The number of people who buy homes to live in them greatly exceeds the number of people who buy homes as investments. That seems obvious to me. The only way most housing could be investment property is if investment vehicles each had so many houses, literally tens or hundreds of thousands, that their total ownership exceeded that of ordinary people .

As it turns out, this is not the case:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187576/housing-units-occ...

I myself am an example, so is everyone in my social circle.

edit: Also Myth 5 in the following article.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/et-explains/six-my...

Edit 2: An 1800 sft, duplex house, built in a 150 square yard property, cost about Rs. 13 million. And that is in a city like Hyderabad. Costs about double that in Bangalore, the top IT city in India and probably more in a city like Mumbai & New Delhi.

An average salary of an IT employee, with about 10 years of experience is about Rs. 3 million per year. Banks give a loan of about Rs. 10 million on that house, and employees usually source the remaining amount from further loans or high interest borrowings. Cumulatively, with current interest rates (have been stable for a decade now), EMI on a 13 million loan is about 0.13 million per month, meaning more than half of an employees salary, 1.56 million, goes to EMI payments.

Average rental value for that property is about Rs. 25000 per month, or Rs. 0.3 million per year. So hardly enough for covering EMI. Tenure on the loan is usually 20 to 30 years.

So, for most families, with wife and husband working, owning one house is within reach, but two is beyond capacity. With so much of income going to EMI, most choose to stay in the house rather than rent it out.