over thirty-one thousand landlord clients managing over 19.7 million rental units
In case anyone is still wondering why housing is fucked, this is it right here. That’s an average of over 600 rental units per landlord.
People renting out their old house for a small profit are not the issue. Like a lot of things, it really only breaks once corporations get involved.
Yep and it just compounds. The money they make they buy more houses driving prices up so they make more.
Although, like economic figures, this tends to be concentrated. It would not surprise me if a hundred of those clients were managing 20k or more units apiece.
I have a real problem with landlords. It feels like an especially predatory business. Some things just shouldn’t be for profit. I mean, when you own something that people universally need, and charge as much as you possibly can for it, to maximize your own profit, for nothing other than just being the owner, it feels really scummy.
I think there’s a little room for nuance, but not much. The way corporate landlords are buying up houses and collaborating to fix prices is totally fucked and needs regulated. There also needs to be regulation or limits for private property owners who buy up a bunch of properties and slumlord it.
Where I think there’s nuance is how things fall right now. I just left the military and I’m renting out my house exclusively to military occupants who are not trying to buy. I bought it at 3% interest and my mortgage is more or less fixed. The next buyer was looking for it as an addition to their rental portfolio. I did the math before deciding to rent and found that because my interest and mortgage are so low I can charge $800/month less in rent than a mortgage would be if I sold it. It’s also less than their housing allowance so they have more for utilities and food.
It’s regrettable that this is the situation, but in this specific case in a very high demand/low supply area, renting it out is the lesser of the evils. Hopefully the market crashes or rates fall and I can sell it to a family who needs it. But until then, I’ll try to make things easier on some service members.
It’s admirable that you are trying to help some service men and women, and not merely looking to make the highest possible profit for yourself. I’m sure you’re not the only landlord who isn’t motivated primarily by greed, but many, if not most, are, because they are incentivized to be.
When the goal is maximum profits, it incentivizes business owners of all types to generate as much revenue as possible (and in the case of housing, that means increase rents as much as possible) and cut costs as much as possible. That’s why many people are paying more and more for lower and lower quality housing.
The problem is the profit motive. And we can’t just hope that all landlords will decide to be more like you, not when they have every incentive to be as greedy as possible.
I own my home. I may rent it out when I retire because I sure as fuck won’t have any money. Maybe we’ll get an RV or move to the Philippines. Dunno. But I need to get paid on that home.
For one, renters are likely to fuck shit up, because it’s not theirs, they have no stake in the property. They may simply be ignorant and ignore problems that cost $100 to fix today, $1,000 to fix tomorrow. Also, I need to buy extra liability insurance.
Then there’s routine stuff. When my ex and I bought the place we took payday loans for 2-months just to get the tools and stuff we needed to care for the place. And nearly everything we bought was used. Paid them off responsibly and quickly, but it was costly.
Ever priced a new roof? Hell, within the last 30-days our sink stopped up, the washer died, fridge finally died. and that’s only the big stuff. Even buying off FB, that was $1,000 in new appliances and repairs. Oh, and the hot water heater leaks, but that’s under control for the moment. And the roof needs patched. I’m scared to even price that, can’t afford it ATM anyway.
So yeah, I need serious “profit” just to break even.
EDIT: Do you idiots think I’m currently renting this home? FFS, try reading from the beginning.
So yeah, I need serious “profit” just to break even.
That’s a contradiction in terms. To break even is by definition not a profit. To make a profit, you need a surplus after you minus expenses from revenue. If landlords were content to just break even, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with them. In fact, I think not-for-profit housing could go a long way in addressing the housing affordability crisis.
Didn’t word that well, agreed. But you need solid profit up front to backstop for emergencies and risk. I would be a one man, one house operation. I couldn’t spread the risk around like a corporate landlord with 100 or 1,000 properties.
If landlords were content to just break even
After paying on the property, maintaining and improving it, I deserve no profit for my 20-years of labor?
Are you saying that workers should be content to merely break even for their labor? Your labor is worthy, but mine is not?
Yeah you’re really not beating the allegations here, bud.
I hope that house turns you under.
Who the hell upvotes evil shit like this comment?!
Lemmy: Capitalists don’t deserve the profits of our labor!
Also Lemmy: Fuck you, I want your labor for free!
Fucking children.
If you plan on moving out anyways, why not just sell the house? It’d give you a large up front sum of money, and you would never have to worry about maintenance or bad tenants again.
Fair question! Two reasons:
I’m not the picture of fiscal responsibility. Be much more comfortable with a predictable income, especially since I’ll be too old to work.
Selling the house would be a last resort for two reasons. My wife is foreign and would be lost without me. I want to know she will always have a roof to sleep under, no matter what. Two, I really want to be able to leave it to my children, give them a jump in life when we’re both gone.
You can get reliable maintenance estimates and keep the rent near costs plus a small profit easily enough. Charging the market price that’s been illegally pushed up by a cartel is not defensible.
Who the hell said anything about any of that?! Jesus, a guy talks about renting his house when he retires and suddenly he’s a corporate slumlord.
Probably because you talked about needing a ton of profit. When I think you meant revenue to cover costs and then some profit, but not extreme amounts.
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“Predatory Cabal”
“Price Fixing”
Landlords are literally rent-seeking, they provide no real economic value to society.
At best they are opportunistic parasites.
And now they’re part of a cartel, which is not only illegal in the US, but illegal in international law. (The oil crisis of the late 1970s was thanks to OPEC price fixing. We’re still sore about it.)
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
-Adam Smith
Adam Smith, famous commie. If you took his quote without attribution people would think it is something Mao said while doing nothing wrong.
Adam Smith is massively misquoted by libertarians and conservatives. He railed against landlords, corporations, and monopolies. He’s the reason we have the phrase, “rent seeking behavior”.
People that developed or came up with the idea for that software:
- Likely worked in buildings with breakable windows.
- Have addresses.
- Have kneecaps.
Y’know, I think kneecaps are no longer scary enough. I think it’s time we moved on to elbows.
Half of the bones in the human body are in the hands and the feet.
Telling someone you’re going to break every bone in their body feels like an exaggeration. It’s not realistic, and takes more effort than it’s worth. But it’s actually fairly easy for a small group of 3 or 4 attackers to break half the bones in a person’s body, with just a sledgehammer that you can buy in any hardware store.
Just some food for thought…
I know that something like this won’t accomplish much, but like gun control, I’m a huge fan of making it terribly inconvenient to do the wrong thing.
It’s a shame that even in a place like San Francisco, it’s apparently impossible to enact rent control.
It was never about supply and demand.
It really wasn’t. As soon as dynamic pricing hit, I stopped believing in the bullshit lie of supply and demand.
Capitalism is a cancer on society.
Why are renters not teaming up? I am sorry but the membership in my local tenants union is frankly shameful. Unite, organise in solidarity is the only way. I know people have a limited time but that’s the situation we are in.
You know I’ve honestly never thought of a renter’s union before and that’s a pretty great idea.
Oh damn thanks for that!
I honestly didn’t even know that was a thing
Because unions are evil. They eat babies and practice dark
sataniccommunist rituals. My GOP certified preacher said so!
price collusion is free speech, just ask the petrol stations
That’s not how that works. They aren’t working together so when they look out the window and see the price they match or go lower. When the rental corporations are working together they agree on higher prices.
Gas stations actually make very little profit on the gas itself. It’s the attached mini mart that brings in the cash.
They aren’t working together so when they look out the window and see the price they match or go lower.
The stories my wife tells me about her gas station job say this is wrong. Her boss has binoculars readily available so they can see if the station across the street changes their prices, and they’d follow suit.
Yes. But people are also extremely sensitive to the price of gas. So if he wants to draw more people he drops it. It’s chained, but not a cartel.
They also did it with raising prices, and both did the same way. It may not have been official, but the behavior was the same either way.
That’s the thing though, because they don’t have an agreement across the city, if he and his neighbor go too high someone will undercut them. He’ll even under cut his neighbor if he thinks he can get enough more business. I’m not disputing that he’ll follow them up too. A cartel differs by manipulating the market instead of responding to the market.
If there aren’t laws for crimes against the economy, there should be.
There are more recent news updates than this one, but this is what I could find quickly before I have to head out.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/12/justice-department-rental-market-collusion-lawsuit-00167838
My MIL worked for RealPage for six months. My wife (before we met) ended up in the hospital, and it was pretty touch-and-go for a while. MIL obviously wanted to go spend time with her. Her manager told her to choose between her job or her daughter. Because if she took time off to go to the hospital, the manager would consider it a resignation. MIL told the manager to go fuck himself, and walked out.
And from everything I’ve seen, that was just par for the course for RealPage. It‘a an evil company, run by evil people, with an evil end goal.
