Law with two parts, only a specific type of company may own rental properties. And you may not own or be employed by more than one property; including holding stock. The same rules apply to property management companies that service land lords with few properties; possibly with larger limits on how many properties they can manage at a time.

With that basic structure we can decide how many buildings/units each company can own. For example the limit could be 100 single family homes, or 3 mid sized complexes, or 1 large tower. Then we should be able to have a system that keeps landlords from going big. Makes the system so decentralized market concepts must work and monopoly power is effectively destroyed.

You’d limit Ultimate Beneficial Ownership of the properties, not direct ownership.

I’d probably do something like: No individual or private entity may have Direct, Indirect or Ultimate Beneficial Ownership exceeding or of multiple of any of X(2-5?) Single Family properties, Y(2-3?) low density Multi-tenant properties, or Z(1-2?) high density Multi-tenant properties. Excluding the first wholely and solely owner occupied property. Excluding Ultimate Beneficial Ownership of less than A(.01-5?)% of a property. Excluding Ownership less than B(30-180?) days. Failure to comply results in forfeiture of newer ownership to REGULATOR-TBD until compliance is met. Multi-tenant properties have C (5-10?) residences

IANAL, probably some other loopholes that need closing. But the intent would be to limit consolidated ownership of many properties. But not impact several of the more reasonable ownership structures, nor impact churn of properties. The regulator would sell whatever extra it gets to fund housing programs.

Not in France. If the tenant wants it, the tenant gets it

I mean, my wife and I didn’t sell to the two highest bidders on our first house because the fuckers were obviously going to rent it out.

One was a bid entered by a piece of software often used by flippers and rental companies (had branding at the bottom of the pages etc) and the other was a cash in hand bid with an overt offer of more under the table, which is fairly illegal where we live.

We selected third place, someone who had messy handwriting, obviously has been written by two different people, and ended the bid with “777” which was cute and showed us not only were they human, they really wanted the place. And no wonder, with offers like the first two likely happening on nearly every sale in the area.

Because sometimes there’s a tie

Yes but we had our fair share of assholes

Never any history of racial segregation in the housing market, nope. No Sir. Never.

There have been auctions in the past, mostly farm, that the community got together to drive off outsiders and then proceed to lowball every item on the auction. They would then return everything to the owner after the auction.

It was a fine ‘fuck you’ to the bank, until the bank closed or sold out because they no longer had the assets and cash reserves needed to stay open themselves. Which then screwed the rest of the community over.

They can still do that through proxy buyers. If you go to enough auctions, it’s easy enough to pick them out.