The sweeping housing reform bill, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, has passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 396-13, after previous reporting (via Politico) indicated that Speaker Mike Johnson and House GOP leaders had reached an agreement with President Donald Trump and the White House.
Following the bill’s passage, National Association of Realtors® (NAR) Chief Advocacy Officer Shannon McGahn released a statement praising the passage and highlighting NAR’s previous support for the legislation.
“This bill reflects the growing bipartisan consensus that the nation needs bold action to expand housing inventory, improve affordability, and create more pathways to homeownership and rental opportunity,” said McGahn, who called the bill “one of the most significant bipartisan housing packages Congress has considered in decades.”
“Specifically, this amended bill provides communities with new resources and best practices to modernize zoning and boost supply, streamlines federal permitting and expands financing options for manufactured and rural housing,” McGahn continued. “The bill also modernizes key programs like CDBG and HOME to strengthen local housing investment, improves credit access for homebuyers, and helps ensure veterans take full advantage of their VA home loan benefits.”
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Chairman Bill Owens also released a statement praising the bill, specifically amendments to provisions that would have impacted build to rent business models.
“NAHB applauds the House for overwhelmingly approving the revised 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act with strong bipartisan support. Led by House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill and Ranking Member Maxine Waters, the package eliminates a forced-sale provision on rental housing that would have reduced supply, raises and indexes multifamily loan limits to help spur new apartment development, and provides meaningful relief to community banks,” said Owens.
Both McGahn and Owens, in their respective statements, called on the Senate to pass the amended bill and move it to the President’s desk.
The bill was passed by the Senate in March, but has been deadlocked in the House due to language differences between the House and the Senate versions regarding institutional investors. The Senate’s version of the bill included more restrictive limits on institutional investors building, owning and renting out single-family homes. The House’s version removed language from the Senate’s version requiring that single-family homes built by institutional inventors as rentals be sold within seven years to homebuyers.
Many voices in the House, along with in the real estate industry, previously criticized the more strict language toward institutional investors in the Senate’s version of the bill, specifically the seven-year rule.
The updated bill now features a compromise between the two versions. There were also several other updates made: a provision for prevailing wages to be paid toward housing construction workers on federally funded projects was added back in; the “Housing Supply Frameworks Act” (to establish best practices for zoning and land use) was added back in; and the “Build Now Act” to incentivize more housing construction through HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program was removed.
Prior to the bill’s passage, Trump urged the House to pass the Senate’s version of the bill in a Truth Social post, looking to “ensure that homes are for people, not Corporations.” Trump has previously called more broadly for limits on institutional investors buying single family homes, and issued an executive order in January meant to restrict those sales.
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) also previously released a statement urging the House to pass the bill, after initially expressing “significant concerns” about the limits on institutional investors.
Now, though, Bill Killmer—senior vice president of legislative and political affairs for MBA—stated that the association “believes this bipartisan measure, as revised, represents a positive and balanced attempt to boost housing supply, expand affordable homeownership and rental opportunities, reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens to housing production, embrace modern manufactured and modular housing, and increase collaboration across all agencies that regulate the housing and real estate finance sectors.”
“MBA strongly supports key revisions contained within the current House text that address our previously expressed concerns about the negative impacts of the prior bill’s language on rental housing capital flows and FHA multifamily loan limits,” he continued.
“The new House text also improves the proposal regarding FHA’s disclosure form requirements intended to heighten awareness of home loan program options for veterans—and preserves prior improvements sought by MBA made to provisions that appropriately reform the USDA’s Rural Housing Service (RHS) program with respect to the financing of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and RHS loan assumptions, while codifying the GSEs’ reconsideration of value (ROV) appraisal processes (absent any increased lender liability),” Killmer concluded.
Editor’s note: This article was updated at 2:20 on May 20 after the bill was passed.
