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They should see it as a job, and maintain their damn properties.
I am a condo super and constantly have issues with these multi unit owners who rent out, as their tenants call me about every broken fixture and I have to remind them that their landlord is their super, not me. I only take care of the common areas.
Landlords don't realize that their job is to be the property manager, super, handy man and administrator for the property they rent out. They're not just supposed to sit on their ass and collect a check.
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I looked after a house that my brother owned while he was out of the country for a few years. The first tenants were a group home that destroyed the place so much we had to gut the drywall and they never paid the rent until I hounded them endlessly every month. Every month.
The other tenants were just regular families and pretty good for the most part.
I would say I was dealing with something related to that house all the time. Every three weeks for stuff. Leaky faucet, roof shingle gone, branch fell on the lawn, sewer backed up. Big and small, all the time.
And they always called late at night or very early in the morning. This was before texting and email was common, etc.
My brother was paying me to do this, I would have done it for free but he insisted, but I was so glad when he sold that place.
I dealt with everything promptly. A family friend ran a property mgmt business and his crews did all the work promptly and billed us direct. People still always seemed annoyed and dissatisfied. Never again.
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Rentoids are usually disgusting.
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I'm somewhat "glad" I'm not renting a place owned by some rich chucklefuck, but one owned by a company. I know, sounds weird, but at least my rent money is going to something useful, since they employ their electricians, plumbers etc., hire a cleaning firm to clean the stairwell, and have a website where I can report problems, look at my energy consumption, stuff like that.
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You rent from a responsible company it sounds like. In my part of the country, there are a few massive companies that own a large amount of property and do fuck-all, have no online portal for anything, take weeks to deal with things like leaking pipes and such. I'm newish to the state so I'm not sure how they get it away with it legally but I've heard a lot of horror stories from these companies. I rent a place now from some rich dude for a very reasonable price, he owns a handful of properties and they do well on the maintenance and everything, it definitely depends.
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Right, but do the faux revolutionaries in this thread know the difference between a good landlord and a bad one? They seem to enjoy basking in righteous anger and not to care for nuances.
Good landlords hate bad landlords too. There's a lot of common ground to be shared.
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I think the main money maker isn't rent. It's owning (or at least having a mortgage on) property that doubles in value every ten years.
The rent often just pays for the mortgage and upkeep. The main payday comes when they sell it all off to the next parasite.
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Whenever I do the math on buying a multi-family, I find you’d either not be breaking even or barely breaking even with the mortgage, insurance, and taxes by charging market rent. The current landlord is basically claiming future rents as his own when he sets the asking price at level that takes all of the current market rent price for himself.
If you buy the property and want to have enough to do repairs / renovations and cover unexpected risks like tenants that can’t pay and won’t leave, you HAVE to go up on rent, otherwise you will go broke and lose the property.
Maybe there was a golden age when being a landlord meant instant cash flow and money making opportunities, but I find most of the stuff on the market today are just people looking to cash out all future value in the property and assuming the next landlord will basically just jack up rent to cope with the high cost of that cash out.
Being a landlord is pretty risky. You could end up with a bad tenant that ruins your property or won’t pay and won’t leave. You also are responsible for costly repairs and renovations that can have long breakeven timelines. You have to cover that cost some how, and that is by charging rent. Who would assume that risk without a reward?
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It really depends on the nature of the rental and your area. If instead of building a house you build 4 closely stacked duplexes and charged each one double what the mortgage would be you'd definitely make money, but you'd also be an extortionate leech. In my area someone built 4 nice duplexes on a double lot (probably around 1.5 acres) and is now renting them at $1800 each. The land was probably less than $55k and the cost of construction was likely less than $1 mil. At 5% interest on a 30 year loan their monthly payment would be $5,600, but they're bringing in $14,400 per month.
$1800 for rent is an extortionate price in my area (it's big city apartment rental prices, with a pool and gym), even after interest rates went up.
On the other hand, I knew a couple who were landlords for nearly 20 years. They rarely raised the rents and even in 2022 they were still charging <$1000 per month for a full house because that paid the costs and for them it was an investment, not a source of income.
They finally sold their rental homes and made about $70k over what they originally paid on each house. Doing the math that comes out to be a roughly 8.5% annual percentage return without counting the rent gained each month. That's a fairly solid investment without being a sucky person.
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"Landlords are rich leeches" is still true because the vast majority of property in the US is not owned by hard working people who are investing their earnings owning a handful of properties at most, but by property companies and hedge funds.
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It's hard to get a good return on your investment in residential real estate without using leverage.
For instance: You don't buy one place outright. You buy 5 with 20% down. You may not have positive cash flow, but at long as it isn't negative not only do you get all the increase in value, you also get more equity every month as the tenants pay your mortgages.
If you bought it outright and over some period of time the tenants have paid your entire investment and the price of the property doubles, you doubled your money. If you buy 5 and over some period of time the tenants pay your mortgage and initial investment and the properties have doubled in value you have increased your initial investment 10X. And before the big expensive renovations come in, you can sell and buy something else if you're not equipped to deal with that.
Also if you are just breaking even to get free property but you want to start getting passive income, after a few years you can refi to a longer term and lower your mortgage payments to get in the black every month.
This isn't advice, fuck anybody buying up single family homes to rent, just showing one way they can generate both wealth and passive income for nothing. Literally nothing if they're using a property management company.
Fuck anybody buying up single family homes to rent. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating.
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Fuck anybody buying up single family homes to rent.
It was worth one more.
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Sure, but I think this example also commingles labor with ownership (as is often the case).
Like you said, your plan involves building a four-family home. That's labor and worth fair remuneration. It's just that, in order to get that remuneration you'd be taking payment from tenants who build no equity for their money. Yeah, you'll have to renovate in 30 years, but you'd still have property and the money paid in rent while they don't.
A landlord can also simultaneously do valuable work supervising and managing a property. That's not mutually exclusive with profiting from ownership, and we can separate how we evaluate the two. It even comes up with billionaires: Bill Gates obviously did work worth payment as CEO of Microsoft, it's just not where he got most of his fortune. It can simultaneously be true that he's a talented guy who deserved to be paid, but most of his fortune came from exploitative business practices and profiting off of the labor of others.
Also, to be clear, there's a difference between structural and individual criticism. Obviously slumlords are pieces of shit, but there's a difference between that and someone who really does work as a property manager doing right by their tenants, or a family renting out a part of their home to make ends meet. I can think that landlords should be judged on an individual basis, while landlording as a thing shouldn't exist.
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That’s how a mortgage works. But the point is that after those 30 years you have a million dollar asset. That you had your tenants pay for.
For a regular plebs like us that’s not a winning proposition because we can’t have our money tied up for 30 years but for people who don’t need their money liquid, it’s free real estate
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The big money's isn't in the rent, the rent is just to pay the mortgage and upkeep. It's that you're getting in debt that someone else is paying for you while they gaurd your asset which is only gaining in value, you then sell that somewhere in the futute.
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On average, the same amount of money dropped into the NASDAQ will have much better overall returns. Real estate ROI is about 4% per year, where the stock market has held close to 11% over the long haul nearly a century.
For small-time landlords, it's often about "I have a place for me or a family member to live if things go bad". For bigger ones, it's the tax-shelter and the low volitility of real estate, as well as diversity in case you need to sell when their stock is down.
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I'm not sure what you used to calculate it, but it definitely isn't only "expensive cities with inherited properties"... I did the math on the last house I rented: lived there for 8 years. It was a duplex in a city in a very cheap cost of living state. Just my rent alone for those 8 years more than covered what the entire duplex was purchased for 3 years prior to me moving in. That means if both sides were occupied, which it was for all but 1 month in the 8 years I was there, it's paid for in full in 4 years. Even if you "have to renovate" in 30 years, hell even 15 years, you have 10 years of pure profit even after considering insurance and property taxes and probably even maintenence costs...
Maybe your area doesn't have high demand for rentals or you under-valued your rent price, but there wouldn't be so many people doing it if it wasn't profitable.
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If it's a poor investment, why do it?
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Being a landlord isn't a way for someone who doesn't have wealth to acquire it. It's a way to park your existing wealth in quickly appreciating assets preferably purchased from other losers when they lose their asses and collect monthly rent too.
If on day one you have 700k and you purchase an existing property and in 30 days after you rent it out your property is still worth 700k and you are now ahead of the game in 30 days not 30 years.
If you purchased at a reasonable time a year later its worth 750 and you've collected 84k 1% of property value per month.
Most owners are in the top 10% to start with.
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quickly appreciating assets preferably purchased from other losers when they lose their asses and collect monthly rent too.
I wouldn't say quickly appreciating, though. It's a fairly slow growth rate for someone with that kind of money. They diversify into real estate because it creates some tax protections (your costs) and it's fairly stable. Like buying into a terrible small business, but one that magically won't fail. The things that could cause total loss to real estate are usually handled in standard insurance, unlike a business that can just tank.
The thing is, as you and the other person said, it's all about the big companies who own tons of real estate AND the big companies that manage rental properties.
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I imagine it very much depends on where you live. A young couple I know through family friends bought a 3 unit condo and are currently paying their mortgage on the property entirely with the rent from their tenants.
Good for them, I guess. What a sweet deal. Definitely leech territory though.
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My landlord's two brothers who inherited a bunch of properties from Daddy. One of them lives in Scottsdale and the other in Hawaii. It really gets my goat knowing that 1 out of every 3 dollars I make goes to some overprivileged daddy's removed boy. I probably pay their golf membership or marina docking fees.
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Thats the american dream isnt it? To be exploited until you do the exploiting? God I love America
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"Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters!"
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What's the problem? If you don't buy a house you need to rent one, houses aren't free. Yeah those owners never worked for it, but isn't that the case with every rich kid? Why don't you buy a crappy house you can fix up yourself?
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Landlords do a lot! They own the house. They move your money from your account to their account. And once in a while, they spend some of your money on fixing the sink that you pay them to use.
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Better than the neighbors from where I grew up turning their land into two big trailer parks.
It used to be a nice little place, just out of town right off the main road. We never even really had to lock our doors. Later on, shitheads from the trailer parks would break in, steal anything not nailed down, made the whole area crap.
One of the landlords had their house broken into when she was staying with her husband at the hospital for a couple days. Complained that the trailer park people don't pay and just hitch and leave if you try to force anything.
Still has the trailer park going strong over a year later.
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Step 1: have an extra house
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Step 1: Use the equity you've built up in your primary dwelling to put a down payment on a second house, which you can rent out. Congratulations, you now have a second job to fill your evenings and weekends.
Step 2: Hope like hell you get a decent tenant who pays the rent on time and doesn't destroy your property.
Step 3: Pay all of the taxes, mortgage payments, maintenance costs, repairs, legal fees, etc., which the rent will just barely cover. Of course, most of the mortgage payment goes to the bank as interest.
Step 4: Keep crossing your fingers that you don't rent to someone who will destroy your property, fail to pay rent, sue you, or cause any other major headaches.
Step 5: After 20 years of doing this, you have now paid off that second house. Yay!
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You forgot the step where wealthy investors & hedge funds crash an artificially inflated market, you go bankrupt and they swoop in to buy the property from their friends at the bank for half of what you paid for it.
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Landleeches deserve to suffer
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That seems like a completely sustainable aspiration for everyone!
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Don't forget to leave the property empty if you're not getting market prices for it.
Isn't it fun how they're are more empty homes than there are homeless people?
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You have to have money to make money. It's just that first step that's the problem...
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ITT: Poor, downtrodden
leecheslandlords talking about how hard it is to be a landlord, when the easiest way to end their suffering is to just sell their extra fucking house(s).-
sadly if you try to be a good landlord and make a slim margin, you'll get dumped a huge repair bill/tax increase/other expense and now you're running the appartment at a loss. At that point you either sell it to a company willing to exploit it or you have to be less nice to your tenants and ignore repairs or charge more. Most people choose the first which is why we end up with terrible landlords.
aside: heard someone in that exact situation running low income housing, on a phone call with an expert talking to the government. The expert said "any prudent management would raise the rents the maximum allowed amount"
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They have once a year paperwork to do and still bitch and moan and they still call it work.
It's disgusting.
The one "person" I know also drags tenants to court over stupid shit (he always loses 🤣)
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Where I live landlords (if they're renting directly at least) are in a big legal responsibility over all kinds of stuff. The easier way is to rent through some company that deals with the renter.
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ITT leeches saying "actually consuming your blood is providing a vital service and takes a lot of work"
Or worse, theyre just aspiring to be leeches
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Yes, successful land reform movements have historically been lead by angry communists, thank you for pointing that out for anyone who might be interested in a little land reform that their best bet is to look into communist strategies of land reform.
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Now come on, this isn't fair to all the mom-and-pop landlords who speak to you politely while exploiting the fuck out of you and your family
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But they’re entitled to the results of my labour!
Why?
Because!!!
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I don't understand, is lemmy flooded by reddit kids now?
Comments here make it sound owning a house is free and doesn't cost money to not make it fall apart (houses tend to do so if left unmaintained).
I've rented for 20 years since I left my parents' house and finally bought my house last year, with great expenses and time waste. I'm still wondering today if renting was a better choice financially.
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This is one of the reason why I think the price of property should be regulated somehow by the government. The cost/ tax of a second house should be exponentially higher to discourage people doing this, so that a renting a second house should be a financial catastrophe. Capitalism, free market does not work, especially for basic human needs (food, shelter, health, energy, and if I may say education).
I myself bought my house 2 years ago, and the price was already ridiculous. Let's say I paid almost 100k€ more than the estimated worth of the house (cause of market price). I'm pretty sure the price will collapse after some time. The price can increase 30-40 percent in 3-5 years. It's crazy. The money invested here is much higher than I did when I was renting an apartment tho.
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I'm actually a grown adult who works my ass off and is lucky enough to own my own home.
None of this changes the fact that landlords are predatory capitalist leeches.
Winning life's lottery doesn't make me lose all empathy and become an ignorant buffoon who abandons my ideals and the hope for a better world for the sake of all people.
Mutual aid, autonomy, and horizontality -- these are all beliefs that I hold for a better world.
Landlords are making the world worse by exploiting renters. They are at best class traitors, but in reality they are much, much worse. They are actively making the world a worse place for other people. They do not "provide housing," as some would say -- these are the true words of the foolish child. Instead, they create homelessness and exploit the misfortune of others for their gain.
Landlords aren't alone in this, of course. Anyone who is an actual capitalist has to go. Either they will do so willingly and live, or they will be unwilling to abandon their position and perish.
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Renting was probably a better choice in this market.
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They're supposed to do all those things but most don't. I'm a condo super and the owners who own and rent multiple units are the worst. Their tenants are always calling me about every issue, and I have to remind them that I deal with the common areas, not the interior of their unit unless there's a flood. Those landlords tend to own multiple units and just assume I will deal with their issues, but I won't. When you own, you're the super, manager, admin, etc. But most landlords I've encountered just wanna collect the check
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The places I've stayed so far pay a company to deal with these issues in place of the owner.
I can't speak on what that costs, however.
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Management companies typically take a percentage of the monthly rent (can vary wildly from 8% up to 25%+). This also means they have a vested interest in increasing a building's rent by the maximum legally allowed amount every single year, because it means they make more without doing additional work.
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They also assume all the risk of the property too. Tenants can leave as they please but landlords are stuck with the property if the market turns.
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Landlords also absorb all the risk if the tenants skip out on two months of rent and leave the unit with no appliances, dog piss stained floors, a body sized hole in the bedroom wall, a toilet that leaked noticably but never reported resulting in extensive water damage, etc.
While its guaranteed that theres a lot of shitty landlords out there, and a ton of price-gouging corporate management companies (who are the real problem these days eith affordability).... I'm fully convinced every user who says "landlords are the devil" are they, themselves, the Tenants from Hell who do not pay the building they live in the tiniest modicum of respect; then wonder why every landlord hates them and hassles them.
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No one forced them to be a landlord. Tenants have very little choice. Why is there even a comparison here?
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Sounds like a good problem to have
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Oh wow boo hoo, they have so much risk 😔 they have an entire house that they can sell at any time, who someone else is paying the mortgage of. Oh, the horror! If the market should crash they'll lose the equity another person paid!
Really the landlords are the victims here, not the tenants paying their mortgage for them plus a little extra for profits. Clearly the tenants have committed the crime of not having good enough credit for a loan, or the crime of not having enough for a down payment, so they aren't worthy of owning property.
No no it's the landlord who has the real problems, because they could ein a shaky financial situation of "selling the second house iown" if the market dips!
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*Some
Many do not do much of this at all, sadly
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If you have multiple properties you hire someone to do that work. 'Landlords' include property companies that own hundreds of units, which is the majority of ownership in the US. Do you think the owners of these companies are doing maintenance and dealing with tenants? The executives are in effect the landlords, and all the work they do is figure out how to make more money off of their company's investments, aka figure out how to better extract income from tenants.
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It's genuinely not easy, both my parents have owned rental properties at some point in their lives, as a retirement investment. I'd never consider a rental property as an investment myself as a result of what I've seen tenants do to a property.
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I’d be thrilled if this “passive income” narrative would die off already. I don’t consider my house a “passive investment”, shit costs a good deal of physical work and money to maintain. If people want to own rental properties but aren’t interested in doing the upkeep and maintenance themselves, hire a skilled handyperson/super to manage it. Can’t afford that? Maybe owning a rental property isn’t for you.
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Sir this is a reddit clone please join the landlord hate circlejerk or GET OUT OF HERE
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Yeah, these memes are made by kids who have never actually worked at all, much less at upkeep on a property they don't live at. They probably whine about taking out the trash every week and beg their mom for new games while thinking they're independent somehow.
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ITT: economic incels
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Shelter is a need, owning women as property is not. It is disgusting to compare people complaining about landlords and people complaining women won't be their possessions.
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I like that crab face, lol. Which cartoon is it from?
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SpongeBob SquarePants duh.
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Nah mf, is Spongetron Squarelacks
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Why are landlords getting so much more hate than other parasites? There isn't much difference between them and business owners. No one should be able to profit from ownership alone.
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There is actually, being a landlord is more of a feudal relationship within the framework of capitalism.
Now, both lords and capitalists should be
talked to about their destructive behavior and have their private property repatriated by the working class through legitimate state mechanisms, but there is a difference.
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It's not a real job like "Stay at home mom" isn't a real job.
I grew up in the property management industry, and my grandfather wanted me to take over running his multi million dollar property portfolio, but Growing up seeing the bullshit he had to deal with with asshole renters made me go into ANYTHING else. customers suck, especially if they live where you work.
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Really? Nothing?
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Yes, nothing. Except for repair and maintenance and servicing all those cost and insurance and worrying the tenant doesn't pay and all those headache people never forsee. Nothing.
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ITT People who vote third party and expect things to change
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Lol, I'm not sure what that has to do with this post, but imagine voting for the same two parties and expecting change.
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So apparently buying a house, furnishing it, maintaining it, complying with various codes and regulations, and making the house available for someone to live in for a period of time for a sum of money is "parasitic". Not sure why, or why the same logic wouldn't apply to anything of value someone makes available to others for a fee.
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You wouldn't do this if it weren't profitable. The tenant will end up paying for the furnishings and maintenance many times over in rent, and you will get an appreciating asset that you are gradually paying off the debt for. You're not getting paid for management, you're profiting from holding capital in a system designed to benefit those that have capital, and seeking rent for the ownership of that capital.
I wouldn't hold it against someone in this system we have if they end up buying a property to safeguard their money, but let's not pretend that landlords are not a parasitic relationship that reduce the amount of housing stock available for people to buy and act as a middle man between a tenant and a property management company.
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Why on earth do you think anyone would rent out a house, or pay for all the ancillaries - furnishings, repairs, insurance, legal etc. if they didn't get a return on their investment, time and effort? Do you also accuse Marriott of being parasites for renting rooms? Or Hertz for renting cars? They do these things because they spent a lot of money to provide something of value that people can utilize for a period of time but they still expect to make money.
Renting is a business. It's as "parasitic" as any other business were a person pays for something with money and receives something in return. If you are not prepared to rent then don't. There are other options to having a roof over your head. Buying a house would be one option but there are others.
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It's a very US-centric view because their states seemingly doesn't enforce rules and regulations while also not having rent control. Creating a situation where landlords can demand pretty much whatever they want in a housing crisis while also not spending their revenue on actually maintaining the apartments they rent out.
The complaint is fair. For them.
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Every landlord I've had doesn't do shit. In principle, sure yeah being a landlord can be a bit of work. In practice? They expect it to be a source of passive income
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I've had the exact opposite relationship with all but one landlord. The one bad landlord relationship I had I sued and won. But I've lived in about 6 or 7 places with amazing landlords that took care of the maintenance and everything else. Hell I fell down in a shower busting a big ass hole in the tub once and the landlord replaced it at his own cost.
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The same logic applies to all rent seeking behaviours
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Because of nasty landlords happy to evict people or raise rents, Reddit and now Lemmy are full of people saying all landlords are awful morlocks feeding off the pain of everyone. Like everything else nowadays there's no middle ground in the common arguments either way. Landlords evil, renters saints.
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This is a misunderstanding though. People aren't complaining about individuals who happen to be landlords being nasty. They're making a systemic complaint about rent-seeking.
A landlord can be a perfectly polite and pleasant person. They're still engaging in rent-seeking. And that's the complaint.
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Wtf. So you get a house.
You get a house and be your own landlord - its that simple. If u think landlords are parasitic-
Where I live a one bedroom apartment starts at half a million dollars. A house is well past one and a half million USD. Guess I'm failing at step one: have an extra house.
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Have you tried not buying avocado toast? What about having rich parents?
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