I disagree. The large corporations in total own hundreds of thousands of homes in their portfolios. The value of renting or selling can be boosted significantly by introducing scarcity on the margins between supply and demand. A vacancy of a small percentage of the portfolio can ensure the rest of the portfolio is worth much more.

To elaborate a little further, it’s not necessarily the act of having it sit empty but rather keeping the pricing high regardless of whether the property stays empty. That becoming industry standard becomes a recipe for prices spiraling out of control, at least for a bit of time.