I am a landlord and also have a full time job. I also spend my time fixing my units.
With the maintenance cost and taxes, I'm actually losing money or breaking even depending on the year.
My tenants are living in a house that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own in today's market. Being able to live near their work.
So why am I the bad guy?
Rental income is considered income, and taxed assuming reasonable tax brackets much higher than investment income (That is to say, caiptal-gains. Interest/Dividends are also taxed at the higher income rate)
The cost of maintaining a livable home, property taxes, insurance, property depreciation, and renter interactions eat into the supposed windfall that landlords make.
I'm not saying it doesn't suck sometimes and that certainly these formulas are out of whack in some situations, but there are no easy answers.
Set some limits. Each person can own one primary residence and x number of secondary dwellings. Each additional dwelling is taxed at a higher rate than the one before.
People can still buy themselves a house and maybe another couple houses or condos for their family or investment.
But big landlords can't profitably buy up neighborhoods then crank up the rent. Or perhaps they can own them, but they're required to be non-profits and expenses and rents are highly controlled relative to income in the area.
It's a tough problem to solve though... Huge apartment buildings do have economies of scale that permit high density living.
And property owners who don't sell or develop their land at all because there's not enough incentive are a big problem in other parts of the world.
Folks, there's a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I've owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I've had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I'm actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that's not a job I honestly don't know what is.
Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.
My boyfriend and I have discussed moving out of his parents' house for many years now. We discussed renting, but then I realized it was just cheaper to buy a house in a small town. We wouldn't even be able to afford to rent in the larger town over that's closer to his job and a friend of ours told us about how a ghost company bought out her old place, raised the rent another two hundered dollars when they were already struggling to get by, and didn't even tell people about it until two weeks before the new year. My friends were able to move out when they did only because of rumors floating around.
My mother and I were forced to live in an apartment after we moved when I was a teenager, but the only reason we got in was because the older guy who owned them knew my mom's dad and used to go hunting with them when they were young. He was kind enough to cut us a deal. That's literally the ONLY reason we didn't end up on the streets. Her sibling said we could live at their place until my mother found a job, but about two weeks later kicked us out because "my husband and I have sex every Saturday and we just can't do that anymore because your son is in the house."
I knew what sex was, I was old enough to understand, and I told my mom that we could just leave the house for a while every Saturday. It really wasn't an issue. But no, the person who convinced my mother to move multiple states away from where we used to and convinced my mom that the job market was absolutely booming (it was absolutely NOT) basically told us to fuck off.
Now that we lived in an apartment in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, my mom jobless and sending applications to any place around us to no avail, we were fucking stuck.
The apartment had many issues and the man and woman who helped the older man run the apartment were hillbilly rigging everything that broke so it just broke again. Over and over.
Eventually, and sadly, the owner of the apartments passed away (the guy actually built the apartments himself with the help of his son) and his son wanted nothing with the place. It took a good year for the apartments to sell to someone else. I went to school with her son and she was kind enough to not raise rent, but eventually she sold them off, too.
It was too much work for her husband and herself and her youngest graduated with me, so she sold the apartments to some jackass in Tennessee.
The rent doubled. There was fucking NOTHING we could do about it. The guy who bought them was hours away from us and had his underlings hire cheap labor to start ripping everything apart.
The people who lived in these apartments weren't rich or had a lot of money. Many were elderly and had nowhere to go, yet they had to leave. My mother was one of them. I helped her move with my boyfriend and we found her a place, but holy fuck, apartments suck. Landlords especially.
Some rich fuck who has no idea what the local economy is like, buys some apartments for cheap, then thinks it is a good investment.
My boyfriend and I are doing our best to currently find a place, but not everyone can buy an entire house to live in. Not everyone has a good enough credit score or people to help them when they are in need.
I've seen a few people talk in the comments about how they own apartments and rent them and are "one of the good ones", and sure, some landlords will work with people. I've witnessed it myself, but only out of luck as stated above. The vast majority of landlords are jackasses who only want to line their pockets with money, and even if it isn't a specific landlord, some scam company can easily buy the apartments and fuck everyone over.
Being a landlord isn't a job. Taking money from vulnerable people isn't a job. If you go out of your way to work on the apartments you own, good for you I guess. Congrats. Woo. But you still chose to own apartments or rent out a house. You CHOSE to line your pockets with money from people who are desperate to have shelter, but not everyone has a choice in deciding to rent.
Being a good landlord can be a job, depending on the home and the needs of the tenants and whether or not they're able so whatever work is needed for the place.
The problem is most just want the returns of an investment without the risks of such, and without ever putting any further "investment" into the property after purchase.
Threads like this really stress me out. I live in the US, and I've always wanted to rent long-term. I've obviously also always wanted a less broken system. If renting was the cheaper option and there were more legal protections for tenants, I think being an independent landlord of a very small number of properties can be well-done. We need to fix a lot before this ever becomes viable, and the stranglehold corps are gaining on the housing market is a fucking crime against humanity. Those fucks are parasites.
I think the real problem isn't landlording, exactly, but the capitalists we've propped up along the way :3
I don't get it.. if someone works and invests in a property, they pay a significant amount of money to have and maintain that property. If someone can only afford to rent for a short term period of time, what then? Is the next step that the person spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house supposed to just hand it over without selling it to a tenant? What is the alternative?
Be a landlord
Pay a cleaning crew to handle the janitorial services.
Pay a contractor to handle repairs.
Pay a management company to handle the day-to-day activities.
Complain that I'm not making enough money on the property.
Raise the rent to the market-clearing price.
Demand the municipal government lower my taxes, because its the only way to incentivize me to buy more property.
This post is insane. Sometimes I feel like Lemmy is an echo chamber for the maniacal. I rented for nearly 10 years of my life because I didn't want to own a place and be tied down. Not everyone wants to be a homeowner. Once I got to the point that I wanted a home I bought one... And guess what, I save money every month on my mortgage versus renting. Renting is a convenience, home ownership is not dead... People buy up the houses near me faster than they can build them.
Lmfao, thanks for bringing all of the parasites and their icky little defenders out of their holes so they can get blocked.. 😂
This format is shit
I dunno about this one. Maintaining residential areas does take some work. Bills and all that do have organizational skills. Is it a 40 hour a week job? Depends on how big it is and how many residents there are.
My only argument here is that rentals should exist. There should be some places that you can rent. I'm thinking the kind of rentals that are high-rise, high density type situations.
There will always be people who need short term housing, which will be longer term than what a hotel/motel will allow for without robbing you blind. Students are a prime example, being able to have students, who don't live near the educational institution, having affordable, temporary housing near the institution, is helpful. They're not staying, so rentals should be available for them.
And yes, dorms are a thing. But often dorms do not have the capacity for the number of students that need temporary housing.
There's also people who are transitioning from one living situation to another, people who maybe lost their home in a fire. Those people need a place they can stay for the year or so that they can work out the details of rebuilding their home.
People moving into an area for contract work are another example. Your contact says one year, so rather than put down a large sum of money to buy a home in the area for the duration of the contract, just rent for a year and you can decide what to do next depending on how your employment situation evolves.
Rentals have a purpose in society.
The issue isn't having rentals, the issue is that landlords and society at large has normalized being a lifelong tenant, and rentals being "investment properties". Turning the whole thing from being a convenience for transient workers and students, into a way of life for many.
The popularization of not owning the property you live in, long term, has fueled the greed of companies to turn it into a profit making enterprise. And now shit landlord wannabe people with more money than sense keep buying up properties as investments and renting them out at significant markup. This is robbing opportunity from would-be legitimate home buyers to actually own a home. It artificially inflates the value of those homes and now we're seeing the results of that trend. Home prices are sky high, basically only obtainable by people with significant funding already (those who "won" the birth lotto), and those who are seeking to profit from the property.
The only way I was able to buy a home was by pooling money with my brother, his wife and my SO, and putting a large percentage of inheritance towards the down payment when my father died. Pretty much all of our savings and all of the inheritance money went towards buying and doing some basic repairs to the home. Not everyone is so lucky. My father had quite the nestegg at the end of his life and all of that value was dumped into this building.
Even with a good amount put as a down payment, the mortgage is still the more than the cost of four single bedroom rentals.... At least it was when we moved in. I'm sure rentals have increased in cost and the numbers have changed.
We don't rent any part of this home to anyone else. We have no interest in becoming landlords.
With all that said, rentals are still important for transient living situations, but the extent that they've started to dominate the market as basically the only option for lower income people (and even then, it's still quite expensive for them) is, in and of itself, a problem. The housing market is set to collapse yet again, as process rise to the point where nobody can afford a roof over their head without help. It's only getting worse. I'm glad I bought a house when I did, I'm sad that I didn't do it sooner, and I'm angry that it's only getting worse. I don't want anyone to be in a situation where they have to choose between eating, or having a place to live. It's getting to that point and I'm hopping mad about it. I've made my bed by paying what I did for this house, it doesn't mean that anyone else should have to pay the same amount. If someone bought an identical house for themselves tomorrow at half the cost, I wouldn't be angry. I would be happy that the market has cooled off. It won't happen, but I would appreciate hearing that.
Things have been allowed to progress towards consolidation of assets to a small group of individuals in all aspects of our lives for too long. Something must be done.
I’m seeing a lot of these memes lately.. is this a particular type of landlord or all landlords? Just want to make sure as reasonable people that we should at least do our part to logically assume that some money is required to the maintenance of upholding the structure you’re renting. I’m sure we can agree that there is labour on working on maintenance and those workers also deserve a living wage.
I just got charged a $50 fee on a 7$ bill. The apartment had been empty and I wanted to move in on the 1st. Told me they couldn't because they already had two people moving in that day and they can't do more than that as per policy. Ugg fine I was driving all the way across country and was on limited time. Setup all my bills but couldn't start them on the 29th because the bills were still in someone else's name...fine the 1st then. Two months later the apartment sends me a 57$ bill because....:( rent is twice my house mortgage I just sold :( there is a 150$ mandatory fee for amenaties....how this isn't considered part of rent is beyond me...it's not good out here...
mao tse tung enters the chat
I rented for many years before I felt ready to buy. When I was younger I didn't want to be tied to a mortgage, even if the bank would have given me one.
I was lucky enough to have a very reasonable landlord who always got things fixed and painted when needed and charged a very reasonable rent (and in turn I tried to be a good tenant and take good care of the property) One day he told me he would like to sell the house and I decided to buy it. Even gave me a very good deal compared to the maximum market value he could have gotten (which of course also saved us both money in agents etc.)
All that to say (and yes it is very anecdotal), good landlords exist and I was very happy with mine.
Just heard on the "local news" here where one of dallas' outlying suburbs has banned new short term rentals anywhere but commercially zoned areas, so at least that little bit of sense made it through.
I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. But if leech landlords (as described in the meme) are on the chopping block (regulation) I'd happily drop the cleaver/vote in favor.
Landlords wanting to use AI to drive prices even more should be illegal. Landlords shouldn't exist.
I rent out my basement at well under market value to an older lady that was in the house when I bought it.
I understand the post was made as a generalization but some landlords aren't bad and some situations are better than the alternatives.
Would you rather I kick out my tenant and god knows where she would live or maybe she becomes homeless?
A single property, no, multiple properties with fair rent, yes. The problem is prices.
capitalism competely collapses without the housing market being one of the many debt carrots converting perceived labour into cash.
You should tip landlords, not get rid of them!
Honestly anyone who happens to own two to five different properties shouldn't honestly be taxed nearly as much as anyone who is going to own 50.... 200..... 1,000 + properties who should then at that point be taxed 100% on their profits.
Mao was right about many things. But he was most right about Landlords.
ok to be clear, maintaining and upkeeping a property IS actually a job.
However it also requires that you well, do the job. There are a lot of people that housekeep for others, that's a job. Landlording is theoretically, a subset of this, in the other direction. But in reality, it's not.
Regardless, i think renting homes should be illegal.
I believe a landlord should have a similar stake in their property that franchisee's for good companies often have: Forced to have a very real presence and understanding of the property, its condition, and how to handle the work if necessary. This would force landlords to own only so many locations, often closer together, and would create more landlords of higher quality, which means better living conditions, and likely lower rent for tenants. This would also make it more of a job. I feel it would also be beneficial if there was a subsidiary program so that landlords were forced to rent, at reduced cost supplemented by the Government, individuals with disabilities that don't directly impact those around them, who can largely live on their own, though may not be able to hold a full-time position. This would only have to be maybe one unit out of every 10.
Finally, assuming everything above could be ironed out to work without some jackass finding loopholes: Property owners, regardless of location, should be forced to pay taxes unique to them. These taxes would specifically go towards programs that support housing and relocation efforts, food and clothing programs, and especially help to offset lowered cost-of-living rental units.
We can mix and match these ideas. I'm mostly vomiting them out this point. POINT is, they can stick around. Let them feed off my wage ONLY if they make it worth our time. I'm happy to not have to worry about mowing a lawn or shoveling, for instance. But if they are going to exist, they must do so under rules that make it more work and less play. After all, a landlord who goes out of their way to promote strong living conditions and happy tenants would, using the ideas above, be a landlord who could play more. Because they've earned it.
Unlike now where the good is uncommon.
Don't many landlords.. manage the home(s) they're renting out? Like cutting the grass, doing maintenance work, investing into the property for upgrades etc.. ?
I don't see how the landlord is stealing from the renter.
Side note: I don't support corporations buying up property and renting them out or converting them into AirBnBs.
It's called not becoming a corporate slave /s
