Yup, I 100% agree. This is my worry too. And it goes beyond real estate market and landlords - they are the obvious infinitely deep money sinkholes of society, but even if housing magically became free and available to everyone, I believe the sudden inflation would happen anyway.

I believe this to be a fundamental feature of free market economy in general. It's something I started realizing many years ago, and thought about a lot ever since; in the last year, I distilled that belief into a concise phrase I now use for this:

The market constantly adjusts to keep the average disposable income to zero.

Except now I realized that "average" is the wrong measure here, I should be saying "median", and also I've been mistakenly using the term "disposable income" (which actually means just after-tax income) to refer to "discretionary income" (what you're left with after covering taxes, bills, and essentials). Which leads me to the New and Better, Updated, Version 2.0 of my economic theory:

The market constantly adjusts to keep median discretionary income near zero.

I'd imagine this is an obvious thing that's already been named 100 years ago, but so far my research only pointed me to things like "neutrality of money", and some specific examples of my statement holding, yet nothing that covers it entirely.

(EDIT: in the unlikely case I'm not an idiot, and that this phrasing was not used/named before, I welcome credit; inquiries from the Nobel Foundation should be directed to my e-mail address, which is in my profile.)