I feel this so much. I own a property. I rented it out. I ran into that exact same lineup of expenses vs income you note here and… I ended up taking my house OFF the rental market. It’s just not worth it.
I keep getting into these discussions with people who yell “It’s immoral to buy a house and rent it out. Landlords must provide housing for renters at a loss so I can have cheap housing” and then… “It’s an investment and you as the owner must fund my low cost housing because you might earn equity in the property when you sell it in the future.”
Landlords must exist because people need to rent housing, and it sure sounds like you’re doing it right. Some landlords (and some tenants) are awful human beings who should not be landlords while others are good people.
A bigger problem is happening in areas with housing shortages. Housing prices have been skyrocketing for 10+ years and home owners have been leveraging themselves with their home equity to buy other homes. On a large scale, that eats up a lot of housing supply, increases prices, and makes it more difficult for people without existing real estate equity to buy a house.
In the city where I live, owning a house is essentially not possible for middle-class people unless their parents give them a down payment. Even my girlfriend and I, who combine for more than triple the average household income in the city, are taking years and years to save for a $300k+ down payment that’s needed to bring the mortgage payment down to $6k/mo.
Landlords didn’t create the housing shortage, but I can see why someone who’s struggling to buy a house while watching landlords buy multiple houses can develop a hatred for them.
The idea that ALL landlords are exploiting ALL tenants ALL of the time is just so fucking stupid it’s hard to listen to. Goods and services cost money, idk why that is such a hard concept to grasp. I lean left and will probably never vote R for the rest of my life, but it’s hard to listen to people like that who have no understanding of basic economics.
the alternative is that I don’t rent out part of my house and then there will be less housing
This is only part of it. The “housing shortage” exists not because there aren’t enough homes, but that there are not enough homes on the market. Truthfully, renting out a spare bedroom is not the focus of people’s ire (though through a certain lens it is still a problem, but I won’t go into it here). The problem is that rent seekers are pricing people out of the housing market, which is creating higher demand for rentals, which drives up the market price, ect. It’s a systemic problem, and not necessarily one of individual culpability. Another part of the problem is the commodification of homes: any action taken to address home affordability will necessarily drive down home values (they are the same thing, after all), and many people depend on the value of their home not dropping. It’s a bubble with millions of people at risk of loosing their homes if it pops.
There’s this convenient assumption for landlords that the rental market is full of people who simply want to be renters, or full of people who simply can’t afford to purchase their own home (usually by some moral failing), when the reality is that rent seekers are creating the problem that they claim to be solving. Houses wouldn’t be so expensive if there weren’t so many people buying houses for the purpose of renting out.
All these cucks can blow me.
Of course, there are other reasons why people might be angry with landlords.
