While intuitive, this does not seem to be supported by facts https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/renting-statistics https://ipropertymanagement.com/resear

While intuitive, this does not seem to be supported by facts https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/renting-statistics https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/renting-statistics If your thesis were true, we might expect rent to be roughly stable and similar to inflation over the past few years as they drop in some regions and rise in others. Instead, national average asking rent has well outpaced inflation. There are a number of trends which you could point to as possible factors (The rise of AirBnB, large companies buying up properties to rent, etc) but it seems the key issue is a fundamental lack of supply which is driving housing prices upwards, pricing out buyers and increasing the pool of renters. https://www.realtor.com/research/us-housing-supply-gap-march-2023/ https://www.realtor.com/research/us-housing-supply-gap-march... Since the 2005-2008 housing crisis, new household formation has outpaced single family home construction significantly each year. We're near all-time vacancy lows for both buyers and renters. A free market should eventually seize the opportunity to build to meet that demand (and new home starts are up this year finally) but the housing crisis caused long-term shifts in the industry which will take time to recover, and then supply chain problems during Covid caused massive material cost spikes which further delayed construction.