As a company, we spend a lot of time and money ensuring that our residents have choice, flexibility, and the best possible experience. That starts with quality homes in great neighborhoods and extends to our investments in other businesses. As the nation’s premier single-family home leasing company, we are always on the lookout for new services or technologies that benefit our communities and make our residents’ lives easier. Those investments help us set ever-higher standards for the industry as a whole.
We have launched a number of partnerships over the years to provide innovative services to our residents. We provide automated air filter delivery and leading smart home technology , including video doorbells, in an increasing number of markets. This is in addition to recent partnerships we’ve launched that further a worry-free leasing experience for residents, including lawn care service with TaskEasy and pest control with Terminix® .
Invitation Homes also invests in solutions that are revolutionizing and shaping the housing landscape. Our partners in PropTech – the use of software and technology to simplify real estate and housing – include RET Ventures, Navitas Capital, Fifth Wall, SmartRent, and Opendoor. These investments are helping advance technology that promotes solutions across many platforms.
These investments also highlight our commitment to sustainability. Our recent investment in Fifth Wall’s Climate Technology Fund helps support new efforts to decarbonize the housing market, including use of more sustainable materials and construction practices, as well as more efficient operations and revitalization projects. Closer to home, we work hard every day to make our own operations more efficient. Those efforts make a positive impact in each of our markets and are increasingly important as our footprint grows.
The COVID pandemic accelerated demand for single-family homes at a time when long-term demand already outpaced the supply of available single-family houses. Invitation Homes seeks to be a part of the solution in addressing those supply constraints, forming a strategic relationship with PulteGroup to build 7,500 homes for the growing share of Americans who are opting not to buy a home. We also recently announced our role as the lead investor in Pathway Homes , a new company that works with customers to identify and purchase a home, offering them the opportunity to first lease and then buy the home outright at a future date.
Our most important investment is always in our people, both those who work for Invitation Homes directly as well as the thousands of contractors and vendors who help us provide premium service. According to the most recent data, Invitation Homes employs more than 1,250 full-time associates across the country and supports nearly 2,000 local businesses. These vendors include a variety of contractors and technicians who help maintain our homes and provide timely service to residents. We also contribute to economic growth in these areas through improvements to our homes and the local income we generate through property taxes, which equaled a cumulative $691 million across all our markets in 2021.
Despite our growth, Invitation Homes remains a very small part of the overall single-family rental market and an even smaller sliver of the housing market more broadly. But we still want to do our part to improve the resident experience and make a positive impact – that includes smarter technology, more sustainable homes and new pathways to ownership. Our hope is that these investments improve the overall future of housing.