President Donald Trump has promised to implement “some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history” this year after home prices continued climbing in 2025 and mortgage rates remained historically high.
He kicked off the new year with two major housing-related announcements, one proposing to ban corporate investors from buying single-family homes in the residential market and one directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities.
Neither measure has officially been introduced, though they have already sparked enthusiasm and skepticism among experts and industry insiders.
As the Trump administration prepares to make more announcements this year on how to tackle the ongoing U.S. housing affordability crisis, Newsweek asked experts which policies they think the president could push for—and how effective they think they would be.
Banning Corporate Investors
On January 7, Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform Truth Social that he was “immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes,” adding that he would soon be calling on Congress to codify such a policy.
“People live in homes, not corporations. I will discuss this topic, including further Housing and Affordability proposals, and more at my speech in Davos in two weeks,” Trump added, referring to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.
The measure seems to respond to widespread anger about investors snatching away homes from everyday Americans in the years following the pandemic homebuying frenzy.
In 2023, when buying a home was extremely hard to afford for Americans because of the supply shortage pushing up prices, corporate investors bought a record share of homes, 26 percent, further exacerbating buyers’ struggles. But the phenomenon has since significantly diminished, experts said, and corporate investors represent a small part of the residential market.
According to the latest Realtor.com Investor Report, investors accounted for about 10.8 percent of home purchases in mid-2025, and “more than 60 percent of that activity came from small, mom-and-pop investors [those with 10 or fewer purchases since 2001], not large corporations,” Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel told Newsweek.
“Importantly, large investor activity has been declining since 2022, while small investor participation has been rising and recently reached its highest level since 2007,” he said. “In other words, the segment this policy targets is an already narrow and shrinking slice of the market.”
Large corporate ownership is “a red herring in the broader supply debate,” Krimmel said. “Most single-family rentals are owned by small landlords, and many of the markets where institutional investors have been most active are also places where inventory has already been rising and price growth has cooled over the past two years.”
The ban, if implemented, “would likely shift home purchases from large corporations to medium and small corporations, without a noticeable impact on the existing dynamics of the housing market,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, wrote in a recent report assessing the proposal.
Opening Up Federal Land
One solution to the U.S. housing affordability crisis that would address inventory is one that Trump has been floating since his 2024 presidential campaign: opening millions of acres of federal land for residential housing construction.
Fairweather told Newsweek that while opening federal land is possible, it is difficult to execute at scale.
“Most federal land isn’t located near jobs or infrastructure, which limits its impact,” she said. “Even if implemented, it would likely help at the margins rather than meaningfully solve the nationwide affordability shortage.”
Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com, told Newsweek that opening up federal land would be “a concrete step” that the Trump administration could take to show that they’re working on the problem.
“Very little federal land is located in areas near major metros, so the impact would be minimal,” he said. “Not much affordable housing could be created in a relevant location, and the areas where federal land does border a major metro area, like in Las Vegas, are home to some weak housing markets for which there may not be much demand anyway.”
While the Trump administration might open federal land for residential construction this year, such a measure “won’t really move the needle,” Berner added.
Introducing a 50-Year Mortgage
One proposal made by Trump last year and quickly put aside after sparking widespread backlash among economists was creating a 50-year mortgage.
The appeal of the idea, which Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte described it as a “complete game changer,” would be “to offer lower monthly payments to homebuyers and break up the logjam of the current housing market which has struggled in terms of sales pace all year,” Berner previously told Newsweek.
But a 50-year mortgage would result “in almost double the interest payments of a 30-year mortgage and a longer path to meaningful home equity,” the economist explained, “and that the result of subsidizing home demand without increasing home supply could be an increase to home prices that negates the potential savings.”
In short, Berner said, many of the proposals made by Trump around mortgages—“assumable mortgages, portable mortgages, 50-year mortgages, and any other proposals regarding home finance are not likely to be a winning solution.”
“The current system is very entrenched and introducing more uncertainty to the equation would likely drive mortgage rates up, not down,” he said. “A better solution to financing challenges is to keep a laser focus on inflation, which if kept in check, could help mortgage rates fall organically.”
Forcing Fannie and Freddie to Buy Millions of Dollars in Mortgage Bonds
As of the week ending on January 8, the national average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 6.16 percent, according to Freddie Mac—still more than double the lows reported during the COVID-19 pandemic but lower than at that time a year earlier, when they were hovering near the 7 percent mark.
Trump, who has been frustrated with the Federal Reserve for not cutting interest rates sooner last year, now seems to have a new solution to lower borrowing costs for Americans. In an unprecedented move last week, he announced on Truth Social that he was “instructing” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds.
“This will drive mortgage rates down, monthly payments down, and make the cost of owning a home more affordable,” he wrote.
But experts are more skeptical of the potential impact of the policy.
“Details remain limited, but it’s difficult to see this proposal moving mortgage rates in a large or lasting way,” Berner previously told Newsweek. “A one-time infusion of roughly $200 billion, or even a series of smaller purchases that add up to that figure, is unlikely to meaningfully alter long-term mortgage pricing.”
Bankrate housing market analyst Jeff Ostrowski said: “Government bond buying can inject stability and certainty in the mortgage market and therefore drive down rates,” adding that that’s what happened in 2020 and 2021, when the Fed “ramped up” its purchases of mortgage-backed securities.
“However, the Fed was far from the most important force pushing down mortgage rates,” he added. “They fell because the global economy was in crisis, and because 10-year Treasury yields, the main benchmark for mortgage rates, plunged to all-time lows.”
Changing Local Zoning
One way Trump could unlock what experts say the housing market really needs—more inventory—is through speeding up permitting and construction, especially by changing local zoning.
“Zoning authority is left up to states and municipalities, but the federal government can influence outcomes through incentives,” Fairweather said.
“This is already in the works in Congress,” Berner said. “The administration could publish some standards regarding local zoning that they encourage municipalities to adopt—either with incentives or punishments—that will likely be related to infrastructure and public transit projects in the area.
“If local governments want the federal money to be invested in their neighborhoods, they’ll have to simplify and standardize their zoning,” he added.
Tying infrastructure funding or competitive grants to housing production is “the most realistic way to encourage zoning reform, though local resistance remains a major constraint,” Fairweather said.
“Congress could give the Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] the authority to preempt local zoning near federal infrastructure like interstate highways or railways,” she said, “but this would set off a legal battle between the federal government and states that would need to be resolved by the Supreme Court.
“There is some precedent here: The federal government has previously overridden local zoning to allow for the development of cellphone towers.”
For Berner, zoning reform is “key” to solve the nation’s “underbuilding problem” and would have the biggest impact in markets that are currently the tightest in terms of inventory, such as the Northeast and Midwest.
“Other policy initiatives all have drawbacks and the fundamental issue is not with the mechanics of home finance, it’s with the fact that there aren’t enough homes for sale and people’s incomes aren’t high enough to afford them,” Berner said.
“General economic growth and reducing barriers to construction should be the goals” of the Trump administration to make housing more affordable, he added.
Deporting Thousands of Migrants
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised an aggressive anti-immigration crackdown if reelected and mass deportations of undocumented migrants that he said would free up housing for American citizens.
Since his return to office, the administration has deported nearly 200,000 undocumented migrants and 1.6 million have left the country of their own will, according to the White House.
From a housing-market perspective, large-scale deportations “would help free up some housing but would also hurt the construction of new housing,” Fairweather said.
The U.S. construction industry employs nearly 1.6 million undocumented immigrants, according to reports based on U.S. Census data and labor surveys cited by the American Business Immigration Coalition.
“Immigrants play a significant role in construction, and reducing labor supply tends to raise building costs and slow new home production,” Fairweather said.
According to Berner, “it’s really not clear that immigration is having a major crowding-out effect on housing demand.”
The “healthiest way” to solve the affordability issue, Berner said, “is on the supply side anyway.”
Declaring a National Emergency
In September, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that Trump was considering declaring a national housing emergency to address the affordability crisis.
It is unclear what this would entail, as, legally, there is no clear definition of what constitutes an emergency under the 1976 National Emergency Act—it is left to the discretion of the president.
But Trump could use such measures to strengthen and turbocharge some of the policies mentioned above.
“The best ways the administration could make an impact are by encouraging the building and purchase of homes. Overriding, or at least standardizing, local laws on zoning would be a great step toward allowing builders to deliver the inventory needed by the American people in the places where it is needed,” Berner told Newsweek in September.
“Streamlining the permitting process and putting fewer restrictions on builders would be a great way to augment home inventory in locations that need it the most. This would have the best long-term impact, but the federal government could also juice the housing market in the short run by making it easier to buy a home.”
Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, last week introduced the National Housing Emergency Act, which calls on Trump to declare a national emergency about the U.S. housing supply.
The bill would invoke the Defense Production Act to incentivize housing construction and build 4 million homes across the nation and prohibit state and local governments from imposing regulations that place “a substantial burden” on housing production and rehabilitation during the “period of the emergency” until October 1, 2031, or until the 4 million goal is met.
“There is nothing more fundamental to the American Dream than owning your own home, and it has become increasingly difficult for middle class Americans to do this,” Slotkin said in a statement.
“The United States is in a housing crisis, and we need to act now. That’s why my bill declares a national housing emergency, cuts regulations that get in the way and uses the full weight of the U.S. government to increase our housing supply by 4 million homes.”