The Trump administration's pending rules aiming to deter institutional investors from scooping up single-family homes – expected by the end of next week – would stymie an investment opportunity many real estate managers pursued in recent years of turning those portfolios into steady-yield rental assets. "Is it possible that someone could have a big [single-family rental] portfolio and kind of need to break it up, essentially? I think that's possible," said John Ferguson, co-chair of law firm Goodwin's Real Estate practice. It's likely fund managers would make great efforts to avoid such outcomes as they could "incredibly" diminish values for certain individual properties, he added. Real estate fund managers are even nervous about whether built-to-rent assets will be exempt from the White House's final decision, though administration officials have hinted they would. Single-family rental and build-to-rent models entail "important distinctions," according to Goodwin's Ferguson. "It looks like the [build-to-rent] community model is going to be kind of carved out of all this," he told FundFire. "[I]ncreasingly, that's where a lot of the institutional capital has been deployed."