More single-family homes across the nation are being built for renters, a shift that mirrors a steady decline in homeownership in the years since the housing bust.
Until recently, real-estate investors had focused primarily on scooping up tens of thousands of foreclosed homes, at a sharp discount, and converting them into rental properties. Now that the pool of these properties has declined and prices have risen, these investors are snapping up newly finished single-family homes to be used as rentals, or even developing vacant lots from the ground up.
