Living

Race to the Suburbs Sparks Boom in Rental-House Construction

Photographer: Ty Wright/Bloomberg
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The Covid-19 pandemic has sent Americans searching for larger living spaces for the work-from-home era, accelerating demographic shifts to the suburbs and attracting new pools of capital to single-family rental homes.

It’s also sparked a mini-boom in rental-home construction. Builders started work on roughly 14,000 rental houses during the third quarter, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis of census data.