What exactly does it mean that investors are driving up prices? As far as I know an investor gets two things by owning a house: a stream of future rent payments

What exactly does it mean that investors are driving up prices? As far as I know an investor gets two things by owning a house: a stream of future rent payments, and an appreciating asset. We can easily calculate the present value of the future rent payments. It would be a weird and obviously temporary condition if homes were selling for less than this. A market in disequilibrium. Is that the theory here? The healthier housing market we had in the past was homes priced at less than the NPV of their rents? Maybe the investors are simply irrational and are overpaying for these properties? Hoping for greater fools? This seems like great news. Everyone who owns a property should sell it to one of these exuberant investors, enjoy the hefty profit, and rent (perhaps from the same person, without even moving house) while waiting for the crash. If this is our contention then rents are reasonable and people who simply want to be housed should just pay them. Or maybe the market has always been in equilibrium and the investors have always been rational, but now the NPV is rising. It could do this for two reasons: the rents going up, or the discount rates going down. It seems plausible that both of those things are happening. The unstoppable force of urbanization meets the immovable object of NIMBYism; urban rents rise. Low interest rates reduce the discount rate. Although stock market returns have been incredible, so I'm less sure about this part. In any case, maybe what we're looking at is new, higher NPVs and we're hoping to keep the housing market in disequilibrium to prevent prices from catching up to that NPV? I guess the final paragraph seems the most likely. And, well, good luck. When there's a systematically under-priced asset, people are going to find a way, rules or not. It would seem a lot more effective and sustainable to address the drivers of the rising fundamental value.