Certainly in the U.K. house builders sit on masses of land but don’t develop it for fear of lowering sold prices. If building a house costs £100k Better to sell 5 at 400k each year for 10 years than sell 50 at 250k
That's not a failure to take necessary risk or a problem of a too-short time horizon. Quite the opposite. And it is certainly not a tragedy of the commons situation.
At least not until you factor in government. What landowners and land speculators clearly don't fear is huge swaths of land suddenly becoming available for building. Or sharply increasing interest rates. Or mass deportations.
A market failure is more like how a CEO is often incentivized to maximize the stock price in the short run at the expense of the long-term health of the company. That is how his compensation is structured.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-...