A townhouse overlooking a pond in Clearwater. A brand-new two-story house in a Brandon subdivision, filled with identical buildings. A yellow brick bungalow in Tampa.

The homes look strikingly different and are miles apart. But they have a key feature in common: They all belong to Progress Residential.

With more than 85,000 homes nationwide, the Arizona-based real estate company is the largest single-family rental operator in the U.S. Roughly 5,500 of those properties are in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties, making Progress Residential the region’s second-largest landlord.

It’s also the largest landlord in Tampa Bay backed by a private equity firm, which means it’s not required to provide information about what assets it owns, who is funding it and how much money it makes.

Progress Residential is among a handful of large real estate investment firms that have pursued an aggressive strategy of acquiring single-family homes and turning them into rentals. Its leaders say the company has been a “significant economic driver” in markets like Tampa.

But as Progress bought Tampa Bay homes, it amassed an array of complaints from tenants who say the company’s growth comes at their expense. Locals who rent Progress homes told the Tampa Bay Times the company had failed to fix broken toilets, remove mold or repair air conditioners in a timely manner, subjecting them to unsanitary conditions harmful to their health.

“From Day 1, it was a nightmare,” said Rebecca Swiatek, who moved into a Progress-owned home in New Port Richey in July. By October, she and her fiance decided to break their lease and move, she said.

Progress Residential did not respond to questions about specific tenants’ maintenance issues or comment on how the company has changed the local housing market. Instead, it deferred to David Howard, chief executive officer of the National Rental Home Council, a trade group that represents single-family rental owners.

In an interview, Howard said he’s seen ownership of single-family rentals shift from smaller local landlords as large firms like Progress have moved in, but that trend hasn’t made it harder to buy a home or hurt renters.

“I think it’s very much a positive,” Howard said. “In rental housing, the scale really matters.” It allows companies to invest more into improving their homes and developing programs to improve the tenant experience, he added.

Some experts, however, say putting profits over people is a hallmark of private equity firms that control more than $6 trillion in assets in the U.S. across industries as wide-ranging as health care, media and housing. These companies are designed to turn hefty profits on a tight timeline, while operating with more secrecy and fewer liabilities than publicly traded firms.

“The business model is about increasing revenue and slashing costs,” said Jordan Ash, director of housing at the Private Equity Stakeholders Project, a nonprofit that scrutinizes such firms.

In the world of real estate, he said, that can mean raising rent and fees, understaffing the company, neglecting maintenance and hastily evicting tenants.

Born out of a recession

Large corporations have always invested in real estate, but traditionally they made money from office buildings, apartments and industrial land, said David Hartzell, a real estate and finance professor at the University of North Carolina.

That changed during the 2008 housing collapse.

After the crash, investors swooped in to buy single-family homes for cheap and rent them to people who lost homes to foreclosure or couldn’t qualify for a mortgage. It was a crisis for average Americans but a gold rush for real estate firms.

Technology made it possible to acquire and manage rental portfolios anywhere. Armed with powerful algorithms and vast databases of public records, these investors can identify the best homes to buy, set the highest-grossing rents and hire contractors, all at the click of a button.

“They are much more cognizant of market conditions than the individual who owns a single house,” Hartzell said.

Progress Residential was created in 2012 as a subsidiary of the investment firm Pretium Partners. It is one of a slew of private equity-backed companies that emerged during this time.

The founder, Donald Mullen, is a former Goldman Sachs executive who helped convince the company to bet against the U.S. mortgage market leading up to the crash. A pitch sent to Pretium’s investors laid out a plan to “capitalize on the severe distress in the residential real estate market in the United States,” according to The Washington Post.

Unlike a publicly traded company, Progress Residential doesn’t have to share information on profits, expenditures or investors. Instead of selling shares on the stock market to raise money, it pools millions of dollars from wealthy individuals, pension funds, foreign banks and other institutions. In its first round of funding, Pretium raised more than $1 billion to form Progress Residential.

Private equity firms pledge to deliver returns as high as 20% in a set time ― usually 10 years or less. This arrangement creates immense pressure to buy thousands of homes as fast as possible, said real estate investor Brandon Middleton, who spent a year working for Second Avenue, a private equity real estate firm in Tampa Bay.

“If that money’s not invested then it’s going backward,” Middleton said.

By 2014, Progress Residential owned more than 400 homes in the local market.

Lonette Posey began working as a residential service coordinator at Progress Residential’s Tampa office in 2016 and spent seven years in various roles. In that time, she watched the company’s portfolio in the Tampa Bay region balloon.

Posey, who said she was fired for deleting a message in the company’s Salesforce platform, said she believes the desire to beat the competition came at the expense of residents. She said she saw a constant backlog of work orders, typically around 500 at a time. Maintenance staff struggled to keep up.

“They would take a long time to come out to the residents’ property, and later on, people were calling back because they were still having the same issue,” Posey said.

Kamicia Booker, who worked as a resident service coordinator for almost four years, believed there was a similar pattern in the company’s Atlanta office. She said the company was increasingly outsourcing customer service jobs to call centers in India.

“It’s hard for residents to get in touch with the same person every single time,” Booker said. “Customer care would have them on hold for 45 minutes.”

Booker, who said she was fired for using her company computer for personal use, said there was constant turnover and the company couldn’t hire employees fast enough to keep up with its growing number of tenants.

This race to decrease spending and increase revenue is all part of the private equity playbook, said Mad Bankson, housing research coordinator for the Private Equity Stakeholders Project.

Because these companies are reliant on a small pool of extremely wealthy backers, “they’re threatened by not getting future investment,” Bankson said. “It makes this housing a much worse place to live.”

Tenants “feel trapped”

The Times interviewed tenants in eight households renting from Progress Residential in Tampa Bay and other parts of Florida. They describe spending futile days or weeks trying to arrange maintenance for broken HVAC systems and water damage. They chronicle frequent glitches in the company’s payment platform, along with unexplained charges and heavy-handed fees.

In Florida, 77 complaints have been filed against the company to the Florida Attorney General’s Office since 2020. Fifty nine complaints were filed to the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The Times requested complaints from the two agencies filed against the five companies owning the most homes in Tampa Bay. Of these five companies, Progress logged the most formal complaints — even more than Invitation Homes, which owns more properties in Tampa Bay.

Nikki Sloup, senior vice president of communications and public relations for Progress Residential, said in a statement that the company aspires to resolve every issue before it escalates to a formal complaint.

“When a complaint surfaces across any channel we take it very seriously and work to understand the issue so that we can resolve it fully and as quickly as possible,” she said.

In July, Swiatek and her fiance said they spent the first weeks in their New Port Richey home waiting for the company to fix a broken A/C unit. It also took three weeks to convince Progress Residential to professionally clean the carpet of a room that smelled strongly of animal urine, according to the tenants.

Later, the toilet in the master bathroom stopped flushing. When Swiatek’s fiance lifted the bowl from the floor to inspect the plumbing, he discovered roots growing around the pipes. It took a week for Progress Residential to address the issue.

“We kept getting kind of bounced around,” Swiatek said. “It was impossible to get a person on the phone. … Every time, I’d ask to be transferred to a manager, and they’d say ‘no.’”

Sloup said in a statement that Progress Residential manages hundreds of thousands of move-in and maintenance requests each year and that it continues to invest in technology that enhances the process. She highlighted a new online tool that allows tenants to track the status of their requests and a “three-dimensional scoping technology” that will help the company address repairs prior to move-in.

She added that “emergency requests receive the highest priority and are often scheduled and/or resolved within the same day.”

Susan Porter Jenkins and Sandi Alford, friends who rent a Progress home in Bradenton, moved into their home in March 2023. Since then, they said they had experienced a series of problems with mold, air conditioning, plumbing and a rotting roof.

“I can’t even smell my own perfume,” Alford said, describing months of respiratory illnesses both women have suffered, which they attributed to mold in their garage and air ducts.

The company usually sends contractors for maintenance workers, Jenkins and Alford said, sometimes levying a $75 “trip charge” for repairs it deemed “resident responsible.” They contend workers often didn’t show up during the times they promised. When they did arrive, they gave conflicting prognoses on what needed to be done, or would administer only temporary, inexpensive fixes.

“Everything they do, they have to get approval from Progress,” Jenkins said. “They’re out here at least three times a month.”

Gary Stein and Monique Zimmerman Stein moved into their Dade City home in June 2023 when their previous rental home was sold. After applying with Progress Residential, they viewed two of the company’s homes before they were told to make a decision in 48 hours or forfeit their application.

Moving was exhausting, they said. Stein is 66 and has suffered two heart attacks. Zimmerman is 63 and blind.

They both say they love their home, but problems large and small were immediately apparent. Dried paint was splattered on the floor upon their arrival. A closet in the garage reeked of mold. An exterior door in the kitchen was warped so severely it let in cold air and insects.

Most pressing, the couple says, is the aging ductwork throughout the home. Each time they turn on the A/C or heat, the ventilation system blows particles of fiberglass through the vents. Stein said he began experiencing breathing problems, and Zimmerman said the air particulates damaged her eyes.

At first, the couple believed the air quality issue could be due to the home’s insulation, until they invited HVAC technicians to inspect the home, at their own expense. For months, the couple communicated with Progress about the problems. They said the company would take weeks to send maintenance workers who either made mistakes or didn’t address the issues.

In a letter the couple shared with the Times, Progress Residential wrote that there was nothing wrong with the home’s insulation but did not address the HVAC at all. The letter stated the air quality issues were due to the couple’s cats and some plastic foam containers they had in the garage, and was therefore a “resident responsible issue.”

The same letter notified Stein and Zimmerman that their lease would be terminated. The couple saw this as retaliation for making so many maintenance requests. They negotiated to stay in the home, but they’ve resorted to keeping the heat off despite the winter chill, opening windows, and buying an air purifier at their own expense.

“Normally, you should be able to go to your landlord with any problems with the house … but we feel like we’re constantly walking a tightrope, seeing if we can do things (ourselves),” Stein said.

Sloup from Progress Residential said it’s “patently false” to suggest the company would end a lease in response to repeated maintenance requests.

“Residents are never threatened with lease termination, eviction or sent eviction notices for making maintenance requests,” she said in a statement.

Progress Residential did not respond to questions from the Times about the letter Stein and Zimmerman received.

Howard, from the National Rental Home Council, said that challenges with maintenance and customer service can happen with landlords of all sizes, even mom and pops.

“The resident experience is always something that can be improved upon,” he said. “The larger companies work on that constantly.”

Stein and Zimmerman said they would like to move, but the cost of finding another rental home in the area is daunting. Zimmerman has had trouble finding work, due to her blindness, and moving into the home depleted their savings.

Not to mention, they said, Progress Residential — and other large companies — control thousands of the available homes in the area. The Times identified about 27,000 homes in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties owned by residential real estate investment firms.

“There’s financial issues, logistics issues, even health issues,” Zimmerman said. “Having to move is not financially acceptable. … We feel trapped.”

The future of single-family rentals

Despite their growing portfolios, the forecast for Progress Residential and other major players in the single-family rental industry is far from certain.

The funds that private equity firms like Progress Residential collect from their backers are just a starting point. They can borrow against the homes they acquire to buy even more property on credit.

But leaning so heavily on debt comes with risks, said Bankson, the Private Equity Stakeholders Project researcher.

These companies are banking on consistent rent growth to pay back what they owe. Locally, that’s already begun to slow, with median rent in Tampa falling by 0.4% in 2023, according to data from the website Apartment List. Economists expect rent to remain flat through the end of the year.

Other macroeconomic challenges like rising interest rates and home prices and the skyrocketing cost of insurance in Florida could hurt Progress Residential’s bottom line.

“What goes up must come down at some point,” Bankson said. “I think that most people have an awareness that constant growth is not a realistic model.”

Some large investors have slowed their buying. Sales data from Hillsborough County indicates purchases by Progress Residential in the first half of 2023 were a fraction of what they were compared to the same period two years ago. Other major investment firms, like Invitation Homes and Home Partners of America, show similar trends.

Still, firms pop up every year. In total, investors have more than doubled their share of single-family parcels in the last decade, the Times found.

“Wall Street has an insatiable appetite for single-family homes,” Middleton said. “There’s just no other asset class that’s providing these types of benefits.”

Democrats have introduced legislation in both houses of Congress that would ban hedge funds from owning single-family homes. If it passes, companies like Progress Residential would be required to sell all their homes within 10 years. Industry groups like the National Rental Home Council have opposed the bill, saying it would reduce the availability of rental housing and discourage new construction.

For Swiatek, curbing Progress Residential’s influence would be a welcome change in a market where the company feels almost inescapable.

She and her fiance now live in an apartment in New Port Richey. There’s a sign down the street in front of a developing subdivision. The owner: Progress Residential.

About Buying Up The Bay

Buying up the Bay explores how the rise of real estate investors in Tampa Bay influences the housing market.

The first installment tracked which companies are driving this trend in the region and where they’re buying. In the coming weeks, we will examine how corporate landlords have evicted tenants at higher rates and accelerated gentrification in Black neighborhoods.

Buying up the Bay was written and reported by Rebecca Liebson and Teghan Simonton.

Liebson covers real estate, focusing on how trends in the market play out in people’s everyday lives. Simonton is a data reporter covering business and health, focusing on poverty and cost of living.

We welcome your feedback, tips or personal stories. If you are affected by this topic or if you have ideas about what the Times should cover in future installments, email us at rliebson@tampabay.com or tsimonton@tampabay.com.