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- Giant homebuilders—including Lennar and Taylor Morrison—reportedly float a rent-to-own 'Trump Homes' program
Giant homebuilders—including Lennar and Taylor Morrison—reportedly float a rent-to-own 'Trump Homes' program
Rent-to-own models have a long track record of struggling, in part because renter-to-buyer conversion rates are hard to forecast. Divvy Homes and Home Partners of America—now defunct—are recent examples.
Lance Lambert
February 04, 2026
Speaking during their December 17 earnings call, executives at Lennar—a giant homebuilder with a market capitalization of $28 billion—said the federal government is working on a plan to help alleviate strained housing affordability. Lennar CEO Stuart Miller said the Trump administration is actively engaging with giant homebuilders and industry groups to better understand constraints and potential policy. At the time, Miller suggested it would be “surprising” if no meaningful action emerged in 2026, given discussions.
Fast-forward to Tuesday, and Bloomberg reports [get behind the paywall here] that some giant homebuilders, including Lennar and Taylor Morrison, have been working on a proposal for what some in the industry are calling “Trump Homes”—a large-scale rent-to-own program funded by private investors aimed at boosting the supply of entry-level housing.
“Under one iteration of the plan, the investors would rent out the homes to tenants, whose monthly payments would, after three years, be counted toward a down payment if they wished to purchase the home. Such a program would be complicated to implement, one of the people said, and it’s possible that it won’t gain enough support to move forward. Even so, it demonstrates builders’ desire to gain the favor—or at a minimum, avoid the ire—of an unusually transactional White House. The size of the program would ultimately depend on how many builders decide to participate, though a person involved in the plan said that builders have discussed aiming for as many as 1 million homes. At that number, the program would likely deliver more than $250 billion worth of housing. The administration is not actively considering the plan, a White House official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The private investors would bear any initial losses, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing the proposal. Many details have yet to be determined, including the role that federally-backed mortgages should play. Industry players initially pitched the plan last year to the administration and are continuing to refine the details, the people familiar with the matter said.”
The proposal also comes amid mixed signals from Washington on the role of institutional capital in housing. Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Administration, has publicly criticized institutional investors for buying homes directly from homebuilders, arguing that the practice disadvantages individual homebuyers. Yet later in the month, the Trump administration’s proposed “ban” on institutional homebuying explicitly included an exemption for build-to-rent “rental communities”. Viewed through that lens, the “Trump Homes” concept may represent an effort by investors and builders to preserve a role for private capital and builder-investor partnerships, while framing those transactions around an eventual path to owner-occupancy rather than permanent rentals. Whether that reframing is enough to make the administration more comfortable with investor participation—or whether the idea moves beyond the discussion stage at all—remains unclear.
In the past, rent-to-own models have repeatedly struggled because conversion rates from renter to buyer tend to be hard to project, while operational and financing costs remain high. When mortgage rates rise or credit conditions tighten, many renters are unable to qualify at the end of the lease, undermining the economics of the model.
Look no further than Divvy Homes, one of the most prominent private rent-to-own startups, which shut down and, in January 2025, sold its portfolio to Maymont Homes in what amounted to a “fire sale.” Around that same time, Blackstone’s rent-to-own firm Home Partners of America shuttered, and Blackstone’s single-family rental firm Tricon took over its portfolio.
Personally, I’m taking many of these policy ideas—and even many of the proposals floated by the administration—with a grain of salt for now. It’s unclear which will actually move forward, and in what form. As we move further into this midterm year, the administration is trying to determine how it wants to address housing, which has become a bigger political pressure point than usual given where housing affordability stands. Part of what the Trump administration is doing right now, in my view, is testing different housing measures to see how public opinion reacts.
For that reason, after many of Trump’s floated housing proposals, I quickly ran polls on X.com (formerly Twitter) to gauge initial public reaction. Based on ResiClub’s polling—and the broader online reaction observed back in November—it’s safe to assume that the administration is likely not going to keep pushing the 50-year mortgage idea.
Effective property tax rate
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Building materials giant Builders FirstSource acknowledges that it recently acquired the assets of modular homebuilder Pleasant Valley Homes, as reported by Webb Analytics and The Builder’s Daily
“In November 2025, Builders FirstSource acquired the assets of Pleasant Valley Homes Inc., a wholesale manufacturer of factory-built housing in Pine Grove, PA with sales of approximately 400 units per year across ten northeastern states. The company sells HUD-compliant manufactured homes and high quality, semi-custom modular homes to land lease community developers, retailers, and homebuilders. This investment represents an expansion of our prefabricated component strategy to address challenges facing the homebuilding industry such as affordability and access to labor with a cost-competitive, factory-built option, which reduces builder cycle times. We plan to use available factory capacity to offer high-quality, semi-custom modular plans to our existing homebuilder customers with the potential to expand the offering to our homebuilder customers in other BFS markets in the future – our goal is to first learn this model and potentially scale it later. We will not change the go-to-market approach of the company and will not compete with homebuilders by selling directly to prospective homebuyers.”
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