Money-laundering oligarchs bought all the real-estate to clean their oil money
I don’t understand how the behavior described in the post  raises rents. Clearly demand from investors would raise sale prices, but why would renters pay more to rent in buildings owned by shady oligarchs? Seems like it would just push up the price-rent ratio, which we definitely can see in the data. If anything, that indicates renters are getting a better deal, paying a smaller portion of the capital cost of living in a scarce asset.Ie. if big city real estate is a particularly good place for oligarchs to park cash illegally, they ought to be getting less real returns then they could get on normal investments like the stock market. If they are overpaying for these properties, they are transferring wealth (on net) to the domestic sellers and/or  tenants.