Pretend? Those landlords aren't that, they're companies like your employer. They borrowed money for the building and are living from the difference between what they earn and what they pay the lender. The lenders are often funds of some sort, "ABC US Real Estate A" or somesuch if it's managed by a company called ABC, owned in turn by other funds and some small individual investors. I probably own a bit of such a real estate fund, maybe $1k or $10k, not sure, I'd have to check.
If you go all the way back and disregard small fry like me, the ultimate big owners are often pension funds. Landed gentry it's not.
Owning a few slivers of a company doesn't make you nobility. Let's draw a few lines. Do you work for a living or own things for a living? In other words, which flavor of incentives is predominant in your life? Whenever a company pulls a Scrooge McDuck move, do you own enough shares that on net this benefits you or does it still hurt you like it hurts most? Do you have enough of a stock that it make sense to hire a lobbyist for a 10% chance of pumping its value by 10% (i.e. does lobbying look like an expense or an investment)? Do you always pay 30% income tax or sometimes pay 15% capital gains tax?
For most of these "are you nobility" questions, you can draw a line on a net worth chart where the incentives and privileges are one thing below the line and a different thing above the line. Each question gives you a different line, but for the most part you and I are on one side of the lines and, say, Bill Gates is on the other. It's important to understand that the world is mostly owned by people who feel a structurally different set of incentives from what you and I feel.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. I fully agreee that owning a few slivers of a fund doesn't make people like me nobility.
Further, I also don't think pension funds are similar to nobility. They have a lot of money and own a lot of buildings (indirectly through funds), but also a lot of future obligations to a lot of people who aren't any kind of nobility. Their assets don't add up to more than their obligations, certainly not to so much more that the difference can sustain a nobility.
Borrowed) They worked hard for this washing columbian snow and collecting exotic crystals. Some of them just extracted essential oils from dessert sands, landlording there, cursed with resources as.. a landed gentry.
The land belonging to an aristocrat can only go to another. Sales are regulated by the central government. Additionally, aristocrats have a de jure place in the government hierarchy, military rights, and the right to enforce laws on their own land.
The nobility doesn't directly control the monopoly on violence like they did under Feudalism. However, they still make a living by owning things rather than by working, this still gives them crossed incentives to most commoners on a wide variety of issues, and they still exert outsized political influence in furtherance of those crossed incentives.
