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>> In many countries, including Europe, new properties are quickly snatched by investment

> Demand for housing is not infinite, and supply of capital is not infinite. Building more units will always help. The quantity of units which are bought and then kept empty long term is tiny in relative terms.

I think it's kind of pointless to argue over which one policy to pursue to fix this problem, why not try a multi-pronged approach?

1. Implement some policy to ban large investors from home-ownership (say no corporate ownership and a small cap on how many an individual/family can own). There are more reasons to do this than just supply.

2. Put an onerous tax on housing that is not occupied full-time.

3. Build more housing.

1 & 2 would help ease some (but not all) pressure that makes 3 less desirable.

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1 and 2 will essentially prevent any sort of a rental market, and rentals clearly play a valuable role for lots of society.

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> 1 and 2 will essentially prevent any sort of a rental market, and rentals clearly play a valuable role for lots of society.

Not if the rule is scoped to single-family homes and individual units in multi-owner buildings. Purpose-built rental housing (e.g. apartment buildings) would be exempted for obvious reasons. The intent is to keep large investors out of markets where owner-occupancy is typical. Even in my original comment I did make allowances for single-family home rentals, but they'd have to be from small-scale landlords.

Also suggestion 2 wouldn't prevent a rental market anywhere there's demand for housing, it would just force landlords to drop rents aggressively to get units occupied.

And obviously, as is true for any internet comment suggestion of regulatory changes, actual implementation will be more complicated than can be expressed in a pithy comment that lays out the gist.