Yeah, baffles me when people think that they’re doing people a favor by being landlords. Like dude, you are trying to get rich, nothing more. You’re not doing anybody anywhere any favors.
To them the only kmaginable alternative is them still having the housing, but just letting it sit empty.
I suppose we would need the government to step up with subsidized mortgages or rent to own programs or something to make things more fair?
The landlord in the OP should have sold their apartment but since they could’ve only sold to someone who could afford the down payment they should’ve also lobbied their representatives to make housing purchases more affordable in the future. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Wonder what would happen if all landlords put their properties up for sale tomorrow. Should be a nice housing crash? And then the remaining renters who still cannot afford the newly reduced down payments, they need a solution prior to the houses closing, I suppose…
Well the situation she’s describing kind of is that, no?Sorry I realise I misread the meme. The rest of this is still valid but not so relevant. I’ll leave it anyway.
If you own a house, and plan to go on a, say, 6 month trip in a few years. You are obviously not going to go through the 6 month+ process of selling the house, storing all of your furniture, etc… only to have to spend 6 months renting while you look for another house to buy.
So either you store my personal stuff and rent it out as furnished on a fixed term rental contract, or it’s empty until you get back.
I really appreciate people’s furore at
landlordshousing scalpers - but single homeowners renting out their house are not the problem. It is perfectly acceptable to own a house and rent it out, you are not hoarding housing and some people need/want to rent for non-financial reasons (they travel for work, they don’t like the hassle of managing maintenance, etc).Won’t somebody think of the poor homeowner going an a 6 month vacation?!
This is such a bizarrely niche situation it doesn’t need to be discussed.
Sure, I suppose it makes sense for the person going on a 6 month trip to not sell their home. The process of finding renters who just want to live there for half a year, making sure you have someone to maintain the property, and having strangers living in your home isn’t exactly easy either.
If laws were pass making it illegal to rent single family dwellings it would have a negligible effect on this situation. The group of people able to afford a 6 month trip, yet need the money from rent, and are willing to let strangers live in their house is vanishingly small.Yeah, like I said I misunderstood the OP.
That said, I think outright banning renting houses would be a terrible idea. Even if we imagine a world in which houses do not cost the astronomical amounts they do today (which just taking landlords out of the market would not guarantee!), most of the time I’ve rented I wanted to rent… I wouldn’t have wanted to be tied to a house with months of buy/sale at either end of my time there, not to mention solicitor’s fees. We obviously want a situation where most people can afford and practically buy a house, it seems stupid to completely annihilate the concept of renting in exchange.
I would also argue it’s not necessary. If you have more people owning homes, you also have more people either temporarily or semi-permanently vacating them for a variety of reasons. Travelling for work or fun, moving in with a partner, etc. In those situations I don’t see why the need for rental properties (which probably remains relatively small if we consider only those people who actively prefer renting, rather than those who simply can’t afford anything else) shouldn’t be met by landlords who own a single property that they don’t live in… also as you say a relatively small group. Tax the shit out of or legislate against multiple property owners all you like as far as I’m concerned, though.
I know I spent a long time perfectly content to rent, I liked the flexibility and I didn’t have time to learn shit like how to fix my washing machine. I wouldn’t have wanted to be forced to either live with strangers or spend months buying/selling because it’s illegal to rent to me.
I think outright banning renting houses would be a terrible idea.
That’s not what I suggested. I suggested banning renting single family housing. If someone wants to rent out their basement suite or turn their house into a duplex that’s fine. That and apartment buildings would cover the people who want to rent. The landlord should have to live on the property they are renting.
As mentioned above this person actually manages to be worse than typical parasitic landlords. She expects them to move whenever she decides she wants to live in the UK again for a bit…
Money rots the brain and the morals…
Money rots the brain and the morals…
Seems too yeah.
Too what now?
Ok, sorry. I’m a dick.
Seems to be my specialty and folks hate me for a good reason. Too reasons actually. I’ll tell you the second reason if you ask me two many times.
God. Overkill. I’m really sorry.
Deep breaths. In and out. You’ll be fine.
I like the unspoken part where the people who have lived in this home must vacate when she decides she wants to spend a few years living in the UK again. They should have to find new accommodation when it suits her, but she is not subject to such requirements.
Tbh that’s the reason she bought and rents it out in the first place, so I’m sure she’s aware
yeah I don’t think she’s unaware. just emphasizing that the asymmetric nature of the relationship extends past just profiting off a basic need.
I don’t know how it is the UK, but usually there is a contract period and a minimum period to respect to break the contract.
well i guess it’s fine, then. got myself all worked up over nothing
I don’t know how it its where you live/the UK but there is probably a special clause/law that allows the owner to end the contract if they want to use the property themselves.
Edit: Downvote as much as you want but at least in Germany and France such clauses exist.
In France there is such a clause, but applicable only if the owner plans to rent to a family member of theirs, iirc
Same here in Germany and I would assume it is pretty common.
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When you added it all up I am pretty confident I spent about 8K USD on my last move. When she is done having fun her sefs will be out that money.
I had a sociopathic narcissistic ex-boyfriend who did that. He owned a townhouse that people were renting out, and when his wife left him and their house was foreclosed and he got evicted, he kicked out his tenants and moved into his townhouse.
HE KICKED OUT HIS TENANTS SO HE COULD MOVE IN 😟
I do not approve of this master/slave dynamic that the housing industry has created. It’s inhumane, unethical, sociopathic,
I recently bought an apartment, and while I was searching I always made sure to ask if the apartments I was looking at were being rented (the listings never disclosed that information), and giving up on the ones that had tenants living in them. This always earned me weird looks from the agents - “you can just buy the apartment and kick them out”. Yes, the law and the contract will allow it, but my conscience wouldn’t.
“Is this… Empathy? In the year 2024? How old-fashioned.” The agents.
The utter god-complex some of these people have
The real question is- where are those people going to live when you get back and evict them?
That’s the fun part: you get to de-home them with the full support of the law.
My landlord assured me I’d be able to rent this place for years.
A few days ago he tells me he’s selling it, and that I need to move by June 1st, when my lease is until September.
I could fight it, but for what? A few extra months? No point in that headache.
I was hoping to rent a few years till I could buy it, as it is in my home town and near both work and family.
With the crazy rent prices today I’m going to have to move over an hour further just to find a smaller place at similar price.
Yeah, same thing happened to us. Landlord said he had at least 5 years. After 2 he starts grumbling that our rent is too low but he can’t increase it to the level he wants to (BC rent control). We say, oh that’s too bad.
After 3 years he decides he’s done being a landlord and wants to sell the apartment and tells us he’s going to kick us out and sell the place. We fight. BC has a policy that the landlord must actually live in the unit for at least 6 months in order to evict a current tenant and he’s shown us he doesn’t intend to do so.
There is more fighting, he finally consults a lawyer (he didn’t seem to be aware of the law). He finally understands what he must do to evict us and we started losing ground. End of story we negotiated him for extra money, getting evicted on the same date and decided it was better than walking away empty handed.
This is why you make a written contract before moving somewhere. If you don’t have it in writing, you’re shit out of luck.
Even with a written contract, it’s still a question of whether you want to fight it, which is often more hassle than it’s worth.
In their 13th property they own outright from landlord profits
I’m in this situation and I’m renting out my house while working overseas, where I am living in a rental property. Just because the market has been perverted by capital doesn’t mean there aren’t legit purposes for a rental market.
Not for profit, there isn’t. Profit as a concept in contemporary economics already doesn’t pass the sniff test, but housing especially doesn’t.
Profit is a byproduct of free exchange of labor. Most people wouldn’t labor if it was net negative for them.
Profit is a byproduct of
free exchange oflaborFTFY
Value is added regardless of whether the labor was freely exchanged.
That said: rent isn’t a result of any labor at all
I agree, however, a good landlord who maintains their property and promptly resolves issues will have to invest an element of time and money into the process.
That being said, fuck landlords in general.
a good landlord [is one] who maintains their property
That job exists - they are called maintenance workers: plumbers, electricians, roofers, handymen…
What makes a landlord a landlord - and not a handyman - is the ownership of property and extraction of rent for its use. It is definitionally not the labor involved in maintaining it.
If landlords want to be paid for maintaining properties they can get jobs as maintenance workers.
Landlord is the role of owner, not maintainer/manager of the property. Sure, they can be the same sometimes (even then most of the actual work gets outsourced to professionals), but anyone can enlist the help of a real estate manager. We usually tend to call them janitors.
Also there are huge open funds specialising in real estate (for rent revenue, for dev/resell potential, or both) that have like a 100 property managers that just need to keep their tenants happy. What that actually means is that investors pool their moneys into a fund with fund managers that buys real estate, finds tenants that wound pay a higher rent under certain conditions (eg I want a huge concert hall in the center of our office complex), fund has the capital to make it happen & evicts the current tenants (unless they can match the rent of the place with a concert hall but without actually having it).
Exactly. Profit actually middies/lowers intrinsic value added since the main driver is purely financial, not actual irl. And you can make a (steady) profit on/with things that don’t add value.
Labor theory of value. Read theory people. It makes you better informed.
The person in the tweet doesn’t claim to be making a profit at all. She’s basically saying she isn’t going to sell the apartment, so if she didn’t rent it out, then it would just sit empty.
Why rent it out if you’re not making a profit?
In her case, so she has a place to move back to if she comes back. Although I have a friend who has a few properties that he rents out basically at cost (mortgage, taxes, insurance, maintenance) and has them as an investment properties.
The way the real estate market is currently set up, a property sitting empty still generates profit as a financial asset. This is the major issue with rentier capitalism, not your average middle class homeowner with an extra property for rent.
The way the real estate market is currently set up, a property sitting empty still generates profit as a financial asset.
Please expand.
Home value goes up over time.
Yeah but you’re paying taxes and maintenance. It’s actually not a great investment vehicle if it’s sitting empty, it’s just generally very safe.
So rent goes where if not in profit? Maintenance??
Mortgage, maintenance, insurance, taxes
Loan interest payments are absolutely not something that should be converted by rent - you just take someones labour to pay for something in order for you to eventually own it.
Same with taxes - both on rent profit and real estate itself.
Maintenance, insurance, electricity, water, etc tenants cover, bcs that is the thing they are using & costing landlords. And those things are absolutely not 6%~12% (as average re yield) of the real estate price. Its just profit from labor transferred to non-productive factors.
So people should just pay a tiny fraction of the cost of home ownership to rent somewhere? If that were the case, only the absolutely most wealthy people could afford to own and rent places out. It wouldn’t make sense for anyone else to buy it, and those ultra wealthy would be the only ones profiting.
Taxes, maintenance, a management company but probably most of all to interest on the insanely large loan you took out to get it. We “bought” a house with a 30 year loan and if we were to rent it out right now at market rate, there would be no profit. We would probably take a small loss other than the opportunity to hold the property hoping that the price of housing continues to rise. It hasn’t risen since we bought the house a couple of years ago. If you’re old enough to remember 2008, then you also know that it doesn’t always go up. Sometimes it goes down pretty dramatically and you’re left holding the bag.
If the house sits empty between tenants, those costs don’t go away. So for me, in my one bathroom house, that would be $2,400 a month (not including maintenance.) Where is that money gonna come from? I don’t have it because I’m paying rent somewhere else to try and make more money to dig my way out of this hole in this hypothetical situation.
So why not sell? To sell it, we have to pay 6% to real estate agents. If we actually owned the house, not just a massive soul-crushing loan, fine. But we don’t. So that 6% is a SHITLOAD of money when you borrowed all of it besides the 15% down payment that was two people’s life savings plus begging for more from relatives. So selling means half your combined life savings and the money you begged from relatives, poof gone.
Most people have a mortgage like this and amortized interest rates mean that in the beginning, 90% of the money you give the mortgage company goes straight to interest because you pay off 30 year’s worth of interest up front so that they’re sure they get their profit (and because paying the full 5% interest on a note that big every year would be impossible for most people.)
People who bought recently, have a mortgage and a single home that they rent out are not making any profit in areas with expensive housing. It’s not like houses are cheap to “buy” in the first place. They get you good.
Why buy at all then? Because I don’t like landlords telling me what I can and can’t do. So much so that I gambled it all on “buying” a place.
Loan interest payments are absolutely not something that should be converted by rent - you just take someones labour to pay for something in order for you to eventually own it.
Regarding the intentionally low liquidity market - that bullshit is by design. The government to allow (much less mandate) real estate agents to not get payed in fixed amounts is just grotesque. They dont provide any service and are not really responsible for anything.
I think we have a cap at 2% (but EU is slowly working towards banning any financial advice where the adviser gets payed in % of something because then it’s in their interest for the price to go up). But most importantly, I can draft the contract myself (or ask a lawyer to do it for a minimal fixed fee if Im too lazy to look online for examples) & pay nothing to real estate agents. I can’t imagine paying an extra 6%, that shit is formed basically as taxes, but go directly to private entities instead.
What in saying is that actual landlords and real estate agents have an interest in hiking prices for something they have extra but its a necessity for everyone.
Wait, why would people buy houses with 30y loans just to rent them?
Ofc, stuff that you can’t really live without (or be considered poor without) cannot be market priced/for profit because the only thing stopping soaring prices would be a revolution/revolt … and we were pretty pacified throughout our upbringing. Even silly/obvious things - like people automatically condemning (financially poor) looters of megacorps with unimaginable private profits.
You are so brave to post this on lemmy
The issue is (the normal and accepted practice of) charging people “market” rates for something that is a necessity.
Like healthcare, housing market isn’t free because the demand part of the market isn’t free.
People tend to mistake choice (the amount of available products that do the same - eg 100 colors of the same 100× overpriced cornflakes) with free market.
You are not going to go live in another country to work there and be homeless. And, if you could buy the place instead of renting, ofc you would want to do that. Even if you dont have the full nominal amount of moneys, as long as your credit payments (eg bank financing) would be lower than rent (well, actually just if the interests payments are lower than rent), you are just losing money paying rent. Even in case of like a really long loan, if you decide to sell the real estate after a year, every penny that you paid to you borrowed nominal is now “yours again” since the loan diminished by that amount and the selling price is within that margin/about the same-ish.
The profit incentive of current owners (ie the ones that just happened to have the opportunity to buy that real estate before you did, or were even born) is the main driver for hiking prices/rents.
And all of the free actors on the market, which are owners that control the supply part of the market, have exactly aligned interest of charging higher rents (that consequently/additionally result in higher real estate prices bought as investments) … guess where the market is headed. Not only at higher market prices, but also supporting other hurdles to buying real estate.
I worked in another country for a few years, renting was defiantly the better choice at the time. I wasn’t going to be there long enough to break even when I sold, and the headache of buying a property in a country that you don’t have citizenship, trying to get financing, ect. just wasn’t worth it.
Oh, that’s true, especially if countries dont have any bilateral agreements. But these are unnecessary complications that should be resolved (like, I can buy stock on basically any open market in seconds with very clear and registered ownership).
The only value landlords have is that is easier to be transient and move around for work and stuff, and not be tied down.
It should be for those in that niche, not because home ownership is too hard to obtain.
If you live in the same town doing the same job, the only reason you should be renting is because you didn’t like doing the extra work homeownership requires.
If anything beyond these niche is your market, fuck off.
3rd paragraph is me. I rented the vast majority of my life. I didn’t want to mow the lawn, shovel snow, clean gutters, fix/replace major items, eg: hot water heater.
Nope. Not interested.
I rented a place that had a small yard. I was excited to have a yard to tend. After cutting the grass once, I was done.
The landlord had the grass removed and a bunch of local plants put into a garden with a minimal watering system. Never needed to be tended. Was a well-loved upgrade.
Yeah, that would’ve been a good idea at my last place.
You can hire people to do those things and if home ownership were affordable, you would likely be able to afford to pay people to do those things and have it all even out to being around the same as renting.
No thanks. No interest in worrying about upkeep or saving $$ to replace my roof in “x” amount of years. And, as others have mentioned. I’ve moved a few times without any hassle about trying to sell/buy. People that insist on home ownership are annoying as shit.
I’m not insisting anyone buy a home. I’m just saying the reason you gave would not be a reason to not buy one if prices were equitable.
Sure it is. Why would I want to deal with finding a good landscaper or other service providers, eg: plumber?
I don’t care about price equality. I straight up don’t want to think about it.
Okay, but why shouldn’t that be an affordable option for others? Shouldn’t you be able to afford a home and such services just like you could afford to rent if things were more equitable?
I’m not talking about others. Just explaining my position. I’m not here to debate the issue.
And not having to take a big loan or have a lot of money on hand to live somewhere.
Landlords are the most delusional class.
If I was a landlord, I’d make the serfs work the fields for even more profit. I mean, If I’m gonna be evil, I’m going all-in.
Isn’t that just charging rent in turnips instead of money?
Sounds like slavery with extra turnips
You can eat turnips. You can’t eat rent money.
“instead”?
The trick is to
If you heard a construction worker say something like that standing infront of the building they worked on you would still think he is a bit full of himself.
I mean, at least from a construction worker it sounds more like a badass boast.
“I MADE THESE WALLS WITH MY DAMN BARE HANDS!”
My family owns a few rental properties. It was the mechanism that allowed my grandfather who grew up in 1930s Mississippi working the same land his slave grandparents did to escape poverty and retire pretty well off. He moved to Chicago, worked as a garbage man, bought a 3 flat and lived in one unit and rented the other two. Eventually he invested his money in more properties and and had his lawyer buy his house in the racist suburb of Oak Park so my mother could grow up in relative comfort.
The company was never ment to extract unlimited profit, we actually had many unprofitable years due to demographics changes, recessions, maintenance, and poor tenants causing damage ( who flushes weave down the drain?). But in aggregate it’s made enough to give stability, because being a landlord is always our side job.
During the pandemic my mother worked with all the tenants who lost their jobs or had limited or no income. Since none of our properties have a mortgage, she reduced rent to just enough to cover the insane Illinois property taxes and the shared utilities for the people that could pay. When the boiler went out she picked up a few extra nursing shifts with covid pay to cover it. When things returned to the new normal or when tenants found new work, she just had them resume normal rent without needing to pay any back rent in their lease.
You’d think we would be rewarded for doing the right thing and treating people with basic human decency, but no. When we applied for covid assistance, the money was gone. We then started to receive building violations for one of our properties is an up and coming area. The funny thing about these violations was that they were for items repairs 10 years earlier, and also for things we received city and used city grants and contracts to fix. Now we are currently in a legal battle with the city where they want us to take a $900k loan to fully renovated the building or have the city seize the property because it’s a “crime den” in their words. Like how, we screen everyone, rent mostly to old people and single mothers, and have camera in public areas and around the buildings. We even routinely provide footage to the police when they request it, even though that means we have to buy a new DVR since we have yet to have one returned.
But ever since covid and this inspection bull, we get daily calls letters, emails from corporations expressing their interest in buying our not for sale property.
Like how, we screen everyone, rent mostly to old people and single mothers, and have camera in public areas and around the buildings.
ever since covid and this inspection bull, we get daily calls letters, emails from corporations expressing their interest in buying our not for sale property.
That’s why. Someone’s asking a “friend” to lean on you and make you sell so that a corporate landlord can consolidate more of the rental market.
To play Devil’s Advocate, the people would only still live there without risk of inescapable debt if they had the qualifications to obtain a loan and pay down payment, as well as means to continue making payments until the property sells again or is paid off. Getting evicted by a landlord sucks but it’s still way better than owing the bank money because they can and will come after you for it.
On the flip side, though, you can still get equity from paying a mortgage, so it’s possible to sell the property and if it sells fast enough you could pay off the loan without excess interest during hard times.
Buying property comes with risks that renting properties do not have.
stop!
You’ve Violated The Law!
I am so tired of the argument that “renters can’t afford to buy the property.”
Is the landlord making a profit? If Rent - Costs = Profit then the people who can afford the rent can afford the costs, and the money that would have been profit for the landlord can instead be savings for emergencies (that the landlord would have paid out of the same funds while still making a profit.)
If I’m understanding you correctly, I disagree. Homeowners aren’t providing a service to renters by allowing them to live “risk free”. The “risk” that a homeowner is incurring is the risk of becoming a renter, same as the risk that an owner of a company incurs is just the risk of having to become a worker.
Some of them might’ve not been able to (or wanted to) pay for the home ownership. But if this assumes someone not making profit was renting it out then yeah
The reason they’re not able to pay for home ownership is because people buy homes to rent for profit. If poor people only had to compete on price with other poor people instead of with investors, house prices would go back to 20th century levels where you could buy one for 3x your salary.
They tried banning landlords in specific neighborhoods in Rotterdam.
It lead to gentrification.
The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.
There’s a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it’s less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.
They could have easily solved that by pegging unit ownership to income.
Or, better yet, we could just build more units.
Or both. There is no reason to offer discounts to wealthy people just because they’re first in line.
we could just build more high-density units
Im sure they also thought the lack of poor people owning houses was “easily solved” by banning landlords.
But how does pegging the unit ownership to income even work?
Very simply- you have to be under a certain income threshold to qualify for these homes. The same way it’s done for lower-income housing everywhere else.
Where does this happen? I was under the impression that low income housing was owned by the state, or maybe someone else but under strict control by the state, and you had to fall under a certain income to rent there, not purchase.
Nowhere. But it should.
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How many net new housing units did they build from 2011 to 2021?
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They had renting back then too and way before that, and it was really large scale too. It’s not really a new phenomenon. And obviously buying a house is still a lot (and I mean a lot) more expensive than renting. Not everyone can save off from their paycheck so that they’d be able to pay for even these cheaper houses.
But in this case I’m not sure if we are talking about situation where the original post’s house was on sale (which would just make it a regular house you have to buy) or a situation where there isn’t any renting at all (or profiting from it), in which case it’d still be more expensive but less so than renting.
I bought my first apartment because my monthly costs would be like 30% less than rent. Like with many things, it’s expensive to be poor.
Absolutely. It’s the same even in very small scale in buying groceries. You can save a lot by buying bigger sized packages but not everyone can afford to since they don’t have such money on hand. So they’re wasting money (or being less efficient about it) because they can’t afford to not do anything else. Shitty situation.
This is literally not how renting works. Get a clue.
As a poor, I’d be happy renting at an affordable rate from the state if the “rental income” was used to fund maintenance and development of state owned housing or plugged back into other social services like my tax dollars are.
I don’t like private owners and private investors profiting of my need for shelter.
renting at an affordable rate from the state
Kind of like our reality of Section 8 housing which I personally think should be the universal norm, rather than a rare exception for which people have to wait on a waiting list for 15 years before they’re granted the exception of subsidized housing. ALL housing should be based upon how much we’re able to pay for it. It only makes sense because
A roof over every human’s head is a basic human need like air to breathe & food to eat.
The first thing primitive humans do is seek out caves to live in, and they learn how to build huts. They don’t have to work 40 hours a week and pay 50% of that to the sky gods for the privilege of shelter from storms.
A roof over every human’s head is a basic human need like air to breathe & food to eat.
The fact that food, shelter, clothing, medical care and education aren’t all considered basic human rights that should be subsidized is depressing as hell to me.
No one should be forced to live on the streets or sacrifice their education.
Municipality owned rental housing is fairly common where I live. Students often live in apartments owned by a student foundation. As landlords, they seem alright. Private sector is much more mixed and varied, obviously.
I think having different sort of rental property ownership works well enough. Balances each other out. Cheap municipal apartments help keep the prices down in the private sector too while allowing the competition and profit incentive for the private sector to invest in building apartments.
Don’t be poor, problem solved!
Yeah, the whole “what about people who want / need to rent because of their current circumstances” problem really is easy to solve.
Create a crown corporation (for those not familiar, a not-for-profit entity owned at arms length by the government) to handle all rentals, with a mandate to offer rents at a (very low) rate established by a formula that accounts for factors of property value (footage, amenities, location), population density and rental demand in a given area.
Then you make it so that only this crown corp is allowed to charge residential tenants rent. Anyone else who wants to make money off of their second properties and the like will have to sell them to the crown corp. Anyone like in the OP who wants to rent for some months of the year will enter an arrangement with the crown corp where the corp rents the property on their behalf at the rates established by the formula.
Municipalities having their own rental apartments is very common where I live. Though here it works in tandem with private sector.
Yes, same here - they are needed in times of turmoil and crisis … in this case the “crisis” being landlords hiking rents.
So in recent years municipalities (and some EU countries) are investing increasingly more into such non-profit projects. It works, rents are low, communities live. Even if buying land and developing got costlier.
Even if this would cost taxpayers money (ie operating with financial loss), I gladly pay it, it benefits us all.
The tandem option is also viable, and is actually a really great starting place for this sort of thing (I will fully acknowledge that my proposal would be very difficult to get through any current political system). The public sector deliberately competing with the private to bring down prices has been proven to work. A great example of this is Sasktel in Canada, where the provincial government made their own publicly owned telecoms provider, and as a result all the big telcos, that functioned as an oligopoly everywhere else, offering identical plans at identical prices, had to offer plans that were much, much cheaper in Saskatchewan specifically.
Also there’s absolutely room for debate as to whether a single massive rental company would be better, or whether it would be preferable to have lots of small, regional or municipal corps. I prefer the former only because it would give them more flexible buying power in terms of scooping up properties to rent out, but I’m sure there are strong arguments for the other approach.
Who would rather pay monthly payments to a third party if they could pay the exact same amount but get to keep most of the money for themselves (ie in real estate ownership)?
Someone not wanting to commit to house ownership for whatever reason. Could be students, temporarily working somewhere, someone not sure if they want to live somewhere long-term etc. Or someone worried if they can get their house sold when or if they want to move. It can be a commitment and some just don’t want to do that.
And this is all assuming you could get a loan and buy the house in the first place, have enough for the down payment and so on.
Exactly. Why would they pay for the ownership/ownership prices if they dont get it? Should it not be available to them at less than that?
Probably not. They would be renting somewhere else. Because if they could afford to buy a piece of property in the first place, they would.
Yeah, landlords make a profit. But, they’re also offering a service. Sure most are fucking shit, but that doesn’t mean landlords in general should not be extracting a profit. If you want to maintain your own piece of property yourself, then go buy one.
If you want to maintain your own piece of property yourself, then go buy one.
I’m trying man, I’m trying. It’d be nice to not have to maintain someone else’s for once in my life.
I mostly agree with this. I guess the argument against this is that if all rent-seekers just sold their properties instead of treating them as an income stream, then theoretically there would be more properties on the market and properties would be more affordable for those who want to buy.
To me, individuals choosing to sell instead of rent-seek would have such a small impact on the market, and those properties would just be bought by corporations that will rent-seek.
It seems clear to me that if we really want to fix things, we should ban corporations from buying single family homes instead of attacking working class people who are trying to build a passive income stream.
passive income steam
This part is my problem. Some people don’t want, or aren’t cut out to maintain a property of their own, so renting is theoretically a good deal for them. And the person doing the work of maintaining a property deserves to be compensated for that work.
But wtf is a passive income steam? It sounds like the landlord is hiring someone else to actually do the work, and then charging the renter enough to cover the property manager and profit the landlord. In which case, the landlord is doing exactly nothing to earn that money.
Most people would buy if they could. But too many are forced to rent because of those landlords cutting the queue and paying through their nose because to them it is an investment and not a home.
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Not to mention we often have such an imbalance between renters and landlords, in either direction.
Either you have state law that heavily favors the landlords with no protections for renters against exorbitant rent increases, no enforcement of the land lord’s duty to the property on the lease, and no recourse for renters.
Or you have state law that heavily favors the renters, with no easy way to evict problem tenants, caps on rent increases that don’t allow the landlord properly account for risk, and no recourse against tenants who don’t pay or cause damage to the property.
Either situation leads to higher rents.
