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We examine rental landlords’ decisions to buy and sell investment properties. We use the results of a new survey of owners of rental properties in nine major US cities, focusing on a subset of rental investors who own properties themselves, where we ask questions about their demographic and economic backgrounds, rental portfolios, and business management practices, and questions about their interest in acquiring new investments and plans to sell properties currently in their portfolio. We use these data to specify a series of regressions examining the factors that shape owners’ decisions to grow or shrink their businesses. First, we examine whether financial factors affect acquisition and disposition decisions. In this category, we include a variety of measures, including rents, external shocks, the owner’s reliance on rental income, debt, and portfolio characteristics. Second, we examine the impact of the owner’s personal characteristics—including age, gender, race, and ownership length—on investment behavior. Finally, we examine the influence of operating experience on future investment decisions, including interactions, vacancies, evictions, property investment, and business impacts from COVID-19 and other external events. Our analysis contributes to a growing body of research on the businesses of small landlords and their impact on the housing system. 

Despite the central role that landlords, or residential rental property owners (RRPOs), play in housing, important areas of RRPO decision making are not well understood. Because of the importance of RRPOs in the housing system, gaps in our knowledge leave planners at a disadvantage when creating policies to improve housing stability for tenants. This article is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary literature review of RRPO characteristics and behavior framed around three decision points: career lifecycle, portfolio maintenance and development, and property operations. This review ends with suggestions for an RRPO-focused research agenda that supports urban resiliency and housing stability for renters.