pre-pandemic rate, with all tracked metro areas posting increases at that price level.”