This land is their land

Georgia legislators introduced bills to limit corporate ownership in Atlanta’s housing market. Most of them stalled.

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Illustration by Khoa Tran

Before Gabriel Sanchez was a Georgia state representative, he was just a downtown Atlanta resident trying to survive the pandemic in an apartment that kept flooding.

The complex had on-site staff, but Sanchez’s landlord did not live in Georgia. “It’s one of those things where you have these owners who are far removed from the actual property they own, so they have little to no care about what happens outside of what the law requires,” he says. Sanchez, a Democrat who now represents Smyrna in the state House, believes if he had a direct connection with the building’s owner, his experience could have been different. “This is what happens when you commodify housing and make it a profit motive instead of something that people need,” he says.

The commodification of housing doesn’t just apply to apartment buildings and condos: According to a Georgia State University study, three real estate investment companies own more than 10 percent of the single-family homes available for rent in metro Atlanta. “We run the highest percentage of corporate ownership in the housing market—[higher] than any other market in the country,” Sanchez explains.  

“We run the highest percentage of corporate ownership in the housing market—[higher] than any other market in the country.” —Gabriel Sanchez, Georgia state representative

Beginning with the 2007 foreclosure crisis—and picking up again with the COVID-19 pandemic—many local landlords and homeowners sold their properties, enabling real estate investment companies to buy homes en masse and rent them out strictly for profit, as so-called corporate landlords. These companies can purchase properties for more than they’re worth, presenting sellers with cash offers that individual homebuyers can’t compete with, and they’re pricing homebuyers out of the market. In fact, investment funds account for more than a third of the recent home purchases in metro Atlanta. Just three companies own more than 19,000 metro Atlanta homes. “You can throw that dream out the window,” said Kelsea Bond, housing advocate and Atlanta City Council District 2 candidate, at a recent Housing Justice League rally for rent control. “We’re not buying a house.”

“You can throw that dream out the window. We’re not buying a house.” —Kelsea Bond, housing advocate and Atlanta City Council District 2 candidate

During this year’s legislative session, four bills were introduced in the state House to address the rise in corporate landlords: House Bills 305, 399, 555, and 864. Out of those bills, only one passed. These are just a few of many housing bills that were proposed this session to address the commodification of housing. We chose to focus on bills that dealt with corporate landlords in particular.

House Bill 305, or the Protect the Dream Act, was sponsored by five Democrats and one Republican. This bill aimed to make it illegal for corporations to own more than 25 single-family homes per county. It stalled in the Governmental Affairs Committee. 

House Bill 555, or the Georgians First Residential Property Protection Act, was sponsored by five Republicans and one Democrat and aimed to “prohibit business enterprises from owning an interest in more than 2,000 single-family residential properties or ten multifamily residential properties.” This bill was sent back to the Judiciary Committee for review.

Even though both bills stalled, Matthew Nursey, an organizer and policy advocate with the Housing Justice League, is encouraged that both House Republicans and Democrats introduced policy this year condemning the rise of corporate landlords.

“There’s an appetite on both sides of the aisle to address the large-investor issue. For more conservative people, it’s about resources leaving the state,” Nursey says. “These corporate landlords are from New York, California, Israel, all over the place. They’re not from Georgia. Millions upon millions of dollars are leaving the state that can be kept here.”

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With fewer people able to purchase a home, more are renting, which, in turn, is driving up rent. In February 2020, just before the onset of the pandemic, the average rent in Atlanta was $1,506, according to Zillow. By February 2025, it had increased nearly 25 percent, to $1,870. 

In December, former President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors released a report attributing some of this increase to RealPage, a property management software company that sells rental price-setting software to landlords. RealPage’s software uses artificial intelligence to adjust rental rates, using nonpublic rental rate information that landlords share with the company to recommend rental prices to competing landlords. 

The CEA report estimated that nearly half of Atlanta’s available rental units are affected by RealPage’s algorithms and claimed that the company has added about $181 per month to Atlanta renters’ costs—way more than the national average increase of $70.

Last August, the Department of Justice announced it was suing RealPage for antitrust violations and price fixing. The DOJ dropped its criminal investigation into the pricing practices of multifamily housing in December. In January, the department escalated its civil suit against algorithmic pricing, amending the suit to include six corporate landlords, one of which is Atlanta-based Cortland Management. Many cities have fought back against RealPage. San Francisco and Philadelphia recently passed laws restricting algorithmic rent-pricing software; other city and state legislators are following suit.

In February, Sanchez and five other Democrats sponsored House Bill 679, or the End Rental Price-Fixing Act. The bill aims to ban landlords in Georgia from using AI to set rental prices and prevent providers of this software from selling it to multiple landlords in the same market for collusion. The bill did not make it out of the House, but it did get a hearing in the Judiciary Committee. Sanchez says he will push for a vote next year.

Late this session, Sanchez introduced another bill (again sponsored by five other Democrats): House Bill 864, or the End Corporate Ownership of Georgia Homes Act. The bill would require corporations to report the number of single-family homes they own and sell 20 percent of their homes each year by imposing a $750,000 fine for each home they own in excess.

“There are definitely other factors as well, but if we don’t fix this [corporate ownership] issue, the housing crisis will not be solved,” Sanchez says. “We have to stop these huge corporations from buying our homes. They’re jacking up the prices and making it unaffordable for the rest of us.” 

“There are definitely other factors as well, but if we don’t fix this [corporate ownership] issue, the housing crisis will not be solved.” —Gabriel Sanchez, Georgia state representative

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On the last day of this year’s legislative session, House Bill 399, sponsored by four Democrats and three Republicans, passed the Senate. This bill will require out-of-state landlords who own 25 homes or more in Georgia to employ at least one person in-state who is responsible for responding to and managing their tenants’ property issues. “[House Bill 399] does apply mainly to single-family homes, but I still think it’s a decent start,” Sanchez says. “It’s a decent bill that could help with some of the issues people face.” It’s heading to Governor Kemp’s desk for a signature now. 

Nursey wants lawmakers to realize that governmental mandates are necessary to prevent large enterprises from keeping their stronghold on the Atlanta housing market. “For capitalism to work, you have to have guardrails and safety nets,” Nursey says. “Clearly, [corporations] are creating monopolies, and that shouldn’t be allowed. It’s against the law. So we need to create protections to minimize the amount of properties that corporate landlords can buy.” •