Yeah I am partly a YIMBY but if investors can just keep buying up all the new properties and rent them out for ludicrous amounts then rents will never go down.

Extra capacity, if not protected from predation, will result in a cycle of high property values and rent.

Do you think that there are an infinite number of people that want to live in any particular city?

You don't rent all the places. You buy all the places and limit the available supply to control the price of rent.

Cornering the market on an entire city seems prohibitively expensive but hey, maybe somebody will roll in with a trillion dollar investment that has massive downside someday.

Have you read up on how software allows you to virtually do exactly that with other landlords? Discussed here on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38114264

How does that fix the supply issue if more people want to live in that place than available units number?

I'm not sure why such economic pseudoscience claims are accepted.

Just in case you're in a position to change anything about the housing market where you live: Change zoning rules. Incentives for co-living. Reduce flat sizes. Rebuilt office spaces. Or look to Vienna: a big stock of goverment-owned flats with low prices which makes it hard to charge more than those.

Pseudoscience? That's rude. I answered your question in good faith and you take pot shots. Lame dude.

To elaborate, if you eliminate investment property, AirBNBers and Blackrock liquidate their house holdings. The houses come from the previously off market investment properties.

Yes, thats a good solution. Ban investments mean more or less ban renting houses. When no one can rent a house, no one can complain about a too high rent. Interested in the new living models that are coming then.

Depends on scale. During much of the pandemic, I rented a house from an elderly lady who owned one other rental property. She only asked for very modest rent increases as rents and property values skyrocketed because I always paid on time and fixed small things myself, which made me a low hassle tenant. Had I been renting from an institutional investor with thousands of properties, I'm betting my rent would have gone up the maximum they thought they could extract.

Thankfully when i lived in lubbock, tx the landlords were much less greedy than my cali landlords