Blackstone has been purchasing through foreclosure auctions and short sales, in which banks agree to accept less than is owed on the mortgage, after more than 5 million homeowners lost their homes since the market’s peak in 2006.

It’s bought so quickly it’s “warehousing” more than half of the homes it’s acquired as it completes the purchase and hires staff and contractors to renovate and rent the properties, Gray said. It takes about 30 days to fix each home and then as much as 30 days to lease the property, he said.

“Renovating the 16,000 homes is an enormous job,” Gray said.

By comparison, D.R. Horton Inc., the largest U.S. homebuilder by volume, sold 18,890 homes and generated $5.35 billion in revenue in fiscal 2012.

Colony Capital has bought about 5,500 homes since April, spending more than $500 million, and expects to reach $1.5 billion invested by the end of the year. Closely held Waypoint Homes said it has bought about 2,500 homes and expects to have 10,000 homes by the end of 2013.

Silver Bay

Silver Bay Realty Trust Corp., a publicly traded arm of Two Harbors, raised $245 million in an initial public offering last month. It rose 0.8 percent to $21.30 at 9:32 a.m. in New York, extending its 14 percent gain through yesterday since it started trading. The firm, led by Chief Executive Officer David Miller, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive and U.S. Treasury Department official, is the largest public real estate investment trust concentrating on single-family homes.

“We are seeing increased supply of rental homes as some of these big companies have moved into the space, but we’re still seeing a strong appetite as well,” said Colin Wiel, co-founder and managing director of Waypoint. “We always anticipated that prices were going to rise pretty quickly. They’ve risen quicker during the last 12 months than we would’ve guessed.”

Blackstone currently buys all of its homes with cash and then finances pools of houses with up to 60 percent debt. Conventional single-family home mortgages are financed with a 20-percent down payment.

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