The institutional-investor trend is real and documented, and the "nobody will ever own again" version overstates it. Big firms have bought thousands of homes, but the buying concentrates in specific markets and specific windows, when cheap prices relative to rents, strong rent growth, and a decent economy line up. That setup has happened before, including the Fresno and Central Valley area coming out of the last cycle around 2011-2012, and it tends to repeat under those conditions rather than march everywhere at once. Financing made the recent wave sticky. A stretch of ultra-low rates let large buyers lock in cheap long-term money, and let existing owners lock in low payments too. Those are strong hands with little reason to sell at a discount, so working through the distortion takes years rather than months. On the bigger fear: markets tend to be self-correcting, and people keep wanting to own. Our honest frustration is that a lot of policy energy goes toward subsidizing rents rather than supporting ownership, which does not help the buyers trying to break in. We will not put a date on it, and nobody can promise where prices or rates head. The durable expectation is that affordability gets restored the slow way, through incomes rising and rates easing over time, possibly with an extended stretch of below-average price growth, rather than through a single dramatic event. Discouraging as the headlines are, "renters forever" is not the base case.