Much has been written about institutional investor ownership of rental housing, but there has been little in the way of defining who institutional single-family rental (SFR) owners and operators are and providing an analysis of their characteristics. A more nuanced understanding of the various types of institutional SFR operators and their business models will allow for a more robust discussion of the role policymakers can and should play in this market. In this report, we attempt to fill that gap. We first clarify the types of owners in the institutional SFR space, categorizing them into two main groups—long-term and short-term holders—and defining investor types within each category. We then look at the geographic footprint of institutional SFR operators and the characteristics of the homes they buy. Last, we look at the neighborhood characteristics of census tracts with SFR properties, as compared with neighborhood characteristics of the entire metropolitan statistical area.