Tourism States Are Quietly Becoming SFR Strongholds
While headlines have fixated on the recent pullback in investor activity, one story that has been largely overlooked: the high share of investor-owned homes remains in tourism states—and how that is reshaping those markets for commercial real estate capital.
Single-family rentals in tourism and lifestyle states are increasingly behaving like a hybrid of traditional housing and a commercial asset class, as the latest BatchData Investor Pulse figures make clear. According to the report, investors own roughly 18% of the nation's 86 million single-family homes, a headline number that matters less than where those homes are concentrated and who controls them.
At the same time, BatchData notes that investors purchased more than 1.32 million homes in 2025 while selling about 368,000, with purchase volume down 4.5% from 1.39 million in 2024. In Q4 2025, purchases declined 19% quarter-over-quarter and 15% year-over-year—even as investors accounted for 32% of home purchases during those three months. In other words, the flow of investor buying has slowed, but the stock of investor-owned homes remains elevated in specific parts of the country.
On a map, the skew is striking. Tourism and lifestyle states sit at the top of the investor-ownership rankings: Wyoming leads with 30.66% of single-family homes held by investors, followed by Maine at 29.88%, Montana at 26.63%, Alaska at 26.61% and Hawaii at 25.84%. These are not the country's largest population centers, yet they function as SFR-dense, hospitality-adjacent markets where a material share of the housing stock is controlled by investors rather than owner-occupiers.
BatchData also reports that five large states—Texas, California, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia—account for roughly a third of all investor-owned single-family homes nationwide.
Several of these are both major tourism destinations and high-growth migration corridors. The combination underscores that even as the national investor purchase rate cools, with tourism and lifestyle markets remaining structurally shaped by investor ownership, a trend that looks increasingly persistent rather than cyclical.
Beneath the state-level view, the ownership profile looks very different from the popular Wall Street landlord narrative. BatchData finds that investors with one to five properties control almost 92% of investor-owned single-family homes nationwide. Those with six to ten properties hold just under 4%, and the largest ones account for only about 2% of investor-owned stock.
In other words, while tourism states may be, in aggregate, heavily owned by investors, they are not dominated by a handful of institutional platforms. Instead, they are shaped by thousands of small operators, local investors and micro-portfolios.
This ownership structure has several implications for commercial real estate capital. Market behavior in these tourism-state SFR concentrations is driven by many small balance sheets, not a small group of large corporate landlords.
Distress or forced selling, if it materializes, is more likely to appear in a granular, localized way rather than through high-profile portfolio disposals, but once aggregated, the impact can still be meaningful.
Local banks and regional lenders, which often finance these smaller investors, effectively hold indirect concentration in tourism-state SFR alongside their more traditional small-balance commercial loans. Any tightening in consumer credit, a downturn in tourism or regulatory shifts in short-term rental policy can therefore register across SFR performance, hospitality metrics and the small-format retail that serves these neighborhoods.
Investors eyeing allocations to these markets have several considerations. Siting decisions for neighborhood retail, medical office and service-oriented industrial increasingly need to factor in a resident base in which a sizable share of homes are operated as rental properties rather than traditional owner-occupied housing.
High SFR penetration can support a more stable customer pool composed of full-time residents, remote workers and recurring visitors, but it also introduces sensitivity to tourism cycles and regulatory risk that looks familiar to hospitality investors.
Land pricing is another point of interaction. In markets where 25% to 30% of the single-family stock is investor-owned, incremental residential land and infill sites may begin to price off SFR returns and expectations, rather than just owner-occupier comparable sales. That shift can affect residual land values and underwriting assumptions for mixed-use projects, small-format commercial developments and build-for-rent communities competing for similar sites.
BatchData's findings do not assert that tourism states have become a new asset class in their own right. They do show, however, that in several tourism-heavy markets, single-family housing has become a large, investor-controlled operating business. For institutional and mid-market capital, treating those states as SFR-driven markets—where the stock of investor-owned homes remains structurally high even as new investor purchases moderate—is no longer just a narrative device; it is a defensible, data-supported lens for underwriting and portfolio construction.
Source: GlobeSt/ALM