A shareholder whose children will inherit the business one day will have a very different outlook to one who is looking at their annual performance numbers, which is the sort thing institutional shareholders are looking at.
Well, let's not actively hope for a crash. Lots of normal people who run businesses, develop skills, and do actual work suffered greatly during the last property bubble of the GFC[0].
For what it's worth, outside of the major metropolises where a combination of supply restrictions (principally via zoning) and overwhelming demand (stoked by natural and economic advantages as well as policy that induces home purchases), people running businesses, developing skills, and doing actual work are able to afford to buy land and homes. My barber, for example, with no college degree and no inheritance, lives on 10 acres. The catch? It's in an area not fancied by urbane types, and his house on that land is a mobile home, though he is saving up to build a "real" one[1].
[0]: And with this, it's interesting to study the effect that government policy had on pushing loans to people who had no hope of repaying them.
[1]: In many areas, building codes and zoning place a floor on the minimum price of a house, and it can be argued that this floor is too high.
https://www.johnson.cornell.edu/smith-family-business-initia...
> Private businesses don’t have to do anything
Is this a baked-in legal distinction between public and private businesses, or is it that the company is supposed to do what the shareholders want and the shareholders of a private business are more likely than those of a public business to want something beyond ROI?