Measuring Rental Property Ownership in the United States

Roughly one-third of US households rent their homes. Understanding the role of property owners in rental markets is difficult because ownership is frequently obscured by limited liability companies and other intermediary entities, making it hard to determine who ultimately owns rental properties. We develop a scalable method to identify ultimate landlord ownership and construct property portfolios by linking restricted US Census Bureau data with deeds and property assessment records. Applying this approach to eleven US cities spanning diverse market and regulatory environments, we construct a property–owner-level dataset. We use these data to document new facts about landlord organization and portfolio structure and to compare ownership measures derived from our approach with commonly used methods, showing that existing approaches substantially misclassify landlord type and concentration.