[skewart]

I think you might be comparing apples and oranges when comparing investing in a company and investing in real estate. There are different ways to invest in a company and different ways to invest in real estate.

Investing in a company to help fuel its growth, like VCs do, is analogous to investing in a new development project. There are lots of firms that provide equity investment to developers for new construction. Much like VCs these firms are interested in helping to create something new to meet market demands. Also like VCs they are typically looking for an exit event, where they benefit from the sale of the recently developed property.

The tech analogue for being a landlord - holding on to a stable asset and maintaining it - is holding on to an already profitable business and just maintaining it. For example, there are lots of SaaS businesses that have a decent number of customers and the owners are happy to just do the minimum needed to maintain the code and handle customer service requests. You can buy and sell these businesses as an investor much like income-oriented real estate investors buy and sell fully-leased apartment and office buildings. These investors are not helping to create something new in a direct way.

However, those income-oriented investors do create a market for stable assets, be it a Midtown Manhattan office building or shares of GE. They aren't directly investing in growth, but they are providing the incentive for growth. After all, while an early stage growth investor might be happy to know that they can sell their stake to another growth investor, as a company gets bigger and bigger its room for growth tends to diminish, and growth investors become less interested in buying it. But the market for its shares doesn't disappear. That's because there are investors looking for stable cash flow, even if it's from a static asset - be it an apartment building from the 1970s or Oracle.