Houses burn cash monthly - utilities, maintenance, taxes etc. Absent of misguided government interventions (nyc rent control etc), it makes no economic sense to

Houses burn cash monthly - utilities, maintenance, taxes etc. Absent of misguided government interventions (nyc rent control etc), it makes no economic sense to leave a property vacant versus renting it. Even in your hypothetical, you're still strictly better off renting it while capturing the gains. The mostly-empty cities in China is about the only place that I know of where vacant properties are being held as investment, but even there the problem is lack of demand rather than anything to do with who owns it. This whole topic seems like a specialization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo...