> there is something morally wrong with being a landlord
In the traditional manner, by upgrading through houses over a lifetime and holding onto the prior homes as “mortgage helpers”? No, not in the least.
In the modern context, by buying up 5, 10, 15, or even more homes in a neighbourhood just to rent them back out for their labour-free “investment income”? Oh YES, VERY MUCH SO.
In the modern context - which is practically every rental these days - landlords do not provide housing. They HOARD it and ransom it back to the community for more than it’s worth.
Landlords and other “investors” are why North America as a whole has a housing crisis, and by direct-causation proxy, a homeless crisis. When an individual or company can sweep into a neighbourhood and buy up most to all of the houses and then jack up rents to the maximum that the market will bear _just because,_ even when a third or more stand empty, that’s economic parasitism of the working class, plain and simple.
So where I stand, if anyone is renting out any sort of a habitable structure that they themselves didn’t live in for the better part of a decade before they turned it into a rental, THEY ARE THE PARASITE.
As a former landlord - who would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever do it again - there is nothing “passive” about being a landlord.
A quick Google search shows that only 1-3% of homes are owned by institutional investors and has almost nothing to do with the homes not being affordable. It’s a talking point that even the briefest Google search will contradict.
IMO anyone holding more than 5 rentals is doing so for the purpose of investing; of having a revenue stream well above what is needed for mortgage purposes.
Why? Because if you take the traditional route of living in a place, and do so for the average of 8 years that most jurisdictions see people doing before upgrading, and turning that prior home into a rental, it would take you into your 70s or 80s until you have 5 rental places.
And having 5 or more rental units accounts for almost ⅓ of all landlords. This means that ⅓ of all landlords are economic parasites, being landlords purely for the income stream.
I am not talking about “institutional investors” that hold 100+ homes by themselves (100+ being the industry definition of an institutional investor), they are just included in my concept of a parasitical population of housing “investors”.
> there is nothing “passive” about being a landlord.
You clearly are an old-school landlord.
These days there are “property management” companies that - for a small fee - do all the work for you, and the only effort left to you is to cash the cheque. And many people with multiple properties leverage this system.
Every business is about buying something or producing something and selling it for a cost higher than it costs you. Why is rental property evil? Do you think building and running an apartment complex is wrong?
Every business is about producing an income stream. My 23 year old son and his fiancé rent a house. They don’t want to buy a home and don’t even know whether they are going to stay in the city they are living in
There is nothing “small” about the fee that property management companies charge. It’s 50% of the first month’s rent for a new tenant and 10% of rent each month. Standard underwriting for rental income is assume 75% - 80% occupancy and you have to account for slow payments and long eviction processes. Even in a red state like GA it can take around 3 months to evict someone for none payment.
And again bringing the 2-3% of homes that are owned by institutional investors won’t make a dent in housing affordability.
Profit margins on all inelastic essential goods are fundamentally evil.
A mansion for a single person isn’t an essential inelastic good. A Bachelor suite or basement suite for a single person _is._
Water in general isn’t an essential inelastic good. Sufficient water to keep a single person hydrated, clean, and in good health _is._
Junk food and premium-grade food isn’t an essential inelastic good. Sufficient raw foods to keep a person fed _is._
When you forcibly extract more from a person than providing the product costs you, purely because they have no other choice, you are an evil parasite, full stop.
And no, going homeless is not “a choice”. Neither is dying from exposure. And there are plenty of people who work full-time jobs yet don’t earn enough to put a roof over their heads.
> bringing the 2-3% of homes that are owned by institutional investors won’t make a dent in housing affordability.
But dealing with the ⅓ of all rentals who are owned by parasites _will._
You refuse to answer the question - do you think that everyone should own a home and their should be no rental market or do you think that landlords should rent at cost?
Housing is very much elastic. There is plenty of undeveloped land in the country and there is even more air - meaning building up and not out. Personally, my wife and I sold our big 5 bedroom 3200 square foot house in the burbs that we had built in 2016 for $335K in the burbs of Atlanta in the good school system to move into a 1250 square foot condo in Florida and we couldn’t be happier. Blame the lack of supply on NIMBYism that opposes multi unit housing and zoning laws.
As far as raw food, do you also think that people in the supply chain like farmers, packagers, food delivery drivers etc shouldn’t make a profit?
You never did answer the question - are you also opposed to apartment complexes owned by investors?
The second point you didn’t address is should my 23 year old son and his fiancé be forced to buy home or should his landlord have spent money on a property and rented to him at cost?
Me personally, if I were renting a house, I would rather deal with a corporation who did it professionally than deal with an individual landlord. The management companies both times I rented an apartment in Atlanta were excellent.
And it’s nonsensical that if you got rid of all of the investors who only own 2-3% of the supply, it would make a dent in housing prices. Do you think everyone who rents wants to buy no matter what their life circumstances? I definitely didn’t want to buy a home when I was single, I wanted the option of moving quickly
> And it’s nonsensical that if you got rid of all of the investors who only own 2-3% of the supply,
Either you are sealioning, or you genuinely can’t comprehend the written word.
Time and time again you keep hammering on this point, which is only a tiny fraction of mine. You keep hammering on the window dressing, while I am addressing the real elephant in the room, THE OTHER ⅓ OF LANDLORDS, WHO ARE THE MAJORITY OF THE PROBLEM.
I am talking about the other ≈30% of landlords
≈30%. Not 2-3%. ≈30%. That is the size of the problem.
> Housing is very much elastic.
For buyers and sellers, perhaps. For renters, NO.
If rent was elastic, we wouldn’t have a “working poor” homeless problem. If rent was elastic, we wouldn’t have 23 empty homes for every homeless person.
> are you also opposed to apartment complexes owned by investors?
A single, separate, unrelated owner per apartment/unit? No. That generates genuine competition for renters.
A single owner per complex? F*ck, yes. It’s an obscene concentration of economic power away from the renter and into the landlord’s hands.
> As far as raw food, do you also think that people in the supply chain like farmers, packagers, food delivery drivers etc shouldn’t make a profit?
My family have been orchardists for almost a half century. We know plenty of other farmers and orchardists. Most would rather let their food go to the hungry rather than let it rot on the tree or in the field.
And yet, it takes capitalism and the Parasite Class to drench food in kerosine and light it aflame in order to generate artificial scarcity and keep profits high.
And if you know anything about economic trends, you would know that food prices keep skyrocketing, yet the share that farmers get keeps shrinking.
Where does it all go? To the middlemen, increasingly concentrated in a handful of suppliers that keep buying up all the competition, thereby concentrating profits in the hands of the ultra-wealthy Parasite Class.
Even up here in Canada, it’s even getting such that the lines between middleman and retailer is blurring, with mega-corps such as Loblaws - which makes up a large majority of supermarkets - buying up distributors and processors in order to capture that middleman profit margin for themselves, denying the farmers higher returns and the consumer lower prices.
Yay, capitalism?
Because it’s neither the consumer nor the farmer who’s benefitting from capitalism. It’s the parasites at the top.
> Either you are sealioning, or you genuinely can’t comprehend the written word.
Time and time again you keep hammering on this point, which is only a tiny fraction of mine. You keep hammering on the window dressing, while I am addressing the real elephant in the room, THE OTHER ⅓ OF LANDLORDS, WHO ARE THE MAJORITY OF THE PROBLEM.
What exactly is your point? For single homes, if only 2% of all homes being sold are owned by investors, releasing those would at most increase the supply by 2%.
But it’s even crazier that you think apartment buildings shouldn’t be owned by corporations and centrally managed.
Do you think individual owners will take care of maintenance, property taxes, collecting rent, a centrally managed tenant office erc?
Funny enough, I have an idea of exactly how that would conceivably work. I mentioned before that my wife and I moved into a condo. I didn’t mention that it was a unit we own in a condotel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/condotel.asp). Each unit is individually owned. But the complex itself is run like a hotel (not a timeshare). All of the owners but us use there unit as some combination of a second home and an investment property. When someone stays in a unit the owner gets half the income and the property manager gets the other half.
To be clear, this is in central Florida close to Disney and it is zoned and was built as a hotel. Unless you are also opposed to corporations owning hotels
You have to have central management for a large apartment complex just like for the condotel we live in.
As far as farmers what do you suggest? Either every farmer distributes the food themselves across the country or everyone in the distribution chain does the work for free? BTW, my grandfather raised and sold pigs and cows most of his life and my uncle (his son) still takes care of the cattle. I don’t think he’s going to be killing and processing the meat himself. Should everyone between him selling the cows and it getting to shelves do it for free?
> For single homes, if only 2% of all homes being sold are owned by investors, releasing those would at most increase the supply by 2%.
For the last time, I AM NOT ONLY TALKING ABOUT CORPORATIONS. I am INCLUDING those INDEPENDENT INDIVIDUALS who are landlording AS A CAREER.
Like, anyone who has bought any residence purely to rent out, and who has never lived in that residence. Who treat housing as an investment without actually being a corporation.
THAT is what covers 30+% of the market.
Release 30+% of that housing onto the market, and supply increases DRAMATICALLY.
QUIT BEING A F*KING TROLL.
> But it’s even crazier that you think apartment buildings shouldn’t be owned by corporations and centrally managed.
>Do you think individual owners will take care of maintenance, property taxes, collecting rent, a centrally managed tenant office erc?
Let me update you on this lovely little administrative structure called a STRATA COUNCIL. This covers a lot of what you just talked about. It’s a council of individual owners that make decisions about maintenance and changes to the common areas and overall physical building.
The property taxes and rent are handled by the landlords, which is what the vast majority of landlords already do.
> As far as farmers what do you suggest?
Punitive taxation of corporate profit margins. This forces the middlemen to do one or more of three things: invest in the company (such as increased wages of workers, or better tooling, etc.), pay more for inputs, or charge less for outputs.
Okay, again, are you saying that no one should rent a home under any circumstances or that people who own homes should tie up their money and do it at cost?
And again you are wrong. It’s not 30% of the market - it’s 3%.
> Let me update you on this lovely little administrative structure called a STRATA COUNCIL…
Guess what a group of owners who collective own and run something is called - a business
On the other hand, there is an existence proof of what happens when a group of individuals run a group of units - look at the mess that is most condo associations in Florida where they don’t do upkeep and condo buildings are literally falling down.
By the way, since most people don’t know how to run a business like an apartment complex or even a condo association where the units are individually owned, they still end up outsourcing the management to a property management organization as do most HOAs
It’s clear that only one of us in this conversation knows about the real estate business….
Why would anyone invest their money in a company if not for profit?
In the traditional manner, by upgrading through houses over a lifetime and holding onto the prior homes as “mortgage helpers”? No, not in the least.
In the modern context, by buying up 5, 10, 15, or even more homes in a neighbourhood just to rent them back out for their labour-free “investment income”? Oh YES, VERY MUCH SO.
In the modern context - which is practically every rental these days - landlords do not provide housing. They HOARD it and ransom it back to the community for more than it’s worth.
Landlords and other “investors” are why North America as a whole has a housing crisis, and by direct-causation proxy, a homeless crisis. When an individual or company can sweep into a neighbourhood and buy up most to all of the houses and then jack up rents to the maximum that the market will bear _just because,_ even when a third or more stand empty, that’s economic parasitism of the working class, plain and simple.
So where I stand, if anyone is renting out any sort of a habitable structure that they themselves didn’t live in for the better part of a decade before they turned it into a rental, THEY ARE THE PARASITE.