Meet Japanese, New York investors who own thousands of suburban Fort Worth homes
The squat, brick house at 1405 Anna Lea Lane in Burleson changed hands in December 2024. Any hospitable neighbors hoping to welcome the new owners would have had to travel roughly 6,700 miles to meet them.
The lot is one of Yamasa Co Ltd.’s latest land acquisitions in Tarrant County. As of early February 2025, the Tarrant Appraisal District lists the Japanese conglomerate as the owner of at least 458 residential properties in the county — 456 single family homes, which Yamasa rents out, and two apartment complexes.
Yamasa partners with American rental home behemoth Progress Residential to list and manage its single family properties. Progress and a medley of LLCs registered to its legal address control thousands of homes across Tarrant County, a small yet meaningful chunk of the company’s national single family rental empire.
Progress is a “wholly owned and vertically integrated subsidiary” of Pretium, an investment firm headquartered in a glass tower in New York City just by Central Park.
Yamasa and Pretium’s combined portfolio in Tarrant County totals just over $1 billion in market value, according to last year’s county appraisals.
Who are the companies, what is their strategy, and how do their operations impact Tarrant County’s housing market?
Meet Yamasa
It would be easier to name the industries Yamasa hasn’t ventured into than to list all the ones it has. Its progenitor started off in the timber trade around the turn of the 20th century, according to a company profile.
Yamasa Co. Ltd. incorporated in 1967. In the ensuing decades, the company has tried its hand at oil sales, music copyrights, hotel management, slot machines and nurseries, to name a few of the corporate pursuits described in public business filings and marketing materials. Yamasa spun off its gambling device business in 2020 and today focuses its core enterprise on plane and cargo ship leasing, solar farms, and the American rental market.
The company’s “head office,” according to its website, is in Niimi, a city of just over 27,000 nestled in the mountains of Okayama Prefecture, an eight- to nine-hour drive west from Tokyo. As of last spring, it boasts 35 employees and a dog mascot named Haika.
This cohort manages, by its count, nine apartment complexes (containing 3,112 units) and 9,800 single family rental homes across the United States as of last July.
A marketing pamphlet prepared last July maps out Yamasa’s acquisitions — almost 1,000 rental homes in the Las Vegas and Dallas areas; 1,545 and 1,391 homes in Phoenix and Atlanta; and smaller bundles in at least 15 other American metro areas in the south and west.
The pamphlet, describing Yamasa as a “long-term low profile and down to earth” investor, also states the company’s interest in purchasing multifamily rental properties built between 2002 and 2010.
Yamasa began its Tarrant County homebuying spree in mid-August 2018, according to county property records. It snapped up 35 properties between then and the new year. It has expanded its portfolio every year since, making its biggest single-year acquisition in 2021, buying up 139 homes.
The company purchased its first Tarrant County apartment complex in December 2022, a development in far north Fort Worth just above Loop 820 and several hundred feet from Interstate 35W. It added its second multifamily property by the eastern shore of Grapevine Lake the following October.
The Tarrant Appraisal District priced Yamasa’s property portfolio as of early February at $262.1 million, according to 2024 appraisals. The median market value of a Yamasa-owned home is $265,000 (and the average slightly higher, at almost $268,000).
(TAD continuously updates its records. The Star-Telegram analyzed a snapshot of TAD data from the first week of February, when it extracted data on all residential properties from TAD’s database. Yamasa has continued to buy and sell properties since then; on Feb. 25, the company purchased The Wyatt, a $55 million apartment complex near Alliance Town Center.)
Yamasa declined to comment for this story.
Meet Pretium
Pretium would not explain how exactly it and Yamasa are connected.
Yamasa’s listed address for almost all of its Tarrant County properties is a P.O. box in Scottsdale, Arizona. Public business registration records list the P.O. box as the “principal mailing address” of Progress Residential, the American rental home giant owned by Pretium.
Yamasa names Progress’ Arizona headquarters as its “known place of business” in its Arizona business application; a Progress employee signed off on the document. Yamasa’s latest “annual report,” filed in August 2024, names a Pretium executive as an officer and vice president. Many Yamasa-owned properties are listed for rent on Progress’ website.
Tarrant Appraisal District records identify Progress and dozens of companies linked to Progress’ and Pretium’s corporate addresses as the owners of at least 2,700 houses and townhomes across the county. County appraisers valued the properties at around $742 million; the median home in the portfolio is worth $268,000.
The bulk of Pretium and Yamasa’s properties encircle Loop 820, forming vast clusters in Fort Worth’s fast-growing suburbs.
Progress describes itself on its website as “one of the largest providers of high-quality, single-family rental homes in the United States with over 85,000 homes across 30 of our nation’s fastest growing metro areas.” Fitch, the national credit rating agency, pegged the rental home stock of Progress and its affiliates rental home stock at 97,000 in a January 2024 report.
Progress’ rental home inventory forms part of Pretium’s roughly $35 billion in real estate assets, according to its website. The investment firm also controls Deephaven, a mortgage company, and BH Management Services, an apartment manager, among other businesses.
“While Pretium funds own less than half of one percent of single-family homes in Tarrant County, we’re working to give families affordable rental options in neighborhoods of opportunity,” a spokesperson for Pretium wrote in a statement. (County property records analyzed by the Star-Telegram corroborate that percentage.)
Some tenants, state governments and housing advocacy groups have criticized the quality and accessibility of those rental options.
The Minnesota Attorney General’s office in February 2022 sued HavenBrook, a rental home provider subsumed by Pretium the year prior, for “systematically misrepresenting its property-repair practices and keeping its properties uninhabitable for tenants.” The parties settled in March 2024; HavenBrook and Progress, among other concessions, agreed to forgive up to $1.99 million in rental debt for all its Minnesota tenants, according to the press release announcing the settlement.
“Enhancing the leasing and resident living experience and making a positive difference for our residents has been our top priority since taking over property management for HavenBrook in mid-2022,” Progress’ general counsel Ama Romaine told the Minnesota Star-Tribune at the time of the settlement. “We are pleased to have resolved this matter in a manner that is consistent with our commitment to making a positive impact on the communities we serve.”
Several months after Progress resolved this dispute, the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana sued the company for allegedly “enforcing blanket bans” on prospective tenants with criminal histories “without assessing individual circumstances, disproportionately affecting Black applicants who are systematically overrepresented in the criminal legal system.”
In response to the lawsuit, a Progress spokesperson told NBC News: “As a leading professional property manager, we are committed to promoting a fair and equitable screening process for all applicants. Although we do not comment on pending litigation, we take these allegations seriously and are currently reviewing the claims made in the lawsuit.”
Are corporate homebuyers hurting the market?
In a March 2024 post on X, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned that the likes of Pretium and Yamasa — cash-rich corporate entities hoping to turn a profit in the housing market — were dimming the homebuying aspirations of everyday Texans.
“I strongly support free markets,” he wrote. “But this corporate large-scale buying of residential homes seems to be distorting the market and making it harder for the average Texan to purchase a home. This must be added to the legislative agenda to protect Texas families.”
Abbott joined a chorus of critics across the country pointing the finger at large corporate homebuyers for snapping up an increasingly scarce supply of homes only to rent them out, driving up asking prices in the process.
Big corporate homebuyers often counter that their presence is smaller and more benign than the media or political figures let on. It’s easy, they say, to scapegoat big, nonnative businesses for the more complicated, obscure problems behind the growing dearth of affordable homes.
The Urban Institute, a Washington policy think tank, estimates that long-term, institutional investors controlled 8.8% of single-family rentals in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 2022. “Mega” investors — those that own at least 1,000 properties across different regions — owned about four-fifths of all investor-controlled homes in the area, by the institute’s count.
Competing institutional investors tend to follow a similar playbook, the researchers added. They focus their purchases in fast-growing urban areas, where sudden population bursts should generate sharp upswings in rent.
They also try to buy newer homes in need of touch-ups. It’s easier, researchers explained, for companies with lots of cash on hand to outbid financing families for homes requiring repairs; the newer the homes, the easier to fix en masse.
Rock bottom interest rates unleashed an investor homebuying spree during the pandemic.
The National Association of Realtors calculated that companies or corporations purchased just over half of the homes sold in Tarrant County in 2021, one of the highest rates in the country; the report didn’t specify the type or size of the businesses.
But rebounding borrowing costs have since mellowed the frenzy, according to some analysts and real estate agents.
“Now things have cooled off quite a bit,” Fort Worth-area broker Chandler Crouch observed.
Fort Worth, hoping to paint a more precise picture of corporate homeownership, conducted its own analysis of county property records last year. It concluded that companies own around 26% of the single-family homes inside city limits, but city officials didn’t distinguish between large investment firms and family-run LLCs.
Experts have yet to reach a firm consensus on how, and to what extent, institutional homebuyers deform the housing market by sucking up inventory.
Researchers and real estate agents acknowledge that it can be harder for home-seeking families to compete with corporations in bidding wars. But big investors tend to seek out homes in need of significant repair, properties that many households are wont to avoid anyways.
Big institutional investors began amassing massive rental home portfolios in the wake of the 2007-09 subprime mortgage crisis, according to the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan federal research agency.
The federal government, keen on stabilizing the nation’s wrecked housing system, helped companies snap up foreclosed homes and put them back on the market for a growing population of renters.
Some studies concluded, with caveats, that institutional investors may have contributed to higher home prices in the years since the crisis.
But it wasn’t always clear, some researchers noted, whether investors precipitated price jumps or merely had a nose for promising areas where strong demand would have driven up prices anyway. Federal analysts also observed that few studies evaluated market trends after 2017.
Effects on rents are also dubious. Large institutional homebuyers like to buy up properties in areas where rents are already skyrocketing, according to Urban Institute researchers.
As such, they observed, “investor purchases tend to lag, not lead rent increases.”
To some Texas policymakers, corporate homebuyers need more scrutiny — and regulation.
State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, filed a bill in February banning corporations, business trusts, LLCs and other corporate entities from owning and renting out more than 10 single-family homes at a time. The proposal would also require the state to produce annual studies of the scale and impact of corporate homeownership in Texas.
The motion has stalled in committee. Hinojosa did not respond to an interview request.
This story was originally published May 12, 2025 at 5:50 AM.
