I’ll take a stab and guess people with enough cash to buy properties.
yep
My wife and I bought some homes in Arizona with cash for investment (rental) properties by leveraging the equity in our own home and equities in some of the rentals. We bought them ourselves directly and not through realtors.
We needed retirement funds and something to write-off once our kids left home. Uncle Sam was taking a big hunk of our income every year in taxes. So we decided to go into the property investment and management business on the side. We did quite well for ourselves.
At one point we owned 10 rentals, all of them free and clear. We paid the mortgages off on most of them be selling some of the rentals we had purchased that had appreciated. We managed the properties ourselves instead of hiring a property manager. We got burnt a couple of times by bad renters not paying but I learned quickly how to get them kicked out quickly without too much trouble or expense.
We got out of most of them (sold them) before the market cooled down in 2008 when the stock market took a dive and the housing crisis hit. We got stuck with a couple of them that we lost money on but did real well on the rest of them. Put money in the bank for retirement.
We weren't rich or didn't win the lottery but by leveraging our homes, we increased the number of them. Then paid them off and accumulated wealth that we now have in the bank for our reserve retirement funds. We had a lot of fun doing it too.
We are retired now and live comfortably on a 30 acre cattle ranch in Florida. And we still own several free and clear investment homes, one here in Florida near our farm, one in South Carolina near the beach in Pawleys Island and one still in Tempe, Arizona near Arizona State University.