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Camden Property Trust
Camden Property Trust owns and operates apartment buildings across the United States and earns money mainly by renting out homes to tenants.
Camden Property Trust is a landlord — one of the biggest apartment landlords in America. It owns and manages tens of thousands of apartments in fast-growing cities, mostly in the South and West, from Atlanta and Houston to Denver, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. People pay Camden rent every month to live in those homes.
The business is simple at its core. Camden earns rent from tenants, and it keeps the buildings full, raises rents when it can, and keeps costs down. What makes this business work is scale: owning many buildings in a city lets Camden spread the cost of staff, maintenance, and marketing across thousands of units. It tends to own newer, higher-quality buildings in neighborhoods with strong job growth, which helps it attract tenants who pay a bit more and move out less often. That said, it is a capital-heavy business. Buying and building apartments takes enormous sums of money, so Camden funds growth with debt and by selling older buildings and recycling the cash into new ones. It raises money from investors through its status as a real estate investment trust, which means it must pay out most of its taxable profits as dividends. Camden is also one of the larger publicly traded apartment owners, with rivals such as Equity Residential and AvalonBay Communities.
The company's fortunes rise and fall with the housing market and the job market. When construction booms, too many new apartments can flood a city and force landlords to offer free rent and discounts to fill units. In recent years, a wave of new apartment supply in the South pushed up vacancy and slowed rent growth, a real pressure on Camden. Its stock is also sensitive to interest rates, because higher rates make borrowing more expensive and make its dividend less attractive compared with bonds. Still, apartments are a basic need, and Camden's buildings sit in cities adding jobs and people, so the business has proven durable over the long run.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026