They're not constrained by income as an ordinary purchaser would be. So they're not at all like an ordinary buyer. Further, if private equity buys to rent at scale they can fundamentally alter the availability and pricing of housing in a market. These firms effectively collude to raise home prices.

Investors and Housing Affordability FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF ST. LOUIS (2020) https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2020/2020-04...

Relationship between rents in NYC and ownership concentration https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8864.pdf

Consolidation of rental market bt private investment firms https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X221135612

The Impact of Institutional Investors on Homeownership and Neighborhood Access https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4554831

Algorithmic collusion in the housing market https://apnews.com/article/algorithm-corporate-rent-housing-...

This story (as I said in a reply to the parent comment) is bunk, but institutional buyers do have a significant advantage over regular people in the form of access to cash. You have to get a real estate agent, find a bank that will lend to you, get your financial info together, probably have an in-person meeting, hope you get approved for a mortgage, and finally close the sale. Some junior trader at Blackstone can just wire the full cash price of the home and have the paperwork signed the same day.

This is of course true, and the extreme aversion to private equity buying houses versus any other investor such as a person buying a second house to rent out, has puzzled me.

Those small time landlords have been the worst landlords I have ever had. Give me a large corporate landlord which knows that laws exist and at least tries to follow them over the greedy, ignorant, and desperate small-time landlord any day.