> There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.

They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is a significant drop and it probably will only continue from there.