For existing houses the investors might very well overbid the market price to get the lot, thereby making it inaccessible for any individual to realistically buy. They’ll gladly overpay the market price on adjacent lots so they can “regenerate” the area, by stuffing four houses into two lots. Any individual simply wanting to buy the existing lot is out of luck, because it wouldn’t ever make sense for them to overpay the asking price.

For new lots, it works so that whenever a city council decides to change the zoning of a lot of land to allow for residential construction, the price is set for investors to bid on. The entire lot is bought by an “investor” or “developer” who will either build on the lot or sell individual parts of the lot for others to build on. There’s no risk. There isn’t necessarily any work carried out. There’s no service provided. It’s just paying for ownership at one price, shuffling the papers and selling at a higher.

It’s the same fucking thing as scalping, only over longer time and for larger amounts.

So the idea that “If it’s so easy, why doesn’t everybody do it?” or “It’s fair, because they paid above asking price, you could just have bid higher” is wrong because I for one can’t afford to buy ten fucking houses just to get one of them at the right price.

This is how capital accrues.