The alternative is having people buy a building,
not do anything with it, and wait for the price to increase to sell it at a profit. Leading to a shortage of real estate with a ton of unused real estate.
And no, we can't just wait for the market to self-correct for empty properties being devalued due to being surrounded by empty properties: you'll just end up with empty, abandoned buildings that nobody wants to fix.
If you want incentives to make people avoid doing that, the only two methods that I can think of are property tax, or legalised squatting (with squatters having a right to stay).