They can however at times be slow, and frustrating, for some random things you'd need. But I can deal with it.
In contrast, my girlfriend who lived in a shared apartment with independent landlord, wouldn't fix heat, and then did a cheap replacement, which broke in few months, and refused again. And now she's out of the apartment, not giving back the amount he owes to her. I'm not sure if there any data to backup, but at-least in city, it seems like independent landlords are possibly worse.
The fed should have some wheel that could introduce random 4% swings every six months that would hopefully disrupt the private equity leveraged buyout schemes, but who am I kidding, it would just lead to some ridiculous speculation/betting on what the next random modifier to the base interest rate is.
Perhaps, rather than offering good interest rates to large companies and hedge funds / private equity, there should be special low interest rates for single house owners, but businesses actually have to pay higher interest rates for commercial ventures.
Of course someone would figure out a scheme to get individuals to overprovision their mortgages and then back-assemble the excess debt with kickbacks to route it to other uses.
There has to be some way to have low interest rates to help out the "little guys" but make big biz and stock market leverage/margin buying pay a higher interest rate. If you have a high interest rate, it just benefits banks and the rich, who are the only people that have "real money", in case anyone actually does have "real money".
Legally mandated LtV < 1 based on `min(sale, appraisal)` would pretty much hinder such schemes. You can always sell your house to your child/parent and get equity back into the family anyway, but in general this would mean mortgage (real estate leveraged financing) could only be used to finance the sale.