You got a raise? It’s my raise now.
i got rent increase notices immediately after every ‘covid check’ was announced.
Which is why I plan to never move. My rent has never gone up and I keep printing out and signing extensions. I have the laziest landlord ever. Guy can’t even be bothered to raise my rent since that would involve some level of work on his part.
He may just be satisfied with you as a tenant and doesn’t want to raise the price so you will stay. Not every landlord is a dick.
Or he’s just lazy as you said.
I’d second the “not every landlord is a dick”, some will even lower the rent price when the demand goes down even though I continue to rent, not start a new one.
But that’s relatively rare, unfortunately
My mother is like this. She rents out her house for under half it’s market value.
The tenants know they have it good though and do a lot of things that really should be my mother’s responsibility like pay for or do minor repairs when they come up.
I have told my mom that the needs to raise rent at least some because she’s not saving enough for big things that will come up like roof replacement, but she’s terrified of her tenants leaving.
that’s what we used to have here… stable and very reasonable rent for 20 years, through several ownership changes, even. then this last and current one is just your stereotypical greedy landlord,
Me too! My landlord didn’t even ask if I was impacted by covid, or if I was even still employed… He just raised the rent to a level I’ve never seen before.
Were you not on a lease? Lease contracts always lock your rent in for the time period they’re good for.
Some leases lock in yearly increases, though, as part of auto-renewal. The last house I looked to rent included an auto-renewal clause with a fucking 5% annual increase. I noped out even before getting to the part that made me as the renter responsible for replacing the sewer if there was ever a problem with it.
first thing the current landlord did when he bought the building is raise the rent for all tenants… despite everyone having leases–the terms and obligations of existing leases is supposed to transfer to a new owner. but they don’t care, and they 100% would have raised them further (and in addition to the other increases since), had anyone pursued any sort of action against them. we have very little in terms of tenant protection laws here.
How bad is it where you live? Where I’m from that would be a fairly easy small claims court suit for breaxh (or done in bulk, you’d get all the tenants together and do a class action for breach).
Man, I went years without a cost of living increase… I told my landlord this, and that same year he raised my rent over 10% with only 60 days notice. That’s illegal in my state on two different levels. I met with an attorney, and the was basically nothing I could do that wouldn’t result in me needing to move out.
At the time, the rent was really bad in the city. I could find a comparable place to live, but the moving cost and hassle was too high.
This is how landlords do whatever the fuck they want and get away with it.
It’s the free country thing. Typical rental leases renew every year (and typically, renters like that freedom). A landlord can simply decline to renew if you’re “too much trouble”.
So you could challenge the illegal rent increase in court and win, but then he declines to renew. You could refuse to pay the illegal increase (doing it the right/legal way) and/or even just stop paying rent. But then he eventually evicts you, or just declines to renew.
In the end, rent is supposed to be temporary. And when it is temporary enough that moving out can be your leverage, it works. If you are settling down somewhere, it really should be owned.
My landlord keeps getting violations from the HOA, and the HOA is straight up making rules up. I can’t sue the HOA for this (which is 100% what needs to happen to get them to stop), because there’s a legal layer between the owner and the tenant…
So yes, shit is broken. He refuses to call them out or take legal action against their harassment of my family. This is really obvious stuff, too. The latest violation involves them accusing me of having open flame torches on my patio. I own solar powered LED lanterns. They want to fine my landlord $100 for this.
I told him I won’t pay it. They are charging HIM, not me, and there’s nothing in my lease or the HOA’s CC&R’s saying I can’t own solar lanterns.
This guy has violated state, federal, and city laws over the last half a decade. He’s also a slumlord that never fixes anything. He once made me wait a year to get my front door handle repaired (sure, I could have fought that, but then he’d have just raised my rent.)
I hope he gets fined, and I hope he fucks around, because I’ve got an attorney ready.
I’m not saying to never take shit from your landlords, everyone… But at some point you have to stand up and tell them to fuck off. Rent is out of control in many cities right now, but that’s not an excuse for the often abusive landlord-tenant systems. Landlords should NOT exist.
I just bought a house from a guy who had been renting it out for thirty years and I’m now in the process of fixing all the shit he neglected during that time. I can’t believe that anyone was willing to rent this place for any amount of money, let alone the $1300/mo he had been getting for it. The kitchen ceiling was sagging down a foot in two places and held up literally only by the paint and caulk, thanks to mice - I got showered with mouse poop and urine-soaked ceiling tile material when I demo’ed it. The electrical outlets were all partially blocked by the baseboard radiators, which was probably a good thing because they were all ungrounded 1940s-era receptacles with the hot and neutral wires hooked up in reverse. One light switch caused the circuit breaker to trip as soon as I flipped it. Not a single door in the house could actually be closed (not even the front door) so I had to reset the hinges; one door looked like he had tried to fix the problem using a beaver with dental problems.
He sold the house as “rental ready” and I’m five months into the renovation now. I like to think the house appreciates my being here.
It isn’t in Charles Village by any chance is it? I’ve got some war stories with Ben.
I’m sorry you’re having to go through that. I’ve had a nightmare landlord before and it really fucks with your mental wellbeing. Best of luck to you!
Nah, never take shit from your landlord. They’re expendable leeches on society.
Landlords should NOT exist.
There is the Georgism position where rent is discouraged with tax which is set to share out society’s share of the value of limited natural resources
It’s hard to run a civilisation without landlords, since some people are not in a position to buy land and need to borrow it.
since some people are not in a position to buy land and need to borrow it.
Some people have no desire to buy land, and want to borrow it. More than half the people I know (and I’m in my 40s now) have no desire to hold the liability of needing to sell a property to be able to move halfway across the country or world. They don’t “own” their, so they see having to literally own it as a problem. And they are willing to pay more in rent than a mortgage (which happens regularly in some areas around me).
There are shit landlords, and there are decent landlords. I think half the problem is that while some areas have great protection for poor renters, they often don’t have great holistic renter protections. In my state, for example, government-subsidized rentals have the most apartment quality regulations. But after that, you’re expected to leverage your rent to force action… without actually withholding it in any way somehow. And small business rentals? Even worse. I have a buddy who runs a breakfast joint. The heating system in the building died, so the landlord said “well if you want to stay open in the winter you should fix that”. So he installed a minisplit and the other business in the building had to close for the winter. Ultimately, both businesses started withholding rent (against lawyer’s advice) and he finally caved and called his renters “cheap bastards” as he got heating installed (and it was like a comedy that the heating company walked out on him twice for his after-contract renegotiations).
I’m ok with someone owning and renting out a building. But it should be somewhere near the level of quality the renter would maintain the place if they owned it.
If there’s more need to sell land then land prices will inevitably go down. Then everything gets better. At that point, we can afford to have multiple properties while trying to sell.
Is this 2/3s of income plus tip or is the tip included? Because if you want to save money, tip your landlord less!
Yeah, but they really deserve that tip. They work really hard, you see. Just the other year my landlord was hard at work promising to paint over a wall he ruined with repairs.
I bet he’s going to get it done any day now!
Gosh, maybe it’s because my last tip was too low… It’s probably my fault.
As a general rule, it’s always the renter’s fault.
And don’t underestimate the effort and work and emotional energy spent on postponing painting the wall, feeling bad about it, postponing it again, … they spent a lot of time and energy on that!
Give your landlord a negative tip.
I donno, is that even legal?
In my area it’s more like 13/12ths
The other 1/3rd goes to the feds, so they can pay for
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Tear down the military industrial complex. We’re sandwiched between oceans on the east and west, and friendly neighbors on the north and south. Nobody’s going to invade us. We don’t need the world’s largest military.
Alcoholic beverages would be a good place to start
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I really wanna make a joke about Irish cream, Irish whiskey, and an Irish stout, but I feel like that could get me a visit from a dozen letters worth of government agencies
Have you heard of revolution?
U first
What does that even mean?
What part is confusing? The people advocating for revolution are often the last ones to the frontline. Just like these brave folks on Lemmy.
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Destitution? Definitely heading that way has been getting progressively worse for the last several years at least. Critical mass? Not yet previous generations are weak and people are idiots. I think radical thought is increasing especially among the younger generations.
There are in betweens.
This Was perfect
Yup, same here. System is broken.
Thank God I live somewhere where I can work 32 hours per week as truck driver. I don’t even spend a quarter of my income on rent, have a healthy weed addiction and manage to save about 500 euro a month and that while being single.
Where do you live? Many of us need to know
100% Land Value Tax redistributed as UBI por favor!!!
But what if I have a duplex as my neighbors? Or my other neighbors put in a granny flat for their aging grandparent??!!!
Wont you think of the neighborhood character?
It’s not so simple, my mom purchased a property with her divorce settlement and the return on the investment can be good, but it can also be not as good. She remodeled an Oregon property in Salem and sold it for less than cost later. While she did get rent for it before she sold, she could have saved a lot of effort just buying dividend stocks.
Real estate can be a good investment, but it can be a poor one.
It shouldn’t be an investment at all. It should be used. It’s like saying water is a good investment. Sure, if you make it artificially scarce and are okay with a ton of people going without… Nestle.
I really wish other better brands would step up in making more consumable products for people with cancer(protein replacement drinks) or children though. It’s really rough when better options are very scarce.
Oh yeah, to be clear I’m not blaming anyone for buying Nestle, it’s nearly impossible to avoid lmao. Sad but true.
Yup I get you. I managed to avoid nestle but I know I have a privileged life only because I don’t need particular things in my diet. I have vulnerable relatives where they cannot take such options to avoid nestle what with their situation. And I can’t judge them for it. But It’s not a pass on nestle. Nestle need to smarten the hell up. they have no excuses to be terrible.
I make an effort. The truth is there are s9 many things that are Nestle with no Nestle on the packaging due to the different layers of subsidiary companies. It’s practically impossible to completely avoid them without some smart phone app, database, etc (which may even be inaccurate) or a fuckin encyclopedic knowledge of the different brands lmao. Shits fucked, yo.
Right?!? I spend way too much time researching each product over actual use of the product. I had to deep dive to the level of “where is this product produced and who are their relatives and what is their mother’s maiden name??”
There used to be an app or site called “buycott” or something and you could set what you were trying to avoid(example: avoiding human rights violating companies, avoiding specific companies, morals of certain companies, etc.), and you could scan an item and it would tell you. I used it for a tiny bit years ago but didn’t stick with it. Not sure if it’s still around.
This isn’t relevant to the meme at all though.
Also if your asking me to feel bad for someone trying to make a profit off acting as a middleman to a basic human need you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Remodeling a house and maintaining it is actual work
Then let the people who actually need to work there do it.
But… She had money! What, do you expect her not to try to make her gold breed? People with money should get more money! It’s only fair!
/s
She had a few hundred K, she needs to make that divorce settlement last until she retires. Social Security is absolutely nothing
a few hundred k
That doesn’t really make me feel sorry for my comment. I make do with <25k a year. A few hundred k would last me over a decade.
She spends the same amount of money as you do, she just doesn’t plan on dying in a decade.
My mom is the landlord and remodeling houses IS her work. She was a stay at home mom until I grew up, that’s what she does for a living after she divorced my dad. She lives on the rent of her properties while she does each project
She lives on the rent of her properties
This is exactly the thing people have issues with. The whole “I am the breadwinner of my landlord’s household.”
That’s why I thought she should just buy stocks and live off dividends instead. I mean, any investment has a rate of return or people would not buy it
Yup, and housing shouldn’t be an investment. It can be affordable, or an investment, not both.
Then charge for work done on the house like any contractor would, instead of rent for simply owning any old plot.
She’s the one who hired contractors. You need someone who decides what work needs to be done, find the people who are qualified, and pay them.
Not all contractors do good work, she got scammed once by a guy who does crap labor and tries to upcharge to fix it. It happens
Even if she sold the houses, the person buying them would probably want a return on their investment and end up renting it out to people
The only way rent would be cheap is if there was a lot of supply of it, less restrictions on building like zoning, fewer fees on developers.
Look one of my siblings is doing the same thing. I’m happy I don’t have to worry about them financially, but I’m not going to say I wouldn’t prefer they made an honest living
My mom is too old to wash dishes in a restaurant, it’s really hard labor and she has carpal tunnel. She tried, it’s just not something a 60+ year old person is fit to do. So she can’t just sit on that money and do hard labor on the side. But drawing some plans and hiring contractors while painting some walls on her own time is something she can do
This is really easy… Housing should not be an investment.
Its wild how the entire country is experiencing a housing shortage
Which entire country? This is lemmy.world
Op is even from Lemmy.zip!
I don’t really understand the market failure happening with such a long term housing shortage. By definition there is excess demand for housing right? So it should make economic sense to build more.
When I ask people always say conspiratorial stuff like “they” maximize profit by keeping housing low but even if there was a conspiracy there should be individuals who are not part of the conspiracy who would profit from going against it.
So it has to be either regulatory or funding based, I think. But I don’t know of any recent regulations that would cause this nationwide, “zoning” is probably part of it but there was no one timeline for that, it’s super local. And funding has been free for a decade and a half and homebuilding has still been slow.
I don’t get it.
Where I live, they simply have made it illegal to build any housing since the 60s. It really sucks
Look to other forms of scalping to see how this works at a smaller scale. Scalping isn’t done through conspiracy, but a bunch of small, self-interested actors reducing supply in the market to inflate prices.
On top of that there are actors that are more coordinated and not as small, like corporations that own hundreds of thousands of homes. These corporations can just coordinate internally (not conspiracy, business) and reduce supply to increase their own returns.
This works for smaller actors too though. As long as the number of houses owned is more than a couple, then it’s likely they’d profit from temporarily restricting supply, and locking in renters to leases for more money. They’ll try to slowly sell off their supply without “flooding” the market and hurting the value of their own supply, just like other scalpers.
Scalping isn’t the comparison though because 1, scalpers don’t reduce the total supply. Any scalper who refuses to sell a portion of their tickets, loses all the money they used to buy them, and the opportunity cost of selling them, and there’s no way it’s worth it for any given individual. The supply/demand differential they make money from is that the venues only have a certain number of seats.
Which brings me to 2, theres no equivalent of homebuilders in the scalper world. If some scalpers could generate new seats at the venue for roughly the cost they pay the venue for tickets, supply and demand would figure themselves out pretty quick.
Hard disagree on the last part there. For one, homebuilders again. Their business model is to build the houses and then sell them, if they joined the “sell houses slower” cartel it just means they earn less profit.
But really the whole idea you’re laying out, the math only works if everyone works together, so it becomes a prisoners dilemma. Because say there’s 20 companies slowing down house sales to maximize profit, there can always be a 21st who gets the benefit of the restricted supply from the 20, but they just sell as much as possible and become the most profitable of all. Maybe it’s in everyone’s interest to restrict supply, but it’s in any given company’s interest to sell as much as possible. So it has to be an as of yet unknown cartel of every home seller in the country and there’s just too many of them to have both: Either it includes everyone or it’s secret.
There are absolutely scalpers that reduce total supply. They’ll only list a couple of consoles that they scalp at a time even if they buy in massive bulk, and it’s all done on the pretense of a limited supply from the original seller that they’re artificially limiting past what the market would naturally do (by buying a ton of them up). Given a literally infinite supply, scalpers lack an ability to do anything. Put another way, when they can’t restrict supply, it’s not a viable strategy.
It’s not that they refuse to sell some of their supply, it’s a temporary restriction (all supply restrictions can be viewed as temporary because we don’t have total knowledge of future supply). The temporary restriction benefits them because they can start bidding wars over the reduced supply, and get a higher price per unit at the cost of getting the money over a longer period of time.
The exact same thing works for housing, when you have the same company renting out tons of units but also keeping tons of units in the same area off the market. It means the bidding wars for the smaller supply of units results in more money per unit (lower supply, same demand, means higher costs).
The concept of a prisoners dilemma here only works if houses are fungible, but they’re not. There are sometimes very similar units or even houses in a neighborhood in the same location, and these are almost fungible, but even in these contexts those nearly identical units in nearly identical locations are usually owned by a single entity (corporate or otherwise), so again there’s no prisoner’s dillema, they can restrict supply effectively to increase yield.
The time vs value calculation is different for housing too compared to smaller things like groceries. If you’re a grocery store, and your local distributor of apples lowers the price of apples, some of that will likely go to the customer because of local competition pushing prices down, and you have a constant supply tied to a constant demand of these (from a buyer’s perspective) essentially fungible things.
Houses are different because if you see the price of houses in your neighborhood drop by some significant amount, individual actors who may otherwise want to sell will actively choose to not list their house because they know the value will go back up, and so these actors are all incentivized to vastly limit supply if something in some area cuts the prices of houses (like a huge influx of new homes for example). These individual actors could be literal individuals or corporations.
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Ditto
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I think landlords is kind of blanket statement. I think most rational people aren’t blaming the landlords who own a single family home and rent the basement suite. I think it’s more referred to companies gobbling up single family homes and rent gouging their tenants.
This is also Lemmy, so, you know, fuck cars, fuck trucks, fuck landlords, fuck Windows, fuck Google, fuck conservatives, fuck you, fuck me, etc etc
This is also Lemmy, so, you know, fuck cars, fuck trucks, fuck landlords, fuck Windows, fuck Google, fuck conservatives, fuck you, fuck me, etc etc
I don’t think I’ve ever seen something I agreed more with. Fuck me.
And fuck you.
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Then don’t rent it an move to a place you can afford to buy the house
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Not so easy for most people to just move.
“Ur homeless? just get a home”
“U depressed? just be more happy”
How is this different from crazy conservatives telling everyone to go to other countries if they don’t like their “American Way”?
Everyone here loves to complain about landlords without realizing that the majority of single family home landlords (not corporate landlords) are barely making it by too.
Banks are really the ones making criminal amounts of money. 1/3 of rent is typically interest payments. 1/3 of rent then goes to taxes.
For instance, I make $2,900/mo. from rent, but pay $2,800/mo. for the mortgage. I’ve spent over $8k this year alone on repairs and maintenance. But please continue to complain how landlords are constantly raking in cash. It’s typical for a homeowner to pay 1% of the cost of the property per year to maintain it. I will never see a positive cash flow until the mortgage is paid off in 25 years. The only benefit I get by continuing to own the property is the appreciation in equity and principle payments to the mortgage. At the end of the year we will have a -$7k cash flow and $5k equity appreciation. In a HCOL area, that $5k on paper is less than 3% of the area’s median yearly salary.
I feel for anyone out there who has a landlord that didn’t consider the hidden costs and the fact they should expect to runa negative cash flow, because it’s those landlords that also can’t afford to fix the house you might be renting.
Sounds like you have a highly subsidized mortgage. That’s why you’re being downvoted. Investments are supposed to have risk. The risk of not making a profit is what you take on when you purchase real estate as an investment. It is not a renters problem whether you are profitable or not.
The only benefit I get by continuing to own the property is the appreciation in equity and principle payments to the mortgage.
Sounds like you’re still getting a sweet deal then. Once the mortgage is paid off you will own property outright that you paid very little for compared to it’s value.
Dude, someone else is paying your mortgage for you. You know what your tenant get for paying your mortgage? Jackshit.
You are complaining that the home that you rent cost you 7k a year instead of 35k a year. Cry me a river.
You know what your tenant get for paying your mortgage?
A place to live? If you need to move, all you have to do is break the lease? I agree that rental rates are artificially high, but to act like there is no value in renting is silly.
There’s no value in living to raise someone else’s equity because you have no choice.
House for $105k that needs flooring and some appliances, so let’s call it $125k. There’s a choice. You probably don’t want to move to Oklahoma though.
There are trade offs for wanting to live near a city or somewhere popular or close to family. Yeah rental rates suck and home prices are climbing, and soon the cheap homes in the Midwest will start to keep up with the other states.
You know what your tenant get for paying your mortgage? Jackshit.
If you are truly getting nothing by renting, buy a home instead. If you respond by saying ‘but I don’t want to, or can’t because of x’, that is what you are paying for as a renter.
Tell that to the banks that refuse to let people have loans, even if they’ve been paying more for rent than the mortgage is for years.
You have abysmal credit from not paying your bills and can’t get a loan? That is certainly a benefit of renting, don’t need a loan.
Ahh, you’re just a troll. My apologies; I thought I was talking to a real person. Never mind.
Oh yes, it costs me $7k a year for the pleasure of managing a property, responding to all the tenants needs, the risk of paying for major future repairs, trusting the tenant to pay on time and in full (collections is practically impossible to enforce), dealing with vacancies while I still pay the mortgage, paying real estate agent fees which amounts to a month’s rent every time I get a new tenant. And that’s all for a house that I am not able to live in, and that I have locked up 20% of the house’s value for a down payment. It’s much more profitable just to let that money sit in the stock market instead.
But please tell me more about how you know better and that’s it’s all sunshine and rainbows for a non-corporate landlord.
Sounds like you should sell that house, dude…
You get a building that is worth more than you paid for, so that’s your payment.
On 25 years, you pay a fifth of the building price for it. And that is not accounting for the equity that the house gains over the years like we’ve seen during covid.
Here, let me play you the sad song on the smallest violin of the world.
On 25 years, you pay a fifth of the building price for it. And that is not accounting for the equity that the house gains over the years like we’ve seen during covid.
So does every other home owner. That benefit is not for just landlords.
I don’t understand the hatred for the risk return of being a landlord. Let’s assume you can double your money in the stock market every 7 years.
Compare real estate and stock ownership for 20k (100k house). In the market, 20k becomes 40k in 7 and 80k in 14, 160k in 21, and so on. That’s 215 total over 25 years. As long as appreciation is close to 3% it’s almost a wash after 25 years. The difference is as a landlord you have the risk of capital expenses requiring you to hold cash and the value of your time to run a rental.
If you want to assume you’ll double your money somewhere else, sell up and do it.
The fact is you’ve borrowed against an asset, the bank took the initial risk on your ability to pay but it’s secured against the asset.
The tenant is in a position they pay more per month than your mortgage payment simply based on a deposit around 20% of the property value.
You get to take on 20% of the risk of buying a house, the bank 80% of the risk, and the tenant pays you both for it.
I’m going to assume the average landlord, just as you assume average returns. Sod all work and maintenance done, no time spent. A property initially bought in good condition coasting on for 10 years with little input required.
Then sold on at a profit after the tenant has paid rent, paid into the landlords mortgage and their equity. Just before the rental value starts to reflect poor condition.
It’s bought by a house flipper in poor cosmetic condition, tenants kicked out, renovations done to the lowest standard to last about 10 years. House sold on for a small additional premium as ready to rent to a buy to let landlord.
I really hope the buy to let landlords end up at a wash or worse. The tenant pays into equity, the house flipper adds value by actually working on the property.
The landlord in between just acts as an easy risk for the bank to charge their interest against while taking the tenants money. The bank makes a healthy profit and the landlord gets a cut of the tenants earnings too, simply for reducing the banks net risk to near zero by putting in their 20%.
Without the landlords banks would have to lend to the tenant directly or not at all. The lower number of actual buyers would lower the price, so they’d actually probably end up lending the same amount against the asset. But they’d have to do more work to ensure the value of the property.
Economically a passive landlord’s main function is to assess value and bet on the right property for the bank. Without landlords the postcode algorithm would be all that’s left as home owners tend to overvalue their potential home. And it’s not enough information.
Landlords could be replaced by banks employing decent surveyors allowing them to offer that 100% mortgage without crashing the market. But they don’t because landlords give them an out.
If, in the current system, real estate investment wasn’t profitable, no company or landlord would buy to let.
The problem is that there is a housing crisis right now where rent is through the roof, buying is out of reach for a big chunk of the population and its getting worse.
The commodification of housing fucked us over.
And then, you have people like the OP I was replying to, that whines because he has to pay the fifth of the value of the building, while the tenant pays his mortgage+ taxes minus 100$ and then get pissy when he gets called out.
Again, the saddest song in the world with the smallest.of.the violin.
If it’s a shit business, they should get out of it, and sell the property
You don’t pay $2,800/month for the mortgage. Your tenants do.
For everyone like you there are who knows how many dozens sitting on inheritances. To be clear I am not against people making money, I am against assholes.
Look a long long time ago a housemate of mine just vanished. Me and the landlord were talking and we decided to put all his stuff neatly in the basement. He shows up a few months later, turns out he was in the hospital. Me and the landlord help him get all his stuff into a new unit. A little bit of work to not screw over a guy.
I’m not against people making money, I’m against people making money hand over fist with the level of effort I exert taking my morning shit, off the backs of people trying to scrape by.
A regular guy who’s a landlord np. Once it becomes your primary investments vector and you’re NOT giving that little extra effort of moving stuff to the basement, once you stop being a person who is a landlord and just become Landlord, it’s shit.
That was very nice your landlord!
I agree, there are people who try to exploit the system, and those people deserve 100% of the hate. And I appreciate the nuance you bring to the discussion.
There are those that will villify small-time landlords for the gall to try to make an extra cent. Ultimately, small-time landlords provide a very valuable service, with extremely tight margins. Frankly, it is just barely worth it for us to keep that home. Because additional risks that go into it includes a tenant trashing the place, skipping out on rent, the property being vacant between renters, rental listing fees (which amounts to a month’s rent typically), and so on.
In return a tenant is able to enjoy a home that would otherwise be unaffordable to them, zero risk, and the flexibility to move without being stuck in one location. If someone is only going to live somewhere for less than 3 years, it will always be better to rent than to buy, and take the money saved renting and invest that into the market. The renter is this case will always make more money in return. Some markets around the country would require someone to live in that home for over 10 years before they break even over the advantage of renting.
The reality is building or buying a home is expensive and that cost has to be borne by someone. For this instance, sure, landlords can provide a service. Smaller landlords who are actually PEOPLE and not faceless corpos who don’t even show up for home tours anymore though? Fuck em, heads on pikes, all of em. Seriously I have not even SEEN a person I rent from.
There are some benefits to being a renter, for sure, but they need to be comparable to the benefits the owners are getting, and they’re not. It’s not worth paying more than you would to actually OWN a thing, just to be able to move at a moments notice.
From the sounds of your situation in another post, you’re making about 5k in equity and spending, after collecting rent, an additional 7k. This sounds about right TBH. I could see it going up until those numbers are equal, no more.
You are absolutely right on all accounts. I’m sorry you’ve had shitty landlords, I wish there was a better way to weed those people out, because as it stands, the balance of power is heavily in the favor of the landlord due to the micro-monopolistic nature of renting a place for years at a time.
Renting vs Buying is very dependent on your local market. I have friends in Ottawa that I’ve run the numbers for and it would literally never be profitable to purchase a home compared to continuing to rent. Some areas two years is the break even point. These days with high interest rates, the break even on buying vs renting is after about 5 or 6 years. I encourage anyone to check it out for themselves! :)
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html
(For anyone stuck behind the paywall, install this chrome extension to get past it: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome)
I could’ve have been clear, but my situation has a very slight net benefit for me, and since my tenants only plan to live in the are for two years, they are getting the better end of the deal. In the end though, there is a mutual benefit and that’s what a competitive market should tend towards (as opposed to the monopolistic nature of corporate apartment housing which encourages the opposite).
My point is that the people who hate all landlords instead of just the bad ones don’t understand the economic realities of housing. It’s actually the mom and pops that rent out their homes for a short period that make renting cheaper on average for the market as a whole. Mostly because they are imperfect businessmen/women and don’t understand the full cost of being a landlord before it’s too late. Instead, most mom and pop landlords are just hoping to break even.
Removed by mod
Poe’s Law?
Don’t think so.
Tbh, it’s always incredible the level of confidence that stupid, hateful people have. I wish we could find a way to use it for something actually productive
