As long as costs are marked up and passed on to the consumer, this is a non starter. Also, government charging more taxes just gets paid by the consumer. Money is fungible. Small landlords have significant advantages in their being able to be more agile, use different rent structures (i.e. rent to own, short term, barter, etc, leverage owner elbow grease to get more profit). The key is to make sure the big guys don't have a financial advantage.

> In my experience the random people that rent out their second property are usually good landlords, whereas the massive players treat people poorly.

I don't think there's really all that much of a difference. Small landlords have low cash problems (slow repairs, stupid disputes on damage deposits, etc...). Big landlords have policy and bureaucracy problems (we forgot you were disabled and removed the ramp from the deck, we evicted the wrong property).