Manipulating markets by controlling liquidity while not holding a large percentage of the overall stock is a thing. The fact that you could juice trading volume by doing something stupid for no reason doesn’t make it a useless statistic for evaluating what is going on in a market (unless you’re alleging that institutional investors would do this, and I can’t see the motive). This isn’t some shitcoin whose creators are faking trading volume to appear on the leaderboards - it’s houses with deeds.

To be clear, I don’t think institutional real state investment is a substantial part of the reason housing prices are so high. I’m just trying to push whatever argument they were thinking of toward something quantifiable.