Investors bought $1.7B in homes in Silicon Valley in Q3. Here’s how that stacks up nationally.

Wall Street is buying up homes across the country. That’s not news — but investors are continuing to gain market share amid an extremely competitive national housing market.

The Business Journals analyzed data from Seattle-based Redfin Corp. (NASDAQ: RDFN), which tracked how many homes investors bought in 40 major metropolitan areas across the United States in the third quarter. Investors had a record quarter, buying 90,215 homes worth a combined $63.6 billion.

Investors made up 18.2% of all housing sales in Q3, also a record, Redfin found.

Through the core of Silicon Valley — the San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale metropolitan statistical area — investors bought $1.72 billion worth of residential real estate.

Here are other details about investor activity in the local home buying region in the last quarter:

• The median house sale was $1,684,000, making the San Jose metro area the second most-expensive housing market in the United States, with San Francisco laying claim to being No. 1 on that metric with the median price of homes being $1,905,000.
• Investors purchased 13.8% of all homes in the San Jose metro area in the third quarter, which was down slightly from a year earlier when investors accounted for 14.2% of home purchases.
• Despite the quarterly dip in investor purchases from Q3 2020 to Q3 2021, investor home purchases overall were up 21.4% year-over-year.

The data excludes some notable metro areas, including Dallas and Austin, Texas. Redfin typically analyzes home sales in the 50 most populous metro areas, but only included 40 metros in the Q3 report because of nondisclosure of sales prices in some counties.

A dive into the markets where investors were prolific this summer and early fall reveals, no surprise, that Sun Belt metros are among the top markets for investor activity. It’s where people continue to migrate to, after all, and with home prices still relatively more affordable than other parts of the country, they continue to draw renters, owner-occupiers and investors alike.

Many of the top metros have seen investor activity more than double in their respective housing market in the past year.

There’s nothing in the forecast to suggest investor activity will slow, either. With rental rates on the rise and billions being poured into the sector, investors big and small will likely continue to see upside for single-family rentals.

Click through the gallery above to see which metro areas have seen the biggest number of investor home sales in the third quarter.