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Invitation Homes, one of the nation’s largest single-family rental landlords with 85,961 wholly owned homes, says the rental supply picture is improving recently in some markets that have been hardest hit by the multiple-year cyclical cooling that followed the pandemic housing boom. But on its Q3 2026 earnings call on Thursday, management flagged a wild card it’s keeping an eye on: “shadow [SFR] supply.”
Tim Lobner, COO of Invitation Homes, said single-family rental listings from large operators were down 13% year over year in August, including in the company’s three largest markets: Atlanta, Tampa, and Phoenix. Build-to-rent deliveries peaked in 2024 and are expected to keep slowing through 2027 and 2028, he said. And single-family housing starts are forecast to fall 7% this year and another 5% next year, he told analysts.
Invitation Homes says the wild card is so-called shadow rental supply. That includes “accidental landlords,” homeowners who list their homes for sale, can’t get their asking price, and list them for rent instead, along with unsold homebuilder spec homes that could end up in the rental market.
Here’s what Dallas Tanner, CEO of Invitation Homes, said on the company’s October 29, 2026, earnings call:
“In an elevated mortgage rate environment, it [higher rates causing some renters to stay put] is obviously beneficial for our renewals business, but it could bring additional [rental] supply pressure around [on the] new lease side. So we’ll be mindful of that . . . And what do the mom and pops do that are maybe sitting on a home they’re trying to sell? Does that then kind of come back into play as well? So it’s too early to tell on any of those from a supply-oriented story, but it’s something we’re mindful of and we pay attention to.”
And here’s what Lobner, the COO, said on the earnings call:
“The one area of focus, and Dallas talked about this earlier, was the mom and pop shadow supply. We’re trying to keep an eye on that. Too early to tell where that’s going to go with interest rates where they are. You know, as we look more broadly though at the housing supply, it’s interesting.”
Where accidental landlords are most common
So where are accidental landlords most prevalent? Back in spring 2026, ResiClub analyzed a Zillow dataset covering 50 major metros, which measured the share of rental listings that had been listed for sale for at least two weeks, failed to sell, and were relisted as rentals within three months.
While that data is a little dated now, the directional finding remains: Accidental landlords are most common in the softer pockets of the U.S. housing market.
Major metros with the highest share of accidental landlord rental listings:
- Denver: 4.9%
- Houston: 4.2%
- Austin: 4.1%
- San Antonio : 3.9%
- Portland, OR: 3.7%
Major metros with the lowest share of accidental landlord rental listings:
- Boston: 0.6%
- Providence, RI: 0.6%
- New York: 0.7%
- Hartford, CT: 0.7%
- Buffalo: 0.8%
ResiClub’s spring 2026 analysis found a fairly strong negative relationship (R² = 0.58) between how much a metro’s home prices have shifted since their 2022 peak and its share of accidental landlords. Put simply: Markets with bigger price corrections, like Austin, Denver, and San Antonio, are more likely to see sellers pivot to renting rather than accept what they view as an unfavorable price cut. We also found a strong relationship (R² = 0.65) between accidental landlords and how far active inventory has rebounded above 2019 levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. More listings mean more competition, and more homes that fail to sell.
Why it matters for local markets
The concern for Invitation Homes is pricing power on new move-ins. In Q3 2026, the company’s renewing tenants paid 4.3% more than on their previous lease, while incoming tenants paid 0.2% less than the prior tenant in the same home.
The weakness on new leases was concentrated in Sun Belt markets where rental listing supply has been elevated: Phoenix (-2.9%), South Florida (-2.6%), Tampa, Florida, (-2.4%), Las Vegas (-2.3%), Atlanta (-0.7%), Houston (-0.5%), Denver (-0.4%), and Dallas (-0.1%). Many of those places also have higher shares of accidental landlords. If those accidental landlord shares rise further, it could undo some of the rental inventory cleanup that’s taken place in some of those markets over the past year.
In most markets, accidental landlording remains fairly niche. Many homeowners need the equity from selling their current home to buy their next one, which caps how many can hold onto a home and rent it out (especially given the current affordability picture). On the flip side, homeowners this cycle are under far less financial stress than during the financial crisis of 2008-09, and many locked in ultralow mortgage rates, which allows some to rent out a home at or above their monthly payment while they wait for the market to improve.
If economic conditions worsen, some of those accidental landlords could eventually become “capitulation sellers,” returning to the for-sale market at lower prices.
While shadow rental supply from accidental landlords is a headwind, Invitation Homes argues current rent vs. buy math is a tailwind. The giant SFR landlord says that as of September, it was on average more than $1,000 a month cheaper to lease a home than to own one in its markets.