VineBrook Homes Breakdown

Portfolio holdings, gross rental yields, purchase and sale activity, and more.

Dec 07, 2023

∙ Paid

VineBrook Homes has built a portfolio of 23,000+ single-family rental properties across the country, with a over a third of the portfolio in Ohio and Missouri.
Compared to public SFR REITs like Invitation Homes and American Homes 4 Rent, VineBrook has focused on workforce housing, buying lower priced homes in more affordable areas and has become the largest owner of workforce single family rentals.
VineBrook has started selling their properties more aggressively than other large SFR operators; the majority of sales have gone to small-scale investors.
Detailed information about VineBrook’s recent property sale activity and gross yields by metro are available for paid subscribers at the end of the article. Meaningful differences in exist in list vs purchase price when looked at by purchase date cohort, including homes being listed for below purchase price. Gross yields have varied widely across metros.

Introduction

VineBrook Homes is a leading SFR fund with a portfolio of 23,000+ properties nationwide. With a focus on affordability and value, VineBrook has a lower median purchase price of the homes it owns at $75k compared to other SFR funds (for comparison, FirstKey Homes has a median acquisition price of $267k). While many SFR funds have a predominant focus on the Southeast, almost half of the homes owned by VineBrook are in the Midwest, with Ohio as the state with the most properties owned.

VineBrook currently has 700+ homes listed for sale. VineBrook isn't the only SFR fund focused on workforce housing looking to offload properties - SFR3 has sold 1,000+ properties year-to-date. Unlike for higher-end properties held by other SFR funds, there are few bulk buyers of workforce housing portfolios. VineBrook will likely need to sell each property individually by listing it on market, rather than finding a way to coordinate a bulk portfolio transaction with another fund.

Data Overview

At SFR Analytics, we leverage nationwide deed, assessor, and rental listing data to track the single family rental market. To generate this analysis, we’ve:

Identified and reconciled the entities that VineBrook has purchased homes under
Matched rental listing data to the underlying ownership information that links an entity to VineBrook
Aggregated additional sources of data, like school ratings, to provide additional context about the neighborhoods where properties are held

Note: A more detailed breakdown of data and methodology used is available at the bottom of the post.

Analysis & Results

Geographic Distribution

VineBrook has built a 23,000+ home portfolio spanning the Midwest and Southeast.

VineBrook’s largest states by ownership are Ohio and Missouri, followed by Alabama and Tennessee. For comparison, the top three states that American Homes 4 Rent owns properties in are Texas, Florida, and North Carolina; for Invitation Homes, the top three states are Florida, Georgia, and California. VineBrook’s portfolio has a significantly heavier tilt towards the Midwest than most large SFR funds — in recent years offering better gross yields with less appreciation than core SFR markets outside the Midwest.

Purchase Price Distribution

Lower cost homes make up the bulk of VineBrook’s portfolio, with a median purchase price of $75k across the portfolio. On average, homes owned by VineBrook have a square footage of roughly 1,300 square feet, compared to almost 2,000 square feet for homes owned by other large funds.

Acquisition History

VineBrook steadily acquired 500 to 1,500 properties a year from 2015 to 2020, before rapidly accelerating purchase volume to 3,000+ in 2021 and almost 5,000 in 2022. With the rise in interest rates, VineBrook has slowed acquisitions, acquiring only a few hundred year-to-date in 2023.

School Ratings

The fund’s focus on lower purchase price homes dedicated to workforce housing shows up in the difference in rating for schools located near homes it owns compared to the schools near homes owned by American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes. SFR3, another fund focused on workforce housing, has similarly lower rated schools.

Sales Activity & Market-Level Gross Yields

Recently, VineBrook has been an active seller, shedding properties from its portfolio.

Note: the remainder of this article is available to paid subscribers, sign up below for access. Paid subscribers get full access to weekly data-rich articles about the SFR market and select additional articles only available to paid subscribers.