I worked in the rental industry for a minuet, and I left because the people in the industry do not think of their renters as people. To property owners, renters are objects that you put in a property to make the property generate money.
In this specific example the 4 rental homes likely don’t even pay for themselves. Add up the mortgage, insurance, maintenance averages, and property taxes then divide by units and subtract the average rent (include vacancies in the average): that’s how much you make per tenant.
At most I could see a profitable location with 4 units covering groceries and vehicles, but not vacations. You would need more like 8 or 9 units for that. Bonus points if they’re combined into a single building to reduce maintenance costs and save on heating.
This meme seems to specifically target mom & pop level operations. If the Tenants are really such victims they should just get together buy the property out.
🥱
This person has no idea what he’s talking about and we should all ignore him accordingly.
If the Tenants are really such victims they should just get together buy the property out.
If they could do that, they could probably buy a better place and wouldn’t have to live there.
And if they can’t do that then there are no alternatives to either renting or homelessness.
If a person wants to change the financial system a bit that’s fine, but if they just want to outlaw rentals then they’re an idiot.
If nobody is allowed to own more than one property, should everyone be forced buy? Where would renters get apartments from?
No rentals, houses will be gifted to everyone and magically conjured out of thin air.
Your sarcastic inability to see a different path does not mean a different path doesn’t exist.
Well, so far all of the “different paths” turned out to be completely crap at working. But surely the next time will do it.
A functioning government?
Ah, so the government is your landlord now?
It’s good, because Americans have so much trust in their government right now.
Good thing I’m not an American.
It’s handy sometimes, isn’t it ;-)
Actually it’s a fucking nightmare having your closest neighbour threaten your sovereignty on a daily basis.
It’s even worse when half the population actually endorses the behaviour.
I don’t hate Americans I’m just disappointed. I hope my children aren’t going to die in a trench on the same field I farm
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Can you give me a serious answer without the /s
If I inherit my grandmas apartment, can I put it up for rent since it’s a small apartment in a college town and there will be takers.
Or should I sell it so I don’t become a “landlord”, which is bad?
Should all students just buy an apartment for the 4-5 years they spend in the city or will the city be the landlord for them somehow collectively? Or is it less bad if the college is the landlord by offering student housing?
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Not American.
Our colleges and universities are free. There is no student athlete industry over here.
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You didn’t answer my question:
If I inherit an apartment, am I allowed to rent it or should I sell it to not become a landlord?
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You could donate it? You could turn it into a shelter. You could let someone live there rent free… Why is selling the only option you can think of?
“Rent free” so I’d pay the costs and someone could just be there for free? I can’t afford that.
No… I specifically said “rent free” instead of “free”… You can charge them what it costs to upkeep with no profit, that’s my point.
…so now being a landlord is ok if you don’t make too much profit?
I seriously can’t keep up.
It’s really not hard. Basic shelter is a human right. Making a profit from providing someone with basic shelter is immoral and unethical.
Look into public housing in Finland.
I am from Finland and public housing is shit.
Public housing was shit, maybe.
Or are all of the articles like this staged? And all of the data is made up?
Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%,[1] though other reports indicate it could be up to 50%.[7] The number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%.[3] “Sleeping rough”, the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains.[3] Analysis of Housing First in Tampere, Finland found that it saved €250,000 in one year.[8] A further study of Finland’s Housing First program found that giving a homeless person a home and support resulted in cost savings for the society of at least €15,000 per person per year, with potentially even higher cost savings in the long term.[7] These cost savings for society are in part a result of reductions in usage of emergency healthcare, police, and the justice system when homeless people are given a home.[9]
So they look like link 1, and they result in that… Seems great.
Giving homeless people homes != “public housing”
We do consider having a place to live a human right, but that doesn’t mean the houses are especially good or well maintained compared to commercial options.
They aren’t always even the cheapest - those can usually be found from private renters who own one or two apartments they rent.
I remember looking up just the air b&b’s in the Portland metro and there were over 4,000……
A large majority of the rest were being rented.
The wealthy are buying it all with no regulation.
There should be one home per family in the suburbs. One vacation place and your house. No one needs 10 properties, get rich another way you greedy terrible fucks.
Rich people outbid regular folks for real resources (homes), taking away any chance at intergenerational wealth building. the only (legal) answer at the moment is taxation of the rich.
Gary Stevenson has some worthwhile insights on what we can do and how to convince working class people that the rich must be stopped or else your kids and grandkids will all be homeless renters.
inequality is sharply risinh all around the world. and it’s getting worse. this is arguably the most important issue of our time.
the only (legal) answer at the moment is taxation of the rich.
Landlords don’t contribute to society
Buy a home, don’t contribute to landlord’s profits.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Yeah they contribute a lot of pain and suffering
Of course they do. Imagine that all of the landlords decide to start removing rental properties from the market if their tenants move out. What do you think that does to housing availability over the next 10 years?
If it would destroy the economy if everyone did it, then it should not be doable in the first place.
This is like saying that if everyone had a small business it would destroy the economy. If you think a rental damages the economy, you have no idea what the economy is, or how it works.
Businesses buy and sell off each other and also create value. But sticking with the “if everyone did this” every one would run a one person business. Not efficient but would work. On the other hand if everyone is renting out houses, they can at most be renting out one (ignoring foe now second houses/holiday apts). Then everyone would be housed and paying each other in a circle. So, no, everyone doing what the post suggests can not work. All but the first house would be empty.
It’s funny that one probably-landlord downvoted this. You know who you are, scum-sucking leech.
It’s kind of a false dilemma to say everyone should do it or nobody should do it. There are a lot of things that would destroy the economy or even the world if everyone did it. I think there is a healthy amount of small family owned rental properties like the one in the meme.
Hey bro sorry, I need to pay my rent a week late.
It’s a simplistic statement, but it’s not meant to be that broad, it’s meant to be taken for this type of practice.
If everyone lived off leeching off someone else or from being middlemen, without producing anything, there would only be money moved with no products, labor, or services.
It’s not meant to be applied to something like “what if everyone’s business was just opening a pub?”. The economy would be destroyed without diversification and many kinds of businesses. But being a landlord isn’t anything like that. Particularly those that won’t freaking repair anything wrong with the house, just take their checks and the tenant is on their own.
That’s true for teachers, too.
If it is a lifestyle that would destroy the economy if everyone had it, then that’s another story.
If everyone went to work every day for 8+ hours for the direct benefit of the members of their community, the economy and the community would both be incredibly healthy.
If everyone purchased the tools that other people need to live and work and decided to rent those out instead of doing their own labor, the economy and community would fail.
This should be incredibly obvious.
What? Your comment doesn’t make sense. If everyone did any profession solely we would destroy the economy. If everyone became doctors, there would be no engineers or pilots. We would still be doomed. A diversity of vocations are necessary regardless of which vocation.
*Edit. I was thinking maybe you mean investments. But the same holds true there. AND because of hedgefunds and private equity it’s becoming more and more of all the money funneling into a handful of companies. All the economists are sounding alarm bells on this. But considering the direction our leaders are taking us, I think this is all part of the plan.
It has little to do with the “profession” and more to do with the distribution of goods. If everyone owned rental properties, nobody would live in these rental properties, meaning for lords to exist there must be serfs.
This is like saying that in order for business owners to exist there have to be people who want the products that that business provides. So what?
Landlording is not a profession.
Handyman is a profession. Real estate management is a profession. Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
The economy can tolerate a finite number of leaches before dying. We currently have too many. The ideal number is zero.
The fact that landlording is bad and not a profession isn’t the point.
The point is that @MithranArkanere@lemmy.world’s argument failed to convincingly argue that because it was logically fallacious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
In other words, the fact that thing A would “destroy of the economy if everyone did it” is an emergent property of everyone doing it, which doesn’t apply to any single entity doing thing A.
Yes yes. Many people fail to accept hyperbole. You don’t need to explain that you don’t either.
That guy said what I was pointing out. Also, it’s not a hyperbole, it would absolutely destroy the economy if everyone did the same thing regardless of what that thing is. Even if everyone decided eating chicken would be the only protein that we eat would destroy the economy. Which is why I added my edit. It’s not just about a profession, but anything, literally anything done in unison by every other human would wreck an economy.
Are you’re saying that if an economy has an increse the concentration of farming activity then economic ouput will deteriorate as fast as if it were to have instead had the same increase the concentration of parasitic activity? Very interesting idea.
Maybe I’m dense but the only way I can see that working is if the parasites become super-effective livestock and can be turned into food that is either more nutrious or has a longer shelflife than the feedstock.
Huh? I’m saying if everyone dropped whatever it is they normally do and instead all do the same exact thing, it would ruin an economy. We need diversity regardless of whatever else is happening. We couldn’t survive if everyone became farmers and no one become engineers. So ultimately, it’s a pointless statement to say if everyone did anything, such as landlording, the economy would be ruined.
It’s also not capitalism.
Adam Smith is seen as the person most responsible for coming up with the concept of capitalism, and he hated landlords.
“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
More details about what he thought of rent in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Adam Smith imagined a world with well-regulated capitalism. In that world, a capitalist might invest in a factory to make a widget. They’d take raw materials, use capital (including labour) and end up with a product that people would want to buy. That capitalist would always have to stay on their toes because if they got lazy, another capitalist could undercut them by using their capital better, to either undercut the widget’s price, or to sell it more cheaply. This competition was key, as well as the idea of the capitalist putting in work to continuously improve their processes. A capitalist who didn’t continually improve their processes would lose to their competitors, see their widget sales drop to zero, and go out of business.
In Adam Smith’s time, the alternative to capitalism was feudalism, where a landlord owned a huge estate, had serfs working on that estate, and simply collected a cut of everything the serfs produced as rent. In that scenario, the landlord had to do almost no work. It was the farmers on their estate who did the work. The landlord just owned the land and charged rent. Originally, serfs were even tied to the land, so they weren’t allowed to leave to work elsewhere, and their children were bound to the same land. But, even once that changed, there was still good farmland. The landlord could lower the rent until it was worth it for a farmer to work the land. The key thing is that the landlord didn’t have to do anything at all, just own the land and charge rent for its use.
I think the reason that people are so pissed off with capitalism these days is that what we’re really seeing is a neo-Feudalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism.
Think of YouTube. A person puts tons of time and money into making a video, they upload it to the only viable video platform for user-made video, YouTube. YouTube hosts the video, then charges a big cut of any advertising revenue the video generates, basically charging rent for merely being the “land” on which the video lives. In a proper capitalist world, there would be plenty of sites to host videos, plenty of ad companies competing to buy ad spots for a video, etc. But, YouTube is a monopoly, and internet advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook. They mostly don’t even compete anymore, each has their own area of the Internet they control and so they’re a local monopoly. This allows them to behave like feudal lords rather than capitalists. There’s no need for them to innovate, no need for them to compete, they just own the land and charge rent. Same with Apple and their app store. There are no other app stores permitted on iPhones, so Apple can charge an outrageous 30%.
It goes well beyond tech though. Say you’re a Canadian and you want to avoid American products, but you love your carbonated beverages. You could buy Coke, but that’s American. Pepsi? That’s American. Royal Crown cola? Sure sounds like it might be Canadian, or British, but no, it’s American. Just look at the chain of mergers for its parent company: “Formed in July 2018, with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Dr. Pepper/7up Inc.), Keurig Dr Pepper offers over 125 hot and cold beverages.” Sure, if you look you can find specialty things like Jarritos, but the huge brands just dominate the shelves.
Capitalists hate capitalism, they want to be feudal lords, and since the time of Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney / etc. competition hasn’t been properly regulated, allowing all the capitalists to merge into enormous companies that no longer have to compete, and can instead act as feudal lords extracting rent.
Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
This actually applies to most all investments.
Yeah, it turns out that a system that rewards people for simply having possession of something leads to behaviors that are harmful for society.
The problem isn’t landlords, that’s just the group that most people interact with directly. The problem is that our rules (primarily taxes) are setup to reward that behavior and to add burden to people who actually do work for their income.
If you’re a billionaire you can get your effective tax rate to single digits or zero. If you work for a living you pay way more taxes proportional to your income.
ALL forms of making money from having money need to be abolished completely.
If you’re not creating/selling a product or providing a service, you’re not EARNING money. Furthermore, rich people getting richer through passive income is the #1 thing diminishing the returns from actually worthwhile endeavors.
I somewhat agree with you. And I 150% agree that “rent seeking behavior” doesn’t add to society.
But what if you want to sell a product you designed but can’t afford to create it or to setup a factory for it, so you want funding, so you try to get investments, maybe by selling equity in your company. Is that not valuable to society? The people that take the risk that your product may not sell?
How did anyone do anything before currency was invented?
Your comment implies that what you describe is a requirement for a functioning society
It isn’t.
Before currency was invented might be a stretch— back then, which was a long long long, time ago we likely didn’t even have professions in the same sense. Albeit Dave might have had a knack for fishing, Kendra for making canoes etc.
There was plenty of space in the wilderness you could just go live for free. Now we have a lot of people, we need agriculture to support that population; there isn’t enough land for hunter gatherer societies to exist without a large population collapse first.
Now to your point I suppose we could have a society without money; yet I think there is some freedom in currency even if everyone gets a UBI. It allows two random strangers to come together and have one person buy something without having to trade an item that the other person wants, then the seller can go buy something they want.
Without currency we would have to have a somewhat complex trading system, which inevitably would see certain items of rarity never traded, or traded for so much surplus goods that a new ironically materialistic moneyed class would develop. It would make for an interesting book, but I think so long as people have varied interests and desires, and create creative works, money is a useful thing.
So let’s say I’ve saved $100k over the course of 20 years of work. Investing in my friend’s bakery startup (making me a silent partner)… should be abolished??
Getting a paycheck automatically means that someone has more money before a product, or service is delivered. So I’m gonna stretch this a little… If we like jobs that pay money then we gotta live with rich assholes. But if we want no rich assholes and truly everyone’s time is worth exactly the same amount, then we need something other than capitalism. We need socialism. But how do we prevent kings or rich politicians in either scenario? Tax them in capitalism for one. In socialism we just downright make that illegal.
Instead of a rich asshole, you can have worker owned cooperatives and such.
everyone’s time is worth exactly the same amount
That’s just objectively not the case. Some people are able to provide more essential or better quality services and labor than others. There are also more and less enjoyable activities.
Everyone’s time can be worth the same amount for the same activity at the same quality level.
how do we prevent kings or rich politicians in either scenario? Tax them in capitalism for one. In socialism we just downright make that illegal.
You will always have people in more powerful positions and some will take advantage of it. What you can do is rotate people with term limits and such. However that can also have downsides in effectiveness and efficiency.
You can also impose limits on how much stuff a person can own. There are ways to circumvent this with non profit NGOs and such.
Socialist economies also need taxes to pay for infrastructure and the operations of the state.
This is basically where not even I believe in myself.
Cooperatives… A few billion of us get together to build a rocket…never gonna happen. A few of us build a power plant…yeah right! Never gonna happen.
What about life? My life, how much is my life worth? Is it worth more than yours or less? Divided into life/second, if I’m worth the same as you are, then I should get paid the same as you no matter what I do… I could be a painter or a seamstress or a cook or a bricklayer. I should be worth the same. Even a bum who wants nothing to do with anyone should be worth the same as the most smartest person to ever live. Its a life. You don’t get to be worth more by being smarter or making more stuff.
I would definitely not want to live in a society where my kids will be homeless even though I am the hardest working worker. If my kids are lazy I still want to ensure they live better than I did. So although I don’t like this consumerism centric capitalistic society, that socialistic society sucks.
I much rather be in a society where you can own things and give them to your kids, and have those things hold some value. I don’t want the government limiting what I can and cannot do. To some extent I think this sort of capitalism is possible, but the billionaires have got to go puff. I would love living a grand life with a big house in a sunny part of California. That’s impossible now no matter what I say or do. Meanwhile some billionaire could just buy California if he wanted to. That sort of money accumulation I’m totally against.
what’s the difference between real estate management and landlording?
Real estate Management is about rent collection, property maintenance, coordination of finding new tenants, etc. There’s labor there.
Many single property landlords are also real estate management and handymen of their own properties. And that part of the situation is actual labor.
In common parlance, people will often conflate these. But I find this dilutes the harm caused by actual landlords, which are mostly large corporations that simply own property and collect income.
actual landlords, which are mostly large corporations that simply own property and collect income.
You can think of a landlord, whether it’s a giant corporation or a family that owns two homes and rents one out, as an investor. They choose to keep their money in a property which they rent to someone else for a profit. But they do this rather than selling the property and investing in a restaurant, a local shop, the stock market, or just blowing the it.
Then it should be illegal to have no children, because if everyone had no children, we would literally go extinct.
That’s just the first thing that came to mind, huh? Tell me you wasnt to control women’s bodies without telling me.
Henry George’s ideas will catch on again someday, hopefully.
Every job involves having other people pay for your living costs.
My job doesn’t involve making a profit off of arguably the most important thing a human needs for survival… Just saying.
So you have a problem with farmers?
Why would I have a problem with farmers? Farmers actually work to produce something, so it’s not really a valid comparison. Landlords create nothing and provide nothing of value to society.
You know, farming is not defined by, “profiting from the things you grow.” Co-ops exist. But yes, in the current hyper-capitalist environment, most farmers are probably going to need to sell some shit to survive.
But there’s a massive difference between farmers in Iowa raking in tons of cash (including a shit ton of government subsidies) for providing more corn than we even need, and self-sustaining farms and/or communities that are not predatory.
For example, the Amish are farmers. They seem to do just fine without price gouging.
The key difference is that these goods and services wouldn’t exist if you were not paid to do the job.
If landlords didn’t exist, then all housing would either be government-distributed, socially-owned, or obtained through mortgages.
If the workers building those houses didn’t exist, then the house wouldn’t either.
The only difference between a system for housing with a landlord, and one without a landlord, is that the landlord is an intermediary that shaves some money off the top any time money is used to pay for housing, even when the building is already fully paid off, or they aren’t there, and your money just covers the cost of construction and maintenance directly.
Facts that concern me:
- they are on Twitter
- they use a combined username (gross)
- they list vacations as number one
Mooching off of others to fund your life style and giving nothing back in return
opens envelope
What’s something considered classy if you’re rich, but trashy if you’re poor?
In reality, you would have needed to own these rental properties for decades to have enough cash flow in them to make you enough to live on AND pay for their mortgages, maintenance, insurance, taxes, and property management. Even if you do manage to get a rental property, it will likely initially lose money. These people are likely selling something else, which is the dream of that life. So, they want you to buy their course or something. These people are all the same. “Let me show you how I make X passive income, by selling courses about making passive income.”
Agreed. I know people who own rentals and barely make enough to cover the cost of constant repairs. Rental properties are only lucrative if yer a piece of shit landlord. People probably make more money offering courses on how to do it than actually doing it.
Not entirely true everywhere.
If you go into the poorest places in the county you can own apartments and have them paid for in no time. You can charge HUD twice the going rate and make life miserable for everyone by destroying the market in those areas.
Take where I live. The average rent in 2012 for a three bedroom, two bathroom home was 400 bucks. Now 13 years later it is 800-1000. Way higher than inflation.
How did this happen? Well, landlords exploited a program designed to help poor people by overcharging it and causing the rent to go up everywhere. Why rent to steady job Steve when meth head Molly’s check is always there because HUD pays her rent?
I know the three men who bought up all the property in this entire area.
One I know very well, so I’ll focus on what he did.
In 2010 he bought 3 apartment buildings for 115k each. They were all built by the same people in the 50s and are nearly identical with three bedrooms in each unit, but one of those bedrooms (in the downstairs apartments) has no window so can’t be categorized as a bedroom, only a closet.
So HUD pays 800 for the ones downstairs, 1,050 for the ones upstairs.
Each building has 4 apartments.
That’s 6300 a month for the upstairs apartments. 4800 a month for the downstairs.
That’s 133,000 a year for apartments he paid 115k for. The previous landlord only charged 200 a month. He has changed nothing about them. They were only fixed up enough to qualify for hud with the cheapest materials available. Nearly no upkeep. Pay a local drunk to redo the roof every few decades. Bam.
I’ve been living here for 8 years. I have nearly paid for the apartment myself.
How did dude get money? You guessed it. Dad helped him start businesses and everything grew from there. He has always paid his workers minimum wage and recently started selling off his businesses because being a landlord is easy peasy.
In the 8 years I’ve lived here, the only thing he ever had to fix was a leak outside.
Before he took it over, the entire building was on the same water and electric bill. First thing he did was separate all that so people handle their own bills and he gets as much as he can get.
NONE of the original tenants are here now. They all got priced out and replaced with easy money HUD recipients.
I’m the only one left who actually pays my rent in full. I’d say he’d be stoked if I moved out. I would, but I’m just too damn lazy and my upstairs neighbor is amazing. If she ever leaves it might motivate me.
I would like to say that many many outsiders have been buying up property here for the last decade and a half. They’re stopping now they they’ve made it impossible for us natives to buy a home.
This place is so poor that I almost had a house for 5,000 dollars in 2003. You could get homes crazy cheap here back then. That same house recently sold for 130k. It has been remodeled, but that was around 2009.
One county over things are still like that if you’re brave enough to live there. I had a problem once over there and had to call the police around 1 AM. “All of our officers are asleep at the moment, but if it turns out to be a big problem call us back and we’ll wake one up.”
Yea, this is what I was thinking. I have two houses and rent one of them. Both houses have a VA loan, but the rental of one does not even cover the mortgage for both.
That math is not mathing.
Of course I’m not charging insanely inflated rent, I just needed to move and decided to rent the old house for 2-3 years instead of selling it.
Housing prices are pretty high in cities. But you can buy your own piece of land in a more rural setting and build a small cottage yourself, maybe a 2 bdrm, 1 bath home. I believe this is possible for less than $100k at the right location. Start with a used cheap RV or mobile home if you have to.
Trump deported all of the construction workers
I don’t support those deportations. But why not do it yourself?
Step one: Have a shitton of money to buy property to rent out.
Oh, you don’t have enough money? Hhm, have you tried not being poor?it’s about suggesting that the social order that propped you up and elevated you basically arbitrarily based on birth is a reason you’re cool, and not just some shit that happened. none of this is about actually helping anyone. if they actually believed this shit from the bottom of their hearts, breathing a word of it would be fucking stupid.
The meme specifies Mortgage which means they also don’t have any money. They obtained a loan that they will be paying back for 15 to 30 years, at which point the property will deteriorate to a much lower value if any at all. If they sell the properties then they will owe depreciation recapture which works similar to a capital gains tax, as if it were additional income on top of the actual capital gains tax on the sale of the property itself. Plus closing costs to realtors.
I know people like this. They truly believe like they are doing society a favor by buying up houses and renting them out. The disconnect from reality is wild.
It’s a little better than corporate real estate vultures though. If you think about it, these small landlords and renters are more alike than the people at Blackrock buying up all this shit.
Just because they aren’t faceless doesn’t mean they aren’t as bad. In case of corporations, at the very least, anyone up to CEO could claim they were doing what their boss/investors told them/expected them to do, they have the mirage of fabricated innocence. The guilt is also spread more thinly, with many, often low paid employees contributing a small portion towards the greater legal crime.
Small landlords have none of those delusions available, though from my personal, anecdotal experience, higher management in large corporations also often personally own real estate and rent it. I’m working in IT, but I have no reason to think it would be in any different elsewhere. I was led to understand it was “normal” and “smart”. So I’d say it’s the same kind of people that make decisions on top of the real estate corporations, and the petite landlords. And yeah, I’m excluding from that, obviously, renting a flat you’ve gotten as inheritance from your grandma or something, though I have more fundamental issues with the inheritance thing itself.
Nah, corporate landlords at least tend to have minimum standards and contractors on call.
These type of small time landlords are the ones that tell you that a working refrigerator is a luxury, and water damage due to a cracked pipe in the wall is the tenant’s responsibility.
