You don’t get to claim part of the equity just for living with someone and paying part of their mortgage. You would have to set up a joint venture or other business structure, otherwise you would just pay rent to the owner/ roommate like they were your landlord.

And even if the partnership was legally set up where you got a percentage for paying rent on a room in a house, unless you retroactively paid part of their downpayment, it would be an insignificant percent the home’s value…probably to the tune of 1/360th of the home’s value, minus the downpayment, minus the growth in value for however many years they have been paying on the loan, and your share would essentially be less than half of your rent going to the value of the investment due to taxes and insurance.

Most of what you are paying for on a home is taxes and insurance. My mortgage is about 65% taxes and insurance. If I were to rent my home, should I pay all of the taxes and insurance that occur in real time so the tenant has a less expensive place to live or pass that on to the renter as a cost of living in the residence?

I’m not a landlord because I ran the numbers and this just barely profitable in a best case scenario where you had nothing but great tenants, no downtime between renters, and no major house repairs, but there is a huge amount of risk with letting stranger occupy your most valuable asset. The expectation that a home owner should offer a discount on the actual cost of the home because they get to sell the house and recoup the asset value is not realistic. When you consider the amount of damage, additional maintenance, turnover costs, downtime between renters, and a whole mess of other things that cost additional money that come with renting to tenants, it is understandable why it’s hard to find cheap rent.

It sucks that this is how the system is, but housing prices have to come down and wages have to come up before this problem gets fixed, and the landlord isn’t the demon you think he is. Corporate firms buying up hundreds of houses to manipulate prices up on the other hand…

Also forgetting that the “then some” part is only warranted if we want an incentive for people to buy houses to rent out. If it was a socially beneficial thing to do. Society would not lose out if buying a house on a mortgage and renting it out was not a profitable thing to do.

We’ll have to agree to disagree.