What a ridiculous assertion.

This is different from, for example, a retailer, who provides the service of gathering things into one convenient place, and does so more efficiently than everyone gathering the things for themselves. A retailer's profits are payment for providing that social utility.

Landlords' profits are mostly a consequence of their holding rights, rather than the provision of any comparable social utility (there are some small efficiencies to be had, but they are not the primary driver of profits).

Those are almost always different groups in practice though I’m sure you could contrive a counterexample.

A landlord provides about as much value to a consumer as a stockholder does to a public company. Economically the landlord-tenant interaction is primarily a speculative/investment/arbitrage relationship rather than a service

Thus landlords are the one to actually finance those buildings.

> A landlord provides about as much value to a consumer as a stockholder does to a public company.

Which is a significant value, for a company (even if I would like more companies to be privately owned). In this model a landlord is how people can get access to housing without huge initial capital and/or long term commitment.

A rent-based housing economy causes huge problems for those that want to buy an house (somilarly to how Airbnb/short stays cause problems for rent seekers) but this is not about one sector being parasites, it is about an imbalance in the market.

the situation would not be better if landlords did not exist.

Actually it's mostly the banks that provide the finance, the landlord is an intermediary.