Uh, yeah, this is all horrible. Even when founding a company makes sense, it's sometimes difficult to justify - e.g. when we were buying a house I was looking at bigger buildings with multiple units, so having a estate holding company would have made sense: We're already taxed over 30% and rents could have pushed us into the highest bracket, while most of the money (rents) in the holding would have gone into financing and maintaining the building anyway.

Don't get me started on founding a company and then getting necessary loans (all while the loan market changes and suitable houses might vanish from the market). Some proper investor is probably now renting out a multi unit house we would have bought, making nice profits while we would have aimed at boosting our pension in a few decades.

But well: That's the way it's meant to be, else the rules would be different, or would they?

(We got an old SFH instead, and slashed energy consumption by ~80-90%. That's not even accounting for PV. It's nice to profit from that now and later in life, but I still believe that we, as a society, would have benefited more from improving a MFH and sharing the lower energy consumption with some tennants)