We need to draw a box around the property owner, the previous owner, the owner before that, etc, because the current property owner does take price risk, but on

We need to draw a box around the property owner, the previous owner, the owner before that, etc, because the current property owner does take price risk, but only by virtue of the payment they made to the previous property owner and so on. The intra-chain P&L distribution is not a legitimizing factor if you believe the entire ownership structure is an exercise in rent seeking (in the economic sense -- as you point out, development and management are not economic rent and I'd add abatement to that list). Equivalently, we can just pretend that there has only ever been one owner.