As I discussed yesterday (The Problem Isn't a Housing Shortage, It's the Concentration of Ownership by the Wealthy), this bubble is fundamentally an artifact of central bank and government policies...

...I am not talking about people of modest means who acquired rental properties by scrimping and saving their earned income and making sacrifices for decades--a strategy that is part of Self-Reliance; I'm talking about the already-wealthy who are seeking to "maximize returns" on their unearned "surplus capital."

A systemic driver of this bidding war for rental properties is the "AirBnB" model of monetizing individual properties to compete with hotels and resorts for lodging.

It's not uncommon to visit tourist-magnet cities and see entire buildings with only a few lights on, as many units are owned by the wealthy and left empty, as rents are not as important as having a safe place to "park surplus capital." Thousands of other units have been pulled from the long-term rental market to reap the higher returns...

There is no way the bottom 90% can afford homes at today's bubble valuations, so the pool of buyers is limited to the top 10% already-wealthy, whose appetite for owning "surplus capital" rentals vanishes once the lofty weekly rates and low vacancies reverse into high vacancies and collapsing rental rates.