What’s your take: single-family rentals or build-to-rent communities?

[Robert Ellis]

I’ve been seeing more investors shift away from buying scattered single-family homes and instead focusing on building purpose-built rental neighborhoods — same product, but totally different game.

With build-to-rent, you get:

• Consistent product + layout

• Easier management

• And potential scale economies

But it also comes with zoning headaches, higher upfront costs, and more development risk.

For those of you who’ve done both — which strategy do you prefer? And if you had to pick one to focus on over the next 5–10 years, where would you bet?