Investors are starting to back out of Utah’s housing market, but they’re still buying in Salt Lake City.
Home sales to investors — not someone looking for their everyday home, but people and companies looking to make money off property by flipping or renting it out — were down 17% in the second quarter of 2025 compared to the previous year in Utah, but remained even in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area, according to data from ATTOM, a property and real estate analytics company.
In Sam Brinton’s experience, most people investing in Utah’s housing market are looking for one of two things – a place for their kids to live near a university that they can later rent out or a home close to skiing and other outdoor recreation that they list as a short-term rental when they aren’t using it.
“A lot have some kind of connection or came here for the outdoors and fell in love,” said Brinton, a Lehi-based real estate agent who’s worked for Redfin for six years.
‘Big jump’ during the pandemic, decrease since
Amid low interest rates, there was a “big jump” in investor activity in the housing market during the coronavirus pandemic, said Chen Zhao, the head of economics research at Redfin. Most investors buy in cash, she said, but rates still matter.
From 2018 to 2020, investors made up less than 5% of buyers in Utah and less than 4% in Salt Lake City, according to data from ATTOM. The data curation company looks specifically at institutional investors, or non-lending entities that purchased at least 10 properties in a calendar year.
At the end of 2021, that had jumped to around 10% nationally and in the Beehive State and its capital city.
Since 2021, investor activity has steadily decreased nationally.
In Utah, it’s fluctuated, with an increase in early 2023 and mostly decreased activity leading up to the second quarter of 2025.
Overall, investor activity is lower than during the pandemic but higher than before, the data shows. Zhao confirmed Redfin’s findings show a similar pattern, even though it includes all investors, not just large ones.
Though sales to investors have dropped sharply in Utah – from 7.9% of the market in the second quarter of 2024 to 6.6% in that same period this year – they’re still higher than in all but 10 states, all of which have a more affordable housing market.
In that way, Utah is an outlier, said ATTOM CEO Rob Barber.
“Institutional investors tend to make up a smaller share of buyers in markets with high home prices,” Barber said in an emailed statement.
The drop between last summer and this summer “could be an indication that those investors are starting to look at cheaper markets or are holding off on new purchases until prices go down,” he said, especially given large drops in investor activity in Ogden and Provo as prices have risen faster there than in Salt Lake City.
That’s key because real estate investment is capital-intensive, Zhao said. “You need a lot of money to buy a house and then reap the dividends.”
Lots of investors rent out properties, Zhao said, and rents being relatively cheap compared to a mortgage right now makes it less attractive.
A long-term mindset is key in Utah
Several factors attract investors to Utah’s housing market.
“People still do it,” Briton said. “It’s a great place to invest for the other reasons I mentioned,” referring to rentals in college towns and homes close to skiing, hiking and mountain biking.
He pointed to Provo as an example, saying a rental there will have “100% occupancy for the rest of your life.”
Brinton has a rental there and said he gets 50 applicants within days of listing it when a tenant moves out.
But the long-term mindset is key in Utah, he said.
A lot of his clients are excited to buy a ski-in-ski-out home that they can list as a short-term rental, he said, but they wouldn’t make enough.
“We go and look at a few places and we run the numbers and they’re like, ‘Oh, wait, we’re losing money’” to management fees and other costs, he said.
It’s hard to make short-term profit off of cash flow in Utah without “putting down a huge down payment,” Brinton said, but people who can hold onto property long enough won’t lose money over time.
‘Kind of like a chicken and egg’
Overall, Zhao said, the most important factor in property investing is whether it’s the best use of capital.
People who want to invest should look at potential price growth, try to buy when prices soften and make sure to diversity their holdings by looking at financial markets and other assets, she said.
When people do invest in Utah’s housing market, Zhao said, it shouldn’t affect other buyers.
Investment is “kind of like a chicken and egg thing,” she said – investors care about home prices and can lead to price changes but aren’t a large enough share of the market to “really dominate” increasing home costs.
“If you’re trying to buy your primary home in a market, I don’t think you should be worried about investors,” Zhao said.
Megan Banta is The Salt Lake Tribune’s data enterprise reporter, a philanthropically supported position. The Tribune retains control over all editorial decisions.