No, oligarchy provides market power similar to that of a monopoly. Also, if you’re renting 100 properties letting 20% sit idle might be with it. I’d your renting 1-2 properties then you don’t have the fine grained control.
Not nessisarily relevant if the same management companies are running these rentals for large numbers of investors.
“25 money laundry clients, all with about $3 million (after you & your washing cut) they need to invest. $75 mil? Let’s buy 6 dingbats and put them in an REIT. Which hires a management team” This means that specific team is managing property for a hypothetical group of 25 people.
The second part “If the REIT buys a building for an inflated price, and they’re getting clean money monthly? They can just sit on it until someone legit comes along, having convinced a bank to make them a very large mortgage on an inflated price.” In other words they don’t care that much about cash flows the way somone leveraged to the hilt would.
That said these numbers completely ignore leverage, that 75 million investment could easily own 200+ million in property.
Possibly, with the event of modern high speed communications pricing is much more transparent. Also, the theory is there were far more landlords in the past and the market is condensing on a much smaller number of them.
I’m really skeptical of this - my mental model is that when a city is initially settled and developed, large tracts of land are owned by people who end up becoming the local “old money” families who may truly have been monopolists. Over time they sell off chunks to “foreign investors” (who might come from the next town over or across the globe) which diversifies ownership.