Dallas Tanner and Charles Young

High interest rates just hit different when you already own 88,000 homes across the country.

Borrowing costs didn’t stop single-
family landlord Invitation Homes from going on a buying spree last summer. In July, Dallas-based Invitation paid Starwood Capital $650 million for a portfolio of 1,870 homes scattered from Texas to California.

That fits with Invitation’s interest in a region of the country it calls the “smile” — a vast market that starts on the West Coast, then dips through the lower states of the Sun Belt to Florida, and finally creeps north into Georgia.

What these communities have in common is a high rate of population growth and new household formation, according to Dallas Tanner.

Tanner began building the company’s single-family empire in Arizona during the lead-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. And, when the bottom fell out a few years later, Invitation, then known as Treehouse Group, began buying up foreclosed homes at astonishing speed. It didn’t take long to catch Blackstone’s attention.

The private equity behemoth bought Invitation in 2012 and poured about $10 billion into it before stepping back to allow the company to go public in 2017.

Charles Young joined the firm in 2013 after stints at Goldman Sachs and Chicago-based Mesa Development. He was appointed president in March 2023. The company’s fundamentals remain strong this year, Young told investors during a first-quarter earnings call in May 2024. Average occupancy across Invitation’s portfolio has stayed above 97 percent for the past year.

“With occupancy in a strong position and fundamentals remaining in our favor, we believe we’re in great shape to capture the demand we’re seeing in our markets,” Young said.

Invitation is also trying something new this year: managing other people’s properties. The company teased the idea in a blog post late last year that argued the merits of getting into the third-party property management business: The move will improve Invitation’s profit margins and help it scale up its presence in existing markets.

Invitation made good on that promise in January when it began managing its first 14,000 homes owned by a third party. One of its first customers was TIAA’s asset management arm, Nuveen, which handed off management of some 3,000 homes to Invitation earlier this year.