Millionaire plans 1,000 Nashville area rental homes, townhomes

June 17, 2017

B. Edward Ewing and partners have bought more than 300 lots in Murfreesboro and other areas around Nashville with another 300 under contract.

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Over the past year, a partnership led by investor B. Edward Ewing has bought more than 300 Nashville area lots as part of overall plans to build 1,000 new for-lease single-family homes and townhomes.

Construction should start in the third quarter on some of those home sites, which are spread across communities including at the Thompson Square subdivision in Murfreesboro. An additional 300 lots are under contract, which would bring the total number of home sites under the project to more than 600.

“We’re trying to be an alternative to apartment living, which is overdone in the Nashville market right now,”  said Austin Pennington, CEO of Brentwood-based Barlow Builders LLC, Ewing’s partner in the venture. “The wave of the future in the rental or for-lease business is to give people communities, which Ed (Ewing) has done in previous states. We’re bringing that concept to the Nashville market.”

Nationwide, rental housing is a big business with even traditional U.S. homebuilders such as Miami-based Lennar Homes entering that market. But while much of the new inventory has been of entry-level homes, the Ewing-Pennington partnership plans to spend $300 million on developing higher-end, for-lease single-family homes and townhomes mostly in entire communities with such housing.

Ewing sees the planned single-family homes and townhomes ranging from 2,000 to 3,000 square feet in size with their values ranging from $350,000 to $400,000. They, however, will be rented out for $1,500 to $3,000 a month with overall plans calling for 2 million to 3 million square feet of space.

Nashville area developer Bruce McNeilage, a player in the local rental-housing niche, cites newly built homes renting for $2,000-to-$2,100 a month in Murfreesboro and Spring Hill as sign of demand for such product. He said the target market includes people moving to Nashville, including because of jobs, who want to rent a quality home while they try to sell the house where they lived previously.

“They really want to use that house to test drive the community,” McNeilage said about buyers also renting homes while they get a better feel for churches and other facilities in parts of the Nashville area. “This is very, very big business. The $2,000 to 3,000 a month houses are in demand. There’s not a lot of them.”

Edsel Charles, chairman of locally based new home research firm MarketGraphics Research Group Inc., sees room across an 11-county Nashville area market for 500 to 850 new rental homes a year. Charles sees a large market for detached rental homes up to 2,200 to 2,400 square feet, but he said the size of the rental market drops off significantly for those priced above $2,200 a month.

Nashville-based economic and development consultant Randall Gross, meanwhile, sees local demand for rental housing being tied to job creation. Affordability is key to maintaining momentum in that market, he said.

Despite owner-occupied homes rising faster than renting households for the first time since 2006 in the first three months of the year, Ewing expects continued decline in home ownership rates across major U.S. cities to help to drive more demand for rental housing. “We want upper middle-class, leasing people,” he added. “We believe that a lot of people would prefer to lease a home than be owners.”

By Bruce McNeilage July 28, 2025
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By Bruce McNeilage July 28, 2025
There have been a lot of headlines about the number of investors, both large and small, snapping up homes as investments. Kinloch Partners co-founder & CEO Bruce McNeilage explains who these investors are and why so many are getting into housing. To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend here . Click the image above to watch the entire video. 00:00 Speaker A When we talk about these investors moving in, what kind of investors are we talking about, Bruce? Are we talking about relatively are these smaller investors, or these private equity players? Who are they? 00:18 Bruce Sure, they're all the above, right? They're small mom and pop investors. They're buying four and five houses here and there. They're mid-tier companies like us. We'd like to do another 100 to 200 houses by the end of the year. They're larger players, and then there are the ones in between. Now, family offices, sovereign wealth funds, the hedge funds, the REITs, everybody is coming into the market right now. There's been too much money on the sidelines, and we're really starting to see these builders benefit because they have a lot of excess inventory, and folks like us can come in, clean up their inventory here in the next few months, and really uh help them with their profits and buy up their inventory. 01:06 Speaker A So that's interesting, Bruce. So part of the trend here is its home builders have a lot of inventory. That's part of the the driver here. 01:18 Bruce Yeah, absolutely. Mom and pops are having a tough time qualifying for mortgages, right? The interest rates are just too high in the last 52 weeks. You know, you look at Freddie Mac numbers, they've basically stayed the same. We're hovering just under 7%. People cannot afford mortgages right now. So the next best thing is to rent a brand new house. Well, who do you rent a brand new house from? The people that have bought one, or the people that have built one. And so we're really offering something that most people can't get, a brand new house, instead of buying it, you're renting it. 02:07 Speaker A And the smaller investor, Bruce, in particular, that this was really the trend the kind of journal pointed out here, is there a reason right now, Bruce, that smaller investors would be more active? 02:25 Bruce Yeah, sure. So small investors can borrow money from credit unions. They can borrow against their 401k. They can do a lot of different things that larger investors aren't going to do. And when you see the the price of houses coming down, when you see the inventory come uh going up, and when you also see all these builder incentives, it really helps a small investor get in the game, so to speak, because they are getting these discounts from these builders. 03:05 Speaker A And is the business model there, Bruce, for the smaller investor? It's what, you move in, buy a home, make some modest renovations, rent it with the aim of of one day selling it. Is that the idea? 03:22 Bruce Yeah, most people are looking at either buying a new house or what I call a used house and fixing it up. You cash flow it for a number of years, let's say three to five years. It goes up in value, and then you sell it. A lot of people are just in this for the capital gains. Some people are in it for the income and capital gains, but the name of the game is to have positive cash flow from day one and then sell it at a profit at the end. 03:54 Speaker A Is there are there advantages, Bruce, a smaller investor, relatively would have over a private equity player? 04:08 Bruce Yeah, I think they can be nimble. I don't think they have the same rules. They certainly don't have investment committees. And so they can choose to buy a house, rent a house, sell a house, and they can pay what they want to pay. You know, again, they don't have a mandate from an investment committee. So if they want to buy something with a lower cap rate, if they want to buy something with a higher cap rate or something big, small, uh you know, older, uh newer, they can be as nimble as they want where the larger funds can't. They have mandates. You know, they have a buy box and uh and and they've got some restrictions, and we do too. 04:57 Speaker A I'm sure, Bruce, there are some folks who are watching this right now who think, well, hold on a second. Doesn't this trend, doesn't this thing that Bruce and Josh are talking about ultimately make it that much tougher for regular Americans, Bruce, to come in and bid and compete?  05:25 Bruce Yeah, so you would think that, but what we're doing is we're not taking inventory out of the market. For us, we're building brand new houses, not taking inventory out of the market. And then these houses are available in the MLS. You know, you buy houses from the different large builders. Anybody can buy those houses today. It's just people are not. So investors are coming in, cleaning up this inventory, buying the houses, but quite frankly, they're available to everyone. It's just people can't afford them. So it's buying up the houses and making more stock available again, not to buy, but for people that can't buy but to rent.
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