Those companies have already failed though (Zillow is practically about to go out of business because they failed so hard), probably can never succeed because of the adverse selection effect, and "investors are buying all the housing" is a myth propagated by NIMBYs.
Zillow is totally fine financially. Yeah they lost $10b which is bad news but they didn't bet the farm, and as they continue to invest r&d in renter/landlord oriented services they should be fine. It's the Expedia of houses, and people have to live somewhere. Can you put forward any proof at all that they are even struggling, let alone "about to go out of business"?
They can’t buy “all” the housing and make money off that. You can simply defeat them by building more housing.
Same reason car companies sell you cars instead of keeping them for themselves. They naturally depreciate, except we intervene in the market to help boomers’ retirements.
Yeah, because it's good-to-essential for boomers' retirements and they're the median voter. Young people are pretty bad at voting in general (they take any excuse to stop doing it) but unfortunately even besides that, wouldn't be the median voter because of population demographics.
But if you're a young person who doesn't own a home, X corporation owning the homes isn't worse for you than random boomer landlords owning them. Corporate landlords at least don't take things personally when you ask them to do maintenance, and theoretically you can be part owners of them since they're publicly traded.
And corporate landlords didn't defeat the social housing legislation in California just now, boomers did.
Those companies have already failed though (Zillow is practically about to go out of business because they failed so hard), probably can never succeed because of the adverse selection effect, and "investors are buying all the housing" is a myth propagated by NIMBYs.