alt Hacker NewsTrue or not, there is little doubt demagogues play on foreign capital when arguing about house ownership costs to the mostly young renting classes.
My own belief is that at national scale the % of foreign capital in housing stock for most western democratic states is low, and when it exists in scale its things like the Canadian teachers pension fund or .. Blackstone.
In America, I suspect it's Blackstone before foreigners.
The problem is real estate can not be looked at on a national scale. It is fundamentally local. In a country like the US, probably 95%+ of the land is absolutely worthless as an investment. You can get a residential plot in North Dakota for like $5k. But owning a very small portion of a country can have an extreme influence if it's that part of a country that people seek to live in. Further, the overwhelming majority of real estate in any given area is typically occupied by someone who has no interest in selling soon. Only about 3-4% of US homes are on the market at any given time. If an entity bought up every home on the market in the Bay area, they'd own a measly 0.009% of the US real estate market in terms of housing units, but they would be able to unilaterally set the price of housing for over 2% of the US population and over 4% of the US economy.