There's been talk lately about clamping down on big institutional money flowing into residential real estate. The pitch sounds straightforward enough—cut out the corporate landlords, make homes cheaper for regular people.

But here's the thing: it's way more complicated than that. Yes, mega-investors scooping up single-family homes have become a flashpoint issue. Nobody wants to see neighborhoods turned into rental portfolios. Yet policies that simply block institutional buyers from the market tend to miss the real problem. Housing affordability isn't just about who owns the properties—it's about supply, zoning, construction costs, and a dozen other factors working against average homebuyers.

When you restrict who can buy, you're treating a symptom instead of the disease. The shortage of available housing, restrictive zoning laws, and construction constraints are the actual culprits driving prices up. Without fixing those fundamentals, banning one type of buyer just reshuffles the deck without genuinely opening doors to more affordable ownership.

It's the kind of populist move that feels good in headlines but rarely delivers the results people expect. Market interventions rarely work this cleanly.