Accidental landlords are on the rise in housing markets where home prices are falling

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. As ResiClub covered earlier this year, “accidental landlords” are rising in housing markets where sellers have lost pricing power. Indeed, as you can see in the scatter plot analysis ResiClub created in March 2026, there’s a fairly strong negative relationship (R² = 0.58) between a metro’s home price shift since its 2022 peak and the share of accidental landlords. Put simply: Markets experiencing larger home price corrections are more likely to see sellers pivot to renting aft...