Flippers have capital (or the ability to be extensively leveraged) and they can quickly gobble up the unimproved inventory such that there is very little "unimp

Flippers have capital (or the ability to be extensively leveraged) and they can quickly gobble up the unimproved inventory such that there is very little "unimproved" inventory available for regular homebuyers. They even spam people with unsolicited offers and try to buy unimproved houses before they hit the market at all! The time that flippers spend "improving" a house is time that the house isn't on the market at all for a potential resident. Don't think of flippers as individual actors on small scales repairing and reselling a house here or there, think of companies that literally buy whole neighborhoods (hundreds of houses) and rent some of them out while they tear down or "improve" the rest. They can afford to keep the rental price high and/or let it sit vacant because the real money will be in the eventual sale. You're right that they "gain" partly from inflation, but that's only one piece of the puzzle. It's a combination of large operations (and a large number of smaller operations) that essentially act as a cartel that effectively limits the supply of available homes for purchase.