Does having an AirBNB setup make someone deserving of the guillotine or does that only apply to owners of multiple houses? What about apartments?
Please explain your reasoning as well.
Landlords aren’t inherently evil - it’s a useful job… a good landlord will make sure that units are well maintained and appliances are functional. A good landlord is also a property manager.
Landlords get a bad name because passive income is a bullshit lie. If you’re earning “passive income” you’re stealing someone else’s income - there’s no such thing as money for nothing, if you’re getting money and doing nothing it’s because someone else isn’t being properly paid for their work.
How many landlords actually do it as a job? And how many just collect the checks and hire bottom of the barrel contractors for anything that involves work? In my experience it’s been the latter.
I think most of the older landlords were like this but their renters are very reluctant to move. The landlords that suck have high turn overs - and recently there’s been a wave of idiots buying apartments to park their money and get “free” income - so the environment is actively getting worse.
I have never had a single landlord where this isn’t the case, except in instances where they are too cheap to even hire professionals to do things that they don’t have the skill to do, and they get their dipshit son to “fix” the sink that fell clean out of the kitchen counter with a lumpy bead of clear silicone and a 1’ piece of 2x4 wedged underneath.
Another thing that pisses me off is that I’m literally paying >100% of the cost of the property over time, yet they retain full ownership. It’s an investment with essentially zero risk, if you have a tenant that isn’t a racoon.
Not sure I have a good solution for that issue, honestly, but the idea of it irks me.
My overall position boils down to: Housing should never generate profit. A landlord can take pay for the work they do, and put money aside for maintenance, but there should never be a profit made on rent.
This was less of an issue before as we could save to buy property. Now we must inherit
This is the main issue. There’s not enough skilled workers to actually make enough houses and homebuilding supplies. It’s so expensive and the average person can’t do it up to code.
Before, if you had some small amount of money and a lot of time you could just buy a small plot and build a house yourself. Now you’d be an idiot to waste time doing that. No one will buy your handmade house even if it’s up to code.
Apartments in cities used to be cheap because the city stank of horse manure and smoke, and there were no elevators. Basically we’ve made the world much nicer and realized people will pay an arm and a leg for a nice place to live.
there absolutely should be a profit for rent. Being a good landlord is work, work should be compensated. Taking the risk of ownership (low though it might be) should be compensated.
The issue isn’t profit. The issue is a) artificial lack of supply driving up prices b) greed and exploitation of basic needs.
In some countries, like some of the USA, you get clean drinking water pumped into your house for your toilets. However you do the math a) people need to work on the system to keep it working and they should get paid a living wage b) water is a need even more than housing. We pay for water, and people make profit on it. How you pay for it - taxes, city rates, privately - whatever, you pay for it.
that isn’t the issue, just like paying rent isn’t the issue. it’s the amount which is.
the solution is simple and already exists: universal basic income, and make basic needs like water and rent limited by this amount.
Pay and profit are not the same thing, though. A landlord can be compensated for work without making a profit.
Agreed on UBI though.
Tap water is not really a for-profit enterprise. Even Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, though there are some well paid lawyers and engineers on staff, has to justify their rates and re-invest it all into water supply reliability. No shareholders making a profit on tap water.
UBI would not prevent landlords from profit. If we can afford to spend trillions on concrete bridges, we could build public housing in every city.
Even if you own your home mortgage free, you’re going to be paying >100% of its value in maintenance and opportunity cost over the first ten years.
Sure, let’s assume that’s true. The difference though is, I own the property. I get something out of the deal other than a temporary roof over my head - something I would argue is a human right.
If I were renting, I would be paying all those same costs, plus a profit margin - and I wouldn’t own anything at all. Someone else gets to cash out on the investment that I entirely paid for.
Also, I would just like to point out that I have very rarely had a landlord do maintenance on the property I live in. One building hadn’t seen a lick of maintenance in over 30 years, until I finally convinced them to replace the oven.
So basically, a good landlord doesn’t make any actually passive income? That makes sense. I just see a lot of people on here saying things like “we should kill all landlords” and they just sound ridiculous to me.
People speak in absolutes as it gets the point across. Also socialism is pretty hot here I myself am a democratic socialist and I have said “kill landlords/rich/owner class” but in reality when the socialist party get in the owner class wont be murder but forced to pay more taxes, slowly forgo they’re business and property.
People say that because outside of modern times in the first world, landlords = the mafia. Without expensive police, landlords have to enforce their own rent. So if you’re socialist or any other political movement bad for landlords, they probably make up the biggest paramilitary force in your country and if you don’t decapitate that chain of command fast you get dumped in a cave with 20,000 other skeletons.
And even in a first world country, the police manhours dedicated to evictions and the private security industry funded almost entirely by landlords is something anybody who wants to deal with housing prices is going to have to worry about.
Lemmy is filled with a lot of extremists. Nuanced thinking is in short supply here.
The internet is filled with a lot of extremists. Nuanced thinking is in short supply here.
The fact that this comment and the replies to it are all evenly upvoted and downvoted definitely helps your point lol
To emphasize this, I’ve had both types of landlords:
One apartment I moved into was available because it was the owners residence, but he had to move away for two years because of his job. He wanted to move back afterwards, so he put some money into refurbishing an already decent place, and rented it out to me at a price that mostly just covered mortgage, maintenance, and wear & tear. Best landlord I ever had.
Afterwards I spent two years in a typical predatory unit that was a normal house, but had been, as cheaply as possible, been renovated/converted into a place meant for packing as many renters as possible. It was expensive, there was always something wrong, it took ages to get anything fixed, and it was obvious that the owner who lived elsewhere only used the peiperty as passive income. The only reason why I stayed that long was economic desperation, and a housing market that was awful.
So basically, a good landlord doesn’t make any actually passive income? That makes sense. I just see a lot of people on here saying things like “we should kill all landlords” and they just sound ridiculous to me.
To me the question is whether the result of what you’re doing makes the world around you better or worse. Would the people living in your place be better off if you were out of the equation? Then you’re a bad landlord.
If you’re making money from providing labor for the people who live in a place you own, and they’re paying your costs to do so, I think there’s a case for that being a reasonable occupation to hold. If there’s an issue with it, it’s not my highest priority, and there’s definitely some value in flexible housing stock for people.
If your goal is passive income, or you’re making money from owning housing and denying that ownership to people who need a place to live, then you’re behaving as a parasite, and I think it’s reasonable for people to give you an amount of respect proportional to that.
there’s no such thing as money for nothing, if you’re getting money and doing nothing it’s because someone else isn’t being properly paid for their work
I earn around 3 to 6k a year of passive income from owning stocks. It’s passive because once I’ve bought the stocks I no longer need to actively do anything to earn interests but it’s not “money for nothing” either because I had to work to earn the money to invest and having one’s money invested into someone else’s business is always inherently risky. Interests are compensation for the risk I’m taking by buying shares in a company and betting on it’s success. Renting property is effectively the same thing. It’s not necessarily what you do that makes it good or bad, it’s how you do it.
I’m not sure what angle you’re coming from here. Anything with a risk involved is inherently not bad? or the origin of the investment capital was morally sound, so the profit off the investment must also be morally sound? I’m not even going to touch on the fundamentals and optics of the stock market at this point and what it has done to the economy, business practices, enshittification, etc etc.
Anything with a risk involved is inherently not bad?
No, but that it’s not money for nothing. It’s compensation for the risk I’m taking of never getting my money back.
It’s not obvious to me that any of this is inherently bad. Like with everything it depends on how you use it. Greedy landlords that don’t do their duties are bad. It’s not the being landlord itself that’s the issue. Me owning a small part of a company isn’t bad - that company treating its employees bad and polluting the envoronment is.
People have some myth of passive income. I sold all my rentals because they were taking to much time. I never turned a profit but it was good for my taxes. If you want to slum lord you can turn a profit but even I dislike those people.
Market rent is basically set by current home costs. Any long term owners who have 15+ year old tax base essentially get to pocket the difference due to lower property taxes. Any newer buyer who is renting can only cover costs.
That is incorrect. I can tell you’ve never rented to people rent is set by the market. Supply and demand.
It doesn’t matter if the house cost 800k. If the market rent is 2k a month. That’s all you’ll get.
In the area where I had my rentals, the houses are 500k but the rent is only 1k. Now I bought in 2008 and only paid 120k. So only lost some money but I made it up in tax benefits.
People really don’t understand the economics of landlords. They think it’s all money in the pocket. It’s not. It’s a very thin profit margin with most the benefit being taxes.
If you own housing that you rent out more than you use it yourself, you’re a landlord.
If you rent out your house or apartment while you’re on vacation, I wouldn’t call you a landlord. But if you have a house or apartment that you only ever offer on AirBNB without ever using it yourself, you’re a landlord.
Btw, I don’t agree that being a landlord makes you deserving of a guillotine, but I do agree that we should limit the ownership of housing to natural persons, with a limit on how much space a person can own.
I appreciate a sane viewpoint.
Buy a second house, fix it up, then sell it OR rent it to help cover the debt and maybe generate enough income to retire early. It’s one of not very many ways regular(ish) people can reliably climb the financial ladder or not work until 75.
Nobody needs 40 properties, but I don’t see anything wrong with one or two. I’m not a landlord myself, but I’ve rented and owned and can see the appeal of a second property.
I can say that having only one rental… is not enough. We have started the process to sell our rental as we were only making < $1500/year on it. It just wasn’t worth it. But if we had had around 3-ish rentals then maybe it would’ve been better as they could better support one another. We charged a lot for rent, but, after taxes, insurance, near constant repairs, and now the threat of not being able to secure insurance (due to companies leaving the higher risk area that we were in,) it just isn’t worth the hassle for a single home rental unless it is next door to your own house, and you are doing the repairs.
My take is that 1-2 houses still isn’t enough. Especially if you’re trying to replace active income generation (jobs and such). Nobody needs 40 units (that would be it’s own property mgmt. job), but one or two is most certainly not enough. I could probably get by with the income of ~10 if a property mgmt company was supporting me.
The problem isn’t that people are trying to make money off of rentals, it’s that people are trying to make too much money off rentals by raising monthly rates to rent-trap level, and low-to-non-existent repair-rates.
Yeah I kinda figured that was the case but I didn’t want to sound like some rich prick that people here in the comments would like to eat lol. As I understand it, you’re just better off taking the interest off your bank accounts vs trying to swing a single rental. Flipping can work but it requires an amount of skill that not everybody has, especially if you have to hire contractors to do the work for you. But yeah if I were to do it, I would probably run straight to a management company.
It seems to me that the average “slightly above average Joe” could afford a second property; my parents are not wealthy (they are semi retired and generally gross less than 20k/year, but own all their stuff outright) but found a house to rent to my brother and I while we were in college and it was a huge boon for everyone involved. My family income is significantly higher, but we don’t have a pool full of money to swim in. From the outside it looks like real estate is an attractive, stable way to grow an investment as opposed to stock market dabbles.
As an aside, and this is all an incredibly “first world” kind of a situation, but I’m not sure how you address the bitterness of some circles (like maybe this thread?) toward the layer of people who got ROI on hard work: I’d also be a proponent of limiting legacy wealth and eating billionaires. I was in college for 15 years at a state school and worked 10 at a university before I made big boy money and got stuff on my own. Not everybody who has some extra money got it by lucky birth or by exploiting the masses and I’ve still got loans to pay, why not own some houses for people like past-me to rent and make a little extra for the effort? I guess it’s easier to see it this way from this side of the problem.
If you are engaging with housing as an investment vehicle, you are part of the reason why there is a global housing crisis.
Housing is a human right and should be legislated as such.
I own a flat that I rent out to people who make similar amounts of money as I do.
That allows me to take a lower paid job that allows me to do more open source work.
I agree with your second paragraph.
This is lemmy. You are no better than musk or bezos for doing that you filthy capitalist.
You should do you open source work hungry, naked and in the cold while someone is whipping you. Like all the virtuous 14yo tankies that are downvoting you certainly do.
/s in case it’s needed
And coal plants provide power and heat to millions of people, that doesn’t make it right. The ends do not justify the means.
I’m renting to people who rent as a convenience, not because they can’t afford to buy a flat. I offered them decreased rent during COVID and they declined.
The electronic device you used for typing all that crap? Probably slave labour. That’s before looking at the power you wasted to do so, and it’s origin. Virtue signalling much?
So you’re not working and collecting money for it so that you have more free time to yourself that you use for your own personal interests.
You then make sure the people you rent to don’t have that free time, and raise the overall property prices by taking an available unit off the market.
Got it.
Nope, that’s very much not correct lol. I’m working. It’s just that you don’t find jobs that pay super much for open source work.
And the people renting my apartment are DINKs, they have a lot of choice about how much free time they have.
No idea about the market price thing. But I’m going to assume you got that wrong too, since the rest of your comment was baseless speculation.
The reason there’s a global housing crisis is government ultimately controls the throttle on new housing development, and government always allows less than the demand.
Our supply doesn’t match our demand and the problem is getting worse as populations increase.
For example, there are countless places where an apartment building would be more profitable than a new house, but zoning density restrictions force people to either build a house or nothing.
The UK has some of the worst housing issues in Europe, yet the amount of houses (dwellings) per person has slightly increased since 2001
21,210,000÷59,113,0000=0.35 Houses per person in 2001
24,930,000÷67,350,695=0.37 Houses per person in 2021
Yet rents and house prices have absolutely skyrocketed. Supply exceeds demand, it’s just greed, long term empty investment properties and government inaction.
Sources https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/dwelling-stock-estimates-in-england-2022/dwelling-stock-estimates-england-31-march-2022 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/overviewoftheukpopulation/2020#the-uks-population-continues-to-grow-but-at-a-slower-rate-than-previously
It’s not just about new housing though, it’s also about fiscal policy which makes housing a more attractive investment vehicle through things like negative gearing and capital gains tax minimization than other things such as the stock market; the result is that prices are artificially inflated and you create a “renter class” who can no longer afford to buy, ever. Right now we’re financing Boomers’ retirements.
The question is, will the politicians have the political balls to fix it once the boomers have died off, or will they just let the profit roll on down through the generations, ultimately letting birth be the sole determiner of your societal class in life?
If you are owning houses just to use them as AIRBNBs, yes. Profiting off of artificial scarcity and already having money is bad. Being wealthy doesn’t mean you deserve to be more wealthy.
Landlords aren’t profiting off of scarcity. They’re profiting off of having the means to do something that renters won’t: Buy a house with a 30yr mortgage, and leverage that money for something useful.
You too can buy a house. But everyone who shits on landlords, always spits out excuses why buying a house isn’t “feasible” or would “lock them down too much”, etc etc.
If you can buy 30k worth of tractor equipment, you can run it and make the money back you spent on it. That’s all landlords are doing - they’re buying when you won’t (not can’t…won’t) and then selling it back to you in trade for your “economic freedom” to move every 1-2 years and bitch about it.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.
I’m lucky enough to have been financially able to buy a home. I had help making the down payment, but we’ve now got a 30 year mortgage. My monthly payments are less than what I was paying for rent, less than the average rent in the city by almost a third. I got this place with two above-average incomes, and had the good fortune to get it during the COVID housing and interest rate dip, and I still needed extra help.
If someone is stuck with renting, they’re likely paying more than they would for a mortgage. They can’t save up the money because they’re already lagging behind, and the housing market isn’t coming down in price, and wages absolutely aren’t keeping pace. No one is saying a house would “lock them down,” they’re pointing out they can never afford it because they can’t even come up with the money to show the bank they can save because they’re already paying above the potential mortgage payments every month.
But you’re saying they won’t, not can’t, so what should they do to come up with the money? Start selling kidneys? 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and that same link shows 71% have less than $2000 in their savings. So where exactly are people supposed to shit out your hypothetical $30,000?
Fellow home-owner, not a landlord. Not in the US but I think things are comparable.
Your mortgage repayments are less than what you were paying in rent, okay. However, do you feel that is a reasonable comparison?
Do you pay some sort of insurance? Property and or council taxes, rubbish removal, water and other things that you probably didn’t even know existed before becoming a home owner?
Do you know that your roof has and average life span of 30 years? Unless yours is new, you’ll need to start thinking about it at some point, and it can be pricey, together with all the rest of planned and unplanned maintenance that comes with owning a place.
Not really defending everything the person you are replying to said, but I think this topic too often gets simplified to monthly rent vs monthly mortgage repayments.
You can show the bank that you’ve never missed a rent payment, yet still be unable to get a mortgage whose monthly payments are less than rent because you don’t have enough saved for a downpayment. That’s a “can’t”, not a “won’t”.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.
Lol what?
I’m pro fuckcars despite the fact that I know they have a place.
It has nothing at all to do with not owning a house or a home. As well, not everyone has to live in the city. But cities should be made with people in mind and the infrastructure should be there for people to get around cities without the need for everyone to own a car.
Besides. Less car-centric design also means less traffic!
Not everyone can buy a house, because of greedy people using housing as a driver of profits. There are a growing mass of people out there that will simply never make enough to own a property where they live. For some people, renting is not a choice - its the only option.
Also: you are completely and utterly missing the entire point of c/fuckcars.
Ya, seriously, their take is crazy. I’m a two income household, both software engineers, and to save enough money to afford the loan to buy the home would take us years. The cost of a mortgage right now is higher than my rent by a huge percentage and that still requires 20-30k of down payment.
Could we downsize to a 1 bedroom apartment, eat PBJs every night, and stick to cheap hobbies such that we could afford to start the loan in two years or something - yes. But why am I required to trade my youth for the ability to pay the bank the better part of a million dollars over the next 20 years of my life just so I can install a nice bathroom and AC and maintain the flat properly.
A landlord is a landlord, regardless of the particular lease terms. In general, they aren’t automatically good or bad. They’re just people acting as rationally as anyone else with respect to their material conditions and interests.
If you’re asking why they get a bad reputation, I think that’s also pretty straight forward:
- Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
- landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
- landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
- and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
Personally, I don’t think that landlords should be guillotined, but housing policy that’s accommodating to them is bad policy. We should be strengthening tenant protections and building new housing to the point that private landlords become practically obsolete.
and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
That’s kind of an interesting point. To homo economicus a house would be no different than a cargo trailer or a storefront, and could be rented just the same. To homo sapiens there might be some ancient territoriality at play, and you see things like the castle doctrine where trespassing is equated to a physical assault.
