Invitation Homes, the nation’s largest owner and operator of single-family and build-to-rent houses, has added more than 1,000 units to the company’s build-to-rent portfolio through a strategic collaboration with several national and regional homebuilders — and more could be on the way.

The partnerships, taking place in the second quarter with four different builders, represent a total investment of roughly $247 million, the company said. The new single-family houses are to be located in three of Invitation Homes’ core markets, including Dallas, Houston and the Carolinas. The first tenants are expected to move in before the end of June with more new houses ready to occupy over the next 12 months.

The addition to the Invitation Homes portfolio comes after the company entered repurchase agreements for roughly 1,900 houses in the first quarter, bringing the company’s total house purchases to nearly 3,000 in the past six months.

Speaking at the Nareit conference this month in New York, executives told investors to expect more purchase agreements with builders.

“When I joined the company almost a year ago, I think we were engaged with two major homebuilders,” said Scott Eisen, chief investment officer at Invitation Homes. “Now, we're engaged with ... six to eight, we'd like to be engaged with more, or increasing that dialogue with both the national production builders as well as the regional builders.”

Underwriting on the house purchases targets a 6% return, driven by growth in the build-to-rent sector that has been supported by “outstanding fundamentals,” Dallas Tanner, chief executive at Invitation Homes, said at the Nareit event. That includes a shortage of millions of houses along with for-sale house prices that have risen 49% since January 2020, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index.

“Like anything in real estate, it goes back to product location and customer fit,” Tanner said. “And I think what we're finding is that massive … lack of supply, it's in a lot of the markets that we operate in and will continue to keep demand elevated. I don't see that changing.”

That faith in the broader market has been reflected in building statistics that show although build-to-rent construction is still a relatively small portion of all single-family projects, its numbers are growing. Over the past 12 months, construction has begun on 80,000 build-to-rent homes, a 16% increase over the previous 12 months, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

That expansion has roughly doubled build-to-rent’s share of the single-family building market from 3.82% as recently as the first quarter of 2021, to roughly 8% in the first quarter of 2024.

Along with pursuing purchase agreements with homebuilders, Invitation Homes is also pitching its operating model as a third-party management service.

In May, the company announced a joint venture with Quarterra, the multifamily arm of homebuilder Lennar, that saw Invitation Homes acquire a 7.2% stake in Upward America, a single-family rental business founded by Lennar in 2021, that will see the company provide property management services at Upward America’s 4,400 houses.

Executives said Invitation Homes would “lean into” growth in its management services as it looks for professional capital with scale that can leverage its playbook.

Those partnerships, along with the additional purchases, have increased Invitation Homes’ total portfolio of owned or managed houses to more than 110,000. The company plans to invest $1 billion in new home purchases this year after spending the same amount on 3,200 homes in 2023.