No, no need to rent. The solution is pretty trivial, and even battle-tested because the problem has already been solved for mortgages (lenders really care wheth

No, no need to rent. The solution is pretty trivial, and even battle-tested because the problem has already been solved for mortgages (lenders really care whether a piece of property is your primary residence) and for income tax (your primary residence really matters). Simply require people to attest that they are purchasing the property as their primary residence, with significant penalties for fraud. You can make enforcement and public accountability even easier by ublishing both owner info and a boolean "is_primary_residence" flag in every county's plat maps/parcel database. I suggest lawmakers could additionally add an x-month grace period, for x =~ 3*<average time on market for like properties in the past 12 months>, which allows people to have a generous period of overlapping ownership while they are moving. Perhaps even allow an auto-appeal process that adds x more time if you can show that you listed the property for sale at around the assessed value and had no offers within say 10% of your asking price.