Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart.
Renting is an essential part of the housing market. Not everyone wants or can commit to home ownership and all it’s unpredictable maintenance costs. A plumbing failure can be as cheap as $200 to fix or cost you $10,000+ for a full replacement and restoration from the biohazards of black water damage.
The reason why the housing market is fucked is because poor regulation allows corporate landlords to buy up tons of investment properties and control the housing costs and supply.
Renting is important to have available but it absolutely does not need to be at the level its at. The amount of people paying for someone else’s investment while wishing they could own something of their own is crazy and it’s insane that we’ve normalized that. And all the while they’re just hoping nothing goes wrong because it seems like even the “good” landlords are hit-or-miss when it comes to getting them to do literally anything. Mine’s usually pretty good but right now there’s a fucking hole in the foundation and getting them to properly address it is a hurdle I shouldn’t have to go through. In order for these buildings to be profitable the tenants need to not only pay for those issues you mentioned but now they’re also paying for someone else’s salary AND in the end that person gets to sell the building and keep all that money, too.
The reason the housing market is fucked in the US and Canada is becauss there are very few rent controls and a lot of the power sides with the landlords. In Montréal you have to be worried about going taking them to court because future landlords can just look up if you’ve ever done anything and deny you a place to live even if the problem was your current landlord is dogshit. Oh, and there’s a new law that’s around landlords being able to use necessary renovations as excuses to raise your rent! They have all the power and it doesn’t matter if they’re big or small, it’s a “business” that attracts the kind of people who don’t mind making easy money off of making you pay for their stuff.
Your landlord(probably) isn’t going to let you hit it because you’re glazing them on Lemmy. Stand up for yourself and others, even if you got lucky with a landlord who is considered good because they don’t throw a hissy fit when you ask them to do their fucking job.
Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart
Your comparison is valid, but it works against your interests. Your local grocer, as a business owner, is every bit against rising minimum wage as Walmart is: both of them see reduced profits when minimum wages are increased, so the class relations between them and their workers make them support anti-worker-rights policy.
In the same manner, your local landlord has every reason to be as opposed to measures such as rent caps or rent freezes as BlackRock.
Yes, rent should exist as an alternative to home ownership, but the housing for rent should be publicly owned and rented at maintenance-cost prices as has been done successfully in many socialist countries before which managed to abolish homelessness. As an example, by the 1970s rent in the Soviet Union costed about 3% of the monthly average income. Can’t we do better than that 55 years of technological progress later?
You’re getting flack but you’re not wrong. When I moved into my current house I was a landlord for over 3 years adopting the basement tenant already in the house. Rent was well below market rate and I never raised it. We were both respectful. Ultimately I terminated their lease because I have kids that are getting older and I need the extra space as well as just not in the mental headspace to rent my basement anymore. I’ve since gutted it with the intention of making it a proper finished basement for us all to enjoy.
I gave them over 3 months notice. First month rent back and provided references.
Some of us just want to do good.
Housing is a human right, not an investment. Nationalize housing
Housing is a human right, not an investment.
Yes and yes 1000%
Nationalize housing
Fuck no.
Social housing in Vienna
Ok? That’s not all housing which to me is nationalizing. All countries have some concept of co-op or subsidized housing which is owned and administered by the government. It can and does exist in parallel. Should the government be doing more of it? I would argue yes.
I think it would work better if the weapons were firing at the sleeping kid directly from the soldier
Aka Gaza style
I think sometimes renting is a good option if you’re just living somewhere temporarily and don’t want to have the hassle of buying and then selling the apartment. And of course people and companies building houses to gain revenue by renting brings in investment in developing land and real estate. It’s just that some ridiculous revenue expectations drive the rent way over what is reasonable. I think in many cases it would help to zone more apartment building.
Yeah the price for rent should be the amortized cost of upkeep/renovation + some salary to the landlord that is reasonable for the actually work done (which is usually very little).
It should never be enough to pay back a loan the landlord took out to buy the property in the first place.
If short term apartment ownership is unattractive because of the hassle of buying and selling, we should look to reduce that hassle, not replace ownership with a parasitic financial relationship.
It’s only a parasitic financial relationship when the rented property is on the hands of a private owner. We could totally have collectively/publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs, which would 100% remove the exploitation and parasitism
No thanks. I’ve lived in 6 different US states in the past 6 years. I understand I’m an extreme edge case, but I’m a huge fan of renting apartments at this stage in my life.
Now maybe in this hypothetical society with better housing and whatnot, I wouldn’t have felt the need to hustle and grind and work my way up the corporate ladder and move around as much as I did… But for my situation, yea I like renting
How would you reduce the hassle of apartment ownership? I’m thinking of the issues of having to make a large financial investment, find an apartment you’re happy to do that for and finding a new buyer for that apartment when you want to move elsewhere in a reasonable time and for the right time. And then there’s the worry about renovations to the building and other such (sometimes sudden and unexpected) financial burdens.
With renting you can just rent for a while, not comnit to anything and even use that time to look for the apartment you want to actually own. And if they find out that the pipes are in much worse condition than assumed, you can just say sayonara and move to next place.
I don’t know. I don’t know much about apartment ownership, it’s not really an option where I live, so I don’t know much about the process.
Do I need to have a solution for improving a process in order to recognize that the process needs improvement though?
companies building houses to gain revenue by renting brings in investment in developing land and real estate. It’s just that some ridiculous revenue expectations drive the rent way over what is reasonable.
how about they build to sell??? Why do they need a stream of money in perpetuity for a one-time investment?
Companies do both. Whether it’s for renting or ownership can depend on municipal rules or some economics from the company, wouldn’t know that well. Renting might also be easier for the company, easier to find tenants than buyers in some situations
I’ve seen a recent finance bro fad saying renting and investing is better than owning. My brother in Christ my rent was much higher than my mortgage for a shittier spot and I didn’t get equity.
It depends, it can definitely be more worthwhile to rent.
I just did the math for renting/investing vs buying, including rent/house value yearly increase, income taxes on capital gains, mortgage rate, down payment amount, and initial house price. The results indicate a strong dependence on rent price and taxes/insurance for buying. I found that renting/investing can be a better financial option depending on the inputs. As another commenter pointed out, the main reasons are taxes/insurance and the greater time return rate for market vs home value. This was surprising to me, so I’m glad I ran the numbers. That tells me the real difference is your life choice of wanting a place of your own vs renting and moving around.
I should’ve known better than to trust my intuition on this. I previously ran the numbers on investing vs double mortgage payments and found investing to be far superior.
During the last housing bubble, you could rent the same place for less than 1/2 the cost of buying it. Renting and investing made more sense then.
Currently buying a house is overpriced but rent is even more so.
The best financial decision right now is to live with your parents your entire life. If you don’t have a parent you can stay with, then a tent and cardboard boxes in the park it is.
As always, you have to run the numbers. Ownership also comes with hidden costs. Property taxes and maintenance aren’t cheap.
Those costs are included in the rent.
Yeah, I think renting has less hidden costs, but it might increase in an unpredictable way, or you might need to move out sooner.
It really depends on the circumstances. For me personally renting and investing is indeed better - but my rent is 500 Eur per month for 100m² cold and I can’t finance a similar sized house for that here. Everyone needs to do their own math for their situation.
Taxes and maintenance wouldn’t be included in the mortgage. A new roof is expensive, so are HVACs, floors, etc. These things will need to be replaced. A rule of thumb is to budget 1% to 4% of the total house value per year. For a 400k house that could be up to $16k extra per year, or $1333 more per month than your mortgage. Those costs for maintenance and taxes don’t go towards paying down your principal so they aren’t directly gaining equity. With the rent and invest option, the investing is the counter to equity. When you sell your house you usually pay a realtor commission. There are a lot of factors to include when seeing if rent & invest is better than mortgage & buy.
That being said, I prefer to buy. I don’t plan on moving anytime soon.
People who don’t own homes don’t understand just how expensive and time consuming it can be. And most of that money and work doesn’t go towards building equity.
The maintenance and taxes on my home are far cheaper then rent in my area. I could not afford to rent the home I own.
People don’t understand that a landlord is going to charge enough rent to cover all those costs and still make a profit. Otherwise they would just sell the home.
Yes, the landlord is going to make a profit, but that’s going to be true of literally any service that’s being provided by a private entity, especially when they’re carrying a large amount of risk.
But it’s disingenuous to claim that there’s no benefit to tenants in a rental situation. They don’t have to worry about having to unexpectedly drop $30k on a new roof or HVAC system, or finding and dealing with contractors to do maintenance (or finding the time and energy to do it themselves).
I once rented a house from friends that were out of the country. We paid exactly their mortgage payment (plus utils and I did and paid for handyman level stuff, they covered big stuff), which was $600 a month less than the market rate for places a step down in quality.
Once we left I told them to increase the rent by $200 for higher insurance and a real handyman and whatever else and it’s still a huge favor to anyone they get by word of mouth only. The next couple thought they had won the lottery scoring a place for almost $5000 a year less than the rest of the area.
You paid a mortgage payment (and then some) and only received shelter, when you should have received shelter and equity in the home. Are you trying to say your friends did you a favor?
It’s nice that your friends didn’t screw you I suppose, and maybe your friends will give you a payout proportional to the amount you paid towards their mortgage when they sell the home, but until that happens, you did them a favor, not the other way around.
I know you mean well here, but this is fully bonkers. This is not how friends behave with each other.
They absolutely don’t owe me shit. We lived with them for a month before they moved, all in same house, for free. So there’s money we didn’t spend right there. We shared meals, shared hangovers, and shared their other friends in a place we were just moving to, which is priceless. But if you’re still really worried about money, they sold us their car for well under KBB as well. The guy’s brother and mom were who we called when stuff broke, and who brought us pupusas randomly when they were in the neighborhood. We trust them and they trust us, so we aren’t going to fuck up their house, and we got landlords that respond to shit immediately. I’m not going to ruin a 20+ year relationship with some tankie notions about “oh, bro, you owe me home equity.” And you can trust that anyone doing something like this knows when they have a good thing going without having to explain details.
Definitely not trying to make any commentary on the quality of your friendship, my bad if you took it that way, but that wasn’t my intent. I’m glad you and your friends came to an arrangement that worked well for everyone.
I worded my comment poorly in a way that forced my ideals onto you, which I shouldn’t do. I should have just expressed that renting is something I personally disagree with and wouldn’t do if I could avoid it. I shouldn’t try to fit everyone into my mold or my way of thinking though, sorry for doing that to you.
And saving the owners hundreds a month in vacant house insurance costs.
Yeah, because the renter will have to pay $5,000 when the AC unit craps out.
What AC unit?! 🤣
So landlords make no profit at all? I guess they just rent out their properties out of the goodness of their hearts. How selfless. (The tenants pay for that AC unit, repairs are priced into the price of rent.)
Yes. If you’re not actively using the land you should sell it - if that were the general practice, many renters would be land owners themselves and an entire layer of middle management would evaporate.
they’ve already paid for it
I never understood this brain dead obsession that Marxists have with landlords.
Landlords own property like anybody else does or could, and they use their property to offer a commodity in demand a for a fee like any other service. You never hear anybody complaining about a car rental service or hotels or any other rental service, just this one. This is a strong sign that it’s not based in any merit, it’s just ideological brain rot.
You could be nuanced and argue that certain types of landlords are bad or that certain practices are harmful, and that’s fine, but to say the concept of people renting out housing units is inherently bad just because is just stupid. Renting has it’s advantages even if you don’t understand or won’t acknowledge them, there’s are plenty of reasons why renting exists.
Marxist here. The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right, whereas rental of a car isn’t and neither of a hotel room. It’s also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person’s income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.
You are right in that landlords offer a commodity in demand for a fee, but it’s not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn’t require work: it’s purely an unnecessary wealth transfer from wealth-less individuals who can’t afford a home to wealthy individuals who could afford (or more likely inherited) one. We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it’s quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.
As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don’t deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income. We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant
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Shelter is a necessity. A hotel isn’t.
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Property is a limited resource. When people scalp concert tickets they get vilified. When they do the same thing for something necessary for survival people like you defend it with “well there are pros and cons…”
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Uhh, I hear people complaining about those services all the time, see Air BnB.
Regardless, a rental car or hotel is not a living requirement like a semi-permanent home is. Definitely comparing apples to oranges here.
You can acknowledge the benefits to renting while also acknowledging it’s an unbelievably toxic and abused system that profits off the poor for the gain of the rich.
Until everyone is housed, no one should be profiteering off thoes that aren’t.
In my area, the majority of homeless have cars. A car rental can be more important than a home to rent for survival for more people than you might think.
That’s more of a testament of how fucked up housing is in your area. That would be like saying tents are more vital than housing because many homeless use them instead.
No, it’s more of a testament to how car-dependent our area is. You can live without a house, but you can’t live without a car, or access to someone who will drive you. Housing here is comparitively affordable.
Car rentals aren’t as much of an issue, because of how much less expensive it is to own a second-hand car. If you’re homeless and you need access to a car, you don’t go to a rental place, you get a beater from Craigslist for about the same price it would cost to rent a car for a month (if not less).
I work with a lot of homeless, and I have known a few who have rented a car in a pinch. But you’re right, most just have an old beater they own.
You don’t understand the problem Marxists have with pure capitalism? That’s like their whole thing. An ownership class hoarding resources, and passively generating income from idle capital while not actively contributing is like the greatest sin in their ideology.
I personally think it’s a bit melodramatic. There’s a world of difference between renting your spare room, or the 2nd floor of your house, and a hedgefund buying 20,000 single family houses.
Just wanna point out that both BlackRock and your average landlord gramma have exactly the same class interests in fighting against rent control, rent freeze, or construction of affordable social housing.
It’s so fucking dumb. Landlords aren’t the problem, corporations owning hundreds and thousands of homes is what’s driving rent through the roof.
Exactly. I know several people who sold their house and went back to renting because they were sick of the hassle and expense of home ownership.
Marxists don’t have a problem with renting per se, we have a problem with private landlords renting to extract a profit from less wealthy individuals. Social/public renting is cool and I have 0 problems with it, and I thing we should favour it.
