Presumably they're investing to rent. At the conference you're talking about.... One of the implications of decreasing affordability is that increasingly folks are going to have to rent as a living arrangement. If you can't afford to buy and you can afford to rent, you're going to rent.
In that world, unless you fix affordability, there will need to be de facto more investors in the marketplace, more people owning a number of units for them to be rented out.