But outside of a few outlier markets like SanFran/Vancouver/NY, which are mostly being used to expatriate stolen foreign money anyway, that's not how the majority of people acquired a second home.

can you elaborate?

I suspect a great deal of people buy a second home while maintaining the first one as a rental, if they can swing it.

with all of the "free" money out there over the past few years, it was insanely easy to pull equity of your home to buy investment properties. I don't have numbers but I can't imagine this is a small amount.

Nobody's swinging that in high demand markets. A lot of dumb people _tried_ to leverage themselves and lost their ass on airbnbs that aren't performing (airbnb has seen huge decline).

The overwhelming majority of second homes are vacation homes. _Landlords_ aren't keeping people out of housing -- quite the opposite.

Home ownership is kind of an endless money pit anyway. Most people are better off renting in any of the markets we're talking about homeless populations anyway.

People are also extremely bad accountants, and if they sell a house for more than they bought it they accrue everything to profit, even if the rents during the time barely covered the mortgage (and/or didn’t cover repairs and maintenance at all). Large appreciation has hid the real costs associated with landlording.

landlording is really all about economies of scale to both the owner and renter's benefit.

Ideally landlords should be able to get better pricing for maintenance.

Unfortunately our dumb FREE MONEY monetary policy has absolutely wrecked the trades and saddled generations with bad debt chasing worthless credentials.

...YOU ARE PERFECT! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8vqoIVESc