Charted: Investor % of Closings — Which Sun Belt Metros Outbid First-Time Buyers, and Did Rates Reverse It?

The housing debate of 2021–22 often collapsed into a single villain: “investors.” The cleaner question is narrower and measurable. In which Sun Belt metros did investor purchases claim a larger share of closings than first-time buyers, and did that gap reverse once mortgage rates rose?

Deed-level purchase flags and NAR-style first-time buyer (FTB) profiles do not answer who “deserved” a house. They do answer who cleared more of the closing tape. On our reconstructed metro panel, Atlanta peaked at 28.4% investor share of closings in 2021 against an 18.2% FTB share — a +10.2 percentage-point gap. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Tampa, Jacksonville, Nashville, Dallas, and Orlando also printed positive investor-minus-FTB gaps at their peaks. Austin, Houston, Raleigh, San Antonio, and Miami tell a different story: investors were loud, but first-time buyers still held the larger slice.

The interactive dashboard tracks investor %, FTB %, and the gap through 2025, with Freddie Mac’s 30-year rate as the rate-rise backdrop. The national punchline is familiar — investor share fell from roughly 18.7% in 2021 to 11.2% in 2025 as the PMMS average climbed from 2.96% to a 2023 peak of 6.81%. The metro punchline is sharper: of ten Sun Belt markets where investors outbid FTB share at the peak, all ten saw the gap flip to zero or negative by 2025. The rate shock did not erase institutional landlords. It did shrink their claim on the closing flow.

What “investor % of closings” actually measures

Investor purchase share is a flow statistic, not a stock statistic. It asks: of recorded single-family and condo deed transfers in a year, what share went to corporate entities, LLCs, or non-occupant buyers identified with cash or investor-financing heuristics? That is different from the share of the single-family rental stock owned by large operators — a related but slower-moving object.

First-time buyer share is usually a survey construct. NAR’s Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers publishes a national FTB percentage; metro splits here are modeled allocations that reconcile those national cells with ACS tenure and first-lien origination age proxies. Treat metro FTB levels as directional, not as recorder-stamped truth.

The comparison that matters for this brief is the gap: investor share minus FTB share, in percentage points. A positive gap means investors claimed more of the year’s closings than first-time buyers. A negative gap means FTB still cleared the larger slice even if investor activity was elevated. That framing avoids a false binary in which any investor purchase is read as a first-time buyer displacement one-for-one.

The Sun Belt scoreboard: who outbid first-time buyers

Ten of fourteen metros in the panel printed a positive gap at their investor peak — almost always 2021. Atlanta (+10.2 pp), Las Vegas (+9.3), Phoenix (+7.8), Charlotte (+4.8), Tampa (+4.4), Miami (+3.4), Jacksonville (+2.4), Nashville (+1.6), Dallas (+1.6), and Orlando (+0.6) form the outbid set. The remaining four — Houston, Austin, Raleigh, and San Antonio — kept FTB share above investor share even at the investor peak.

Miami deserves a footnote. Its investor share never reached Atlanta’s altitude, but its FTB share is structurally low, so absolute first-time participation stayed weak even after the gap flipped negative by 2025. That is a different pathology from Phoenix, where the peak gap was large and FTB share recovered further into the mid-20s as investors exited.

All ten outbid metros show a negative investor−FTB gap by 2025 on this series. Miami’s reversal still leaves a structurally low FTB level; see caveats.

Did the rate shock reverse the gap?

Freddie Mac’s PMMS annual average rose from 2.96% in 2021 to 6.81% in 2023, then eased only modestly through 2025. That is a +4.1 percentage-point rate reset in two years — enough to break leveraged buy-to-rent underwriting that assumed sub-4% debt and rapid rent growth.

On the dashboard’s reversal scatter, metros with the highest peak investor shares also posted the largest peak-to-2025 declines: Atlanta (−15.3 pp), Las Vegas (−16.1), Phoenix (−14.4). The median decline among outbid metros is about 9.6 pp. Nationally, investor share fell 7.5 pp from peak to 2025 while FTB share recovered only 2.5 pp from its 2022 trough. In other words: most of the gap repair came from investors leaving the tape, not from a surge of first-time closings.

That asymmetry matters for policy and for desk narratives. A market can look “friendlier” to first-time buyers on a gap chart while still being historically unaffordable on price-to-income and payment-to-income. Gap reversal is a composition story about who wins auctions when they occur; it is not an affordability cure.

Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas: three peak stories

Atlanta is the headline metro for a reason. Builders delivered a deep entry-level inventory; institutional single-family rental platforms and smaller LLCs both scaled; and 2021’s rate floor made cash-heavy bids cheap to finance or to justify on rent spreads. The 28.4% investor share did not mean nearly three in ten homes became Wall Street rentals overnight — some investors flip, some are small landlords, some are entities for household purchases — but it did mean first-time buyers were competing against a thick non-occupant bid.

Phoenix compressed faster. Investor share fell from 26.8% to 12.4% by 2025 as price cuts, insurance costs, and rate-sensitive leverage hit desert metros hard. The FTB share rose into the mid-20s, and the gap swung from +7.8 pp to −12.9 pp. If you want a clean illustration of “rate rise reversed the outbid,” Phoenix is it.

Las Vegas combines a high peak with a sharp exit. The 2021 investor share (27.1%) sat near Atlanta’s; the 2025 share (11.0%) sits near the national average. Tourism-linked labor markets and a thinner owner-occupant base make the FTB series noisier here, but the direction of the investor retreat is not subtle.

First-time buyers did not simply reclaim the market

It is tempting to read gap reversal as a handoff: investors leave, first-timers arrive. The levels disagree. National FTB share only moved from a 26% trough in 2022 to about 28.5% in 2025 — still well below late-2010s readings near the mid-30s in many NAR vintages. In several Sun Belt metros, FTB share rose a few points while investor share collapsed by double digits. The arithmetic of the gap is dominated by the investor leg.

Why didn’t FTB share explode into the vacuum? Payment shock. A median-priced Sun Belt home at 6.5% is a different object than the same home at 3%. Inventory that investors abandoned did not automatically price into first-time payment affordability. Builders also shifted mix toward larger, higher-margin product in some metros. And credit overlays for lower-down-payment borrowers tightened in practice even when headline programs remained open.

So the honest 2025 read is: investors lost share of closings; first-time buyers gained some ground; neither restored a pre-pandemic buyer mix.

Caveats and measurement limits

Several limits should sit next to every chart in this post.

Definition risk. Vendor “investor” flags disagree on LLC households, iBuyers, and entity purchases that are still owner-occupant in economic substance. Our series follows the common corporate / non-occupant heuristic used in ATTOM, CoreLogic, and Redfin-style releases; it is not a IRS Schedule E audit.

FTB metro modeling. National NAR cells are disclosed; metro FTB paths are estimated. Ranking metros on FTB levels alone overstates precision. Ranking them on whether the investor−FTB gap was positive at the peak is more robust, because investor shares move more and are better anchored in deed flags.

Coverage. The panel is Sun Belt–heavy by design. Coastal California, the Northeast corridor, and Midwest metros can show different investor–FTB geometries. Do not globalize Atlanta’s 2021 peak.

Stock vs flow. A falling investor share of purchases can coexist with a still-rising institutional share of the rental stock if large owners simply buy less while holding what they already have. This post is about the closing tape, not the landlord census.

2025 partial-year fill. Late-year deed counts are still settling in some counties; 2025 figures are desk estimates consistent with mid-year run-rates, not final recorder yearbooks.

What desks should watch next

Three observables will decide whether 2025’s gap repair sticks. First, the rate path: a return toward 5% would reopen leveraged investor math faster than many underwriting decks admit. Second, build-to-rent starts versus existing-home investor purchases — a shift into new supply changes the political economy even if total investor unit growth continues. Third, FTB payment affordability on local medians: without that, gap charts can look healthy while household formation into ownership stays stuck.

For now, the Sun Belt evidence is clear enough. Investor purchases did outbid first-time buyer shares in a concentrated set of metros at the 2021 peak — Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas foremost — and most of those gaps reversed as the 30-year rate reset, primarily because investors stepped back from the tape. First-time buyers inherited a quieter auction, not a restored market.