Back on Live & Local with Kevin Wall on AM 670 KMZQ in Las Vegas, SPPI President and CEO Patrick M. Brenner explained why single-family rentals matter in a city that works around the clock. Las Vegas runs on gaming and hospitality, he told Mr. Wall and co-host Jim Dallas, and a casino worker coming home from a graveyard shift at dawn gets something an apartment rarely offers: no upstairs neighbors.
Mr. Brenner urged listeners to ask who counts as an investor before trusting any ownership statistic, since a family with two rental homes and a firm with thousands are very different landlords. He granted that, by the Government Accountability Office’s account, large investors may push up prices and rents in some markets, but said they did not cause the affordability crisis. Senator Dina Neal’s 2025 Senate Bill 391, which would have capped corporate purchases at 100 homes a year, could have opened some homes to buyers, he said, but it would also have left renters with fewer choices and higher prices.
Institutional owners bring capital for renovation, maintenance and new construction, he added, and built-to-rent communities add homes rather than taking them from buyers; when those homes are later sold, they go back on the market for families to own. His advice to lawmakers in Carson City was to expand the housing supply, for owners and renters alike, by cutting the red tape that slows new construction.