And, well, umm, ya' gotta' wonder how many older regular Americans own 12 houses.

I'm guessing, not many.

But probably more than you think. Well, maybe not 12 exactly - but 5 or 10.

Per the data, most single-family homes that are owned by investors are owned in small bunches:

Despite headlines about Wall Street landlords, the market remains overwhelmingly controlled by small investors. Owners of just one to five properties account for 87% of all investor-owned homes, the report found. Another 4% belong to those with six to ten properties. By contrast, large institutional players with portfolios exceeding 1,000 homes control only 2% of the market.

nationalmortgageprofessional.com - Small investors dominate single family home market

Doing the math for a moment, there's about 17 million SFH that are investor-owned. So about 700K SFH are owned by investors with 6-10 homes - so probably about 100K people/investors there. There's probably a very much larger number that have 4-5 homes - the number of individual mom and pop owners with 1-5 homes is going to be at least 3 million, so maybe half a million are going to be at the upper end there?

It should be noted that this doesn't mean these houses are owned individually by little old retirees - some of them will be actual businesses or investment vehicles for groups of people. But Bessent is probably right to get out there on this point, because most of the people who would look with worry on a ban on investor-owned SFH are people who are involved with only a small number of properties - and you don't want them to get scared/pissed off.