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.
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.
Rentoids are usually disgusting.
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.
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.
Thats the american dream isnt it? To be exploited until you do the exploiting? God I love America
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?
lol just buy a house and stop complaining it’s so easy, said the completely out of touch boomer
Pull yourself up by your ball sack
Step 1: have an extra house
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!
Cool, now try being the renter who paid off your mortgage for 20 years and has nothing to show for it.
The system is exploitative to both sides if they have low capital. The only winners are the capitalists who already have more than enough.
They wouldn’t be landlords if they didn’t think they wouldn’t make money off of it. However the petite bourgeoisie are often squeezed by the haut bourgeoisie, and if that happens enough we get fascism as class warfare on the part of the big beautiful boaters and car dealership owners.
I agree there is a problem where people that rent and want to own can’t because of affordability. However, renting is less risky. Renters aren’t on the hook for major problems with a property. Imagine a leak goes undiscovered and causes major damage and mold to your apartment. What do you do as a renter? You move out, find a new place, and maybe even sue your landlord for damages and health impact.
What does your landlord do? Try to find enough money to cover the repairs, vacancy, and hire a lawyer.
Let’s not act like renting isn’t without its benefits. I think the factor most people overlook when they think about owning property is RISK. Risk means you could lose something or be liable. Renters have limited risk. If you’re taking on risk, you should be rewarded for it, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. Also, the reward is supposed to make you resilient to risks materializing. If the reward isn’t big enough, then when a risk materializes into a real problem, you won’t have enough capital to recover from it and you’ll go bankrupt.
I can’t even imagine how devastating it would be to have to sell my second home.
I mean, it’s more than that though. You could sell the property at a loss or have it foreclosed on. Selling incurs fees of roughly 6-8% of the selling price… so, even if you sell it for what you bought it for, you could still be in the red. You might walk away $100ks in debt.
You can be jealous of people in that position of having multiple properties all you want, but ask yourself if you were in their position whether you would somehow respond differently to the incentives and risks?
If you had enough money to buy multiple properties what would you do?
I would do what I do now and invest in companies making products I really care about. I wouldn’t own two houses. To me, that’s unethical. I understand that not everyone considers it that way, but you should also understand that I do.
Who rents for 20 years and then acts all surprised that they don’t own the house? If your end goal is to own a house, start by buying a house. If you can afford to rent and pay off someone else’s mortgage then you can certainly afford to pay off your own mortgage.
You certainly can, right? But that doesn’t mean you’ll qualify for a loan.
That and I can’t save up enough for a down payment cause rent/inflation/student loans/car payment. I was a teacher for 6 years and couldn’t save a penny. If I wanted to make more money I needed a master’s degree which I also couldn’t save up to afford.
How is someone supposed to save for a mortgage when they’re busy paying off someone else’s mortgage?
How is that the landlord’s fault?
Well, because as a class they raise the cost of land, meaning that many peoples only option is to rent. And then you have to pay off their mortgage for them.
Note that in the USSR apartments were 5 percent of income. That is what the actual cost of maintaining homes for people is, when you remove all the rent seeking and property speculation.
There is a huge difference between small and large landlords. The example I gave was clearly related to small landlords. If you have two houses and two mortgages and are doing your own maintenance, you aren’t driving up the cost of housing significantly. If you are a small landlord, as I’ve described, the only “profit” you’re making goes straight into the payments on that mortgage, most of which is interest for the bank. Also, those “profits” won’t be realized for 20+ years. Of course, I’m talking about averages over time. Clearly, housing is unbalanced right now, and bubbles create exceptions.
Large landlords, hedge fund investors, foreign investors, large AirBnB investors… these are a different story. They are the ones on large amounts of property, creating artificial scarcity, jacking up rents to unreasonable levels, etc.
When you find yourself comparing to the USSR I think you’ve already lost your argument. Since it boils down to “eradicate capitalism and rent becomes cheaper”. Maybe it does and everything else becomes a lot shittier too.
The problem is not the landlord. They made it possible that there was a house to rent.
The problem are other voters who prevent zoning laws that allow property that is cheap enough to buy.
Landlords do not build houses, they own houses. Saying that they provide housing is equivalent to saying Jeff Bezos delivered your latest Amazon package.
Owning things is not creating things.
Do you disagree with something that I wrote or are you reaffirming my point?
This part:
They made it possible that there was a house to rent.
Obviously.
Well, didn’t they? They manage the risk that the construction of the house is profitable. You cannot build houses everywhere.
If you don’t want landlords then you need public housing. That’s where the voters come in.
If you are a renter, there is a big probability you move a lot, and buying is simply not so convenient due to your current situation. But it is unfortunate that many people also can’t afford to buy a house or apartment and are only able to rent. What are you, as a landlord, supposed to do if you are living paycheck to paycheck with the mortgage you took for the apartment that you rent ?
Depends on the country. Apparently most people in Germany rent because that’s just the way things are over there. I would say in the UK that generally people only rent if they’re living somewhere on a relatively short term basis. Otherwise they might either buy their own property or apply for social housing depending on their income level.
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.
Using equity from current property to buy a new property? LOL
My friend, you are begging for pain… but appreciate it. Live that grind til you get repo’d
People do this, it’s called “refi and roll.” The idea is to find properties that pay more in rent than they cost to upkeep.
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That seems like a completely sustainable aspiration for everyone!
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
ITT angry communist noises
Holy fuck the “everything I remotely disagree with is communism” shit in this website is seriously annoying, did I time travel to 1950s America or something. Like I think lemmy might legitimately be the worst for it. it’s putting me off coming here.
You’re on lemmy.world which is an anti-communiet instance.
Naww, you regular traveled to modern America.
Are the 50’s making a comeback over there? should i expect Elvis impersonators returning to the mainstream or something?
Maybe branch out to another instance, I got here through lemmy.dbzer0.com, instances other than lemmy.world seem to be much more tolerable if you are tired of those sorts of comments.
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.
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.
You have to have money to make money. It’s just that first step that’s the problem…
Save money
You have to have money to save money. How does a person save money if every dollar earned is spent on necessities?
You do not need money to save money. You need money to invest.
Find inefficiencies in how you spend money and fix them to reduce expenses. Then save this difference.
The most common areas people spend too much are housing and cars.
And now you just reminded me of the retarded secretary of commerce in Chile who said, when complained to that people had to wake up at 5 AM, spend two hours in a commute to start a shitty 7-to-5 jobs to earn less than a living wage, he answered them with “lol just wake up at 3 AM, you just gained two hours”.
You aren’t wrong, but lets take someone like me for example. I don’t have a car, I rent a studio apartment below the average price in my area, I eat less food than I should and try to reduce my power and water costs when possible. I have a job that pays well for my area and I can barely afford rent, until recently I often required help from family to afford it. I agree there are probably ways I could save some money. But look at the wealth in the US, there are incredible profits for property companies and hedge funds, this money doesn’t just come out of the air. There is a siphoning of wealth from the working class. To say that these struggling workers need to save or invest might be true for some but there are much bigger factors in the increasing inequality of wealth.
I agree that the rich in America are siphoning from the poor. But I think that the biggest way they steal from the poor is through debt, not living expenses.
Think about it. Americans are taught that they must go to university right after high school. Kids are forced to make a huge financial decision without any understanding of the consequences, and there’s a lot of social pressure on them to conform by taking out a student loan.
Next Americans are taught that they should always use credit cards, and that they need to build a good credit score (so they can get approved for more debt later.) They are again pressured by advertising and social norms to take on debt, in addition to the gimmicky rewards like airline miles and cash back, which intices you to spend more than you normally would.
Finally people have even started using debt products like margin trading, which allows you to lose more money on the stock market than you even have, and apps like Afterpay allow you to buy expensive items you can’t afford. It’s just a never ending cycle of debt.
If people were taught about the debt trap from an early age they could protect themselves and actually save their money, not become a wage slave like so many Americans have.
Please just read any communist literature about class oppression instead of making up wild theories about why the working class is so poor. You’re trying to reinvent the wheel without any idea about how a normal wheel functions in the first place.
Sorry professor, I didn’t realize I interrupted your communism 101 lecture. Unfortunately I live in the real world where not everyone is out to get you and not everything is hopeless.
Or just work for a living
You don’t really even have to save money if you’re smart with the first time homebuyers credits and grants.
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
But they’re entitled to the results of my labour!
Why?
Because!!!
They’re just trying to pay for their grandma in the nursing home!
Oh, what about your grandma? Fuck her, pay your rent.
If someone’s grandma goes into assisted living, how does selling their house help anyone who can’t afford a house? Especially given the cost of assisted living. That’s a ridiculous criticism. It’s the people who own a dozen houses, or complexes, who are the problem.
The “kill landlords” crowd doesn’t care for this nuance.
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.
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.
I don’t think the government should control the price. That just leads to problems. The government should control supply, by changing zoning laws from single family to multi-family. It should also fund building new housing units that can be sold or rented. This is how Singapore solved its housing crisis. We should build denser. There is no reason to have a housing shortage in America when we have so much land. We just use it terribly.
The Singaporean are forced to do that because of how small their land is. In places where single family unit shouldn’t be a problem (Europe or States), it shouldn’t be forced to make the people to live in a multi family unit.
Owning an extra house should be punished (financially) to discourage people buying houses only to rent them away.
One political party suggested that recently in my country. Nothing happened because every study showed it will just increase the rents.
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.
Renting was probably a better choice in this market.
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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.
Landlords actually do a lot of work. Maintenance and dealing with tenants can easily become a full time job if you have multiple properties. A lot of people buy rentals thinking it’s “passive income” and then end up working twice as hard as before.
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
*Some
Many do not do much of this at all, sadly
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.
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.
If you’re talking about the owner of a property company, that’s a company owner not a landlord. Still a tough job to run a company.
What does it mean to be a landlord then? Are you saying the properties owned by these companies have no landlord? I don’t doubt it’s a tough job to run a company, I still don’t think that justifies the amount of our profits we give up to ensure we have shelter.
Properties owned by a corporation do not have a landlord. They are owned jointly by a group of investors who assume the financial risk. You can be a property company investor too if you want, there are a number of such companies called REITs that sell shares on the stock market and return a quarterly dividend.
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Sir this is a reddit clone please join the landlord hate circlejerk or GET OUT OF HERE
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.
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.
ITT People who vote third party and expect things to change
Lol, I’m not sure what that has to do with this post, but imagine voting for the same two parties and expecting change.
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.
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.
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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Yo know, with all that extra money I have just piled up everywhere lying around taking up space in my shitty, dirty, tiny apartment I’ll just gather it up and buy a house down at the house store! It’s sooo simple… what a great idea! 😉
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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.