Treasury blueprints carve-outs from ROAD’s Wall Street BTR ban

The devil in the details of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, America’s most ambitious bipartisan housing policy measure in a half-century, amounts to a highly complex, high-stakes, high-wire act for both global capital investment and residential development players navigating the law’s black-and-white and grey areas for the near- and longer-term future commitments in the space.On Thursday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury released a notice of proposed rulemaking that would grant build-to-rent (BTR) communities a range of notable exemptions from the institutional investor ban lawmakers included in the bill. The final version of ROAD explicitly stated that investors who own 350 or more single-family homes will not be eligible to acquire additional properties, while exempting newly built BTR communities from that restriction. The ban takes effect on January 7, 2027. However, industry advocates suggested that Treasury could interpret the law differently. In July, three days after ROAD went into law, a coalition of rental housing organizations issued an open letter asking that Treasury signal its intention to issue regulations exempting build-to-rent, as intended in the housing ...