I bought a house two years ago and I intend to rent it out while I’m living with my elderly parents until they move into a nursing home or pass away, at which point I will move into it. I met with a lawyer during the purchase process and he showed a copy of his standard rental contract, which included an annual auto-renewal of the lease at a mandatory 5% increase over the previous year’s rental price. In my case, there would be absolutely no justification of any increase at all - I paid cash for the house, my insurance does not increase from year to year and neither do my property taxes, except after very infrequent reassessments - let alone a 5% increase. Even somebody who took out a mortgage to buy the house would have been paying a fixed monthly amount from year to year, so they would have had no justification for an increase in rent either.
Yes I know I’m a scumlord, but I’m charging $300 a month less than is typical in my neighborhood and I don’t do that first-and-last-months rent bullshit. A security deposit is a reasonable ask, but why should a tenant have to pay the last month’s rent up front? I’ve put a lot of work into renovating this house, and I just want a tenant who isn’t going to fuck everything up before I move into it myself.
Being a landlord is not a valuable role in society, but being a property manager is. It sounds like you’re committed to offering a well-maintained and affordable rental in what would otherwise be an unoccupied house due to your current family situation. That’s nothing like a typical corporate slumlord at all. You’re providing a valuable resource for your community, don’t sell yourself short
I understand the general distaste towards landlords… but I mean realistically they are necessary, not everyok can or wants to own a house at every time point in life. I am also a landlord and haven’t upped the rent during any of the interest hikes, increases in our land tax etc whilst we have the same tenant. May look at reevaluating if/when they move out. Home ownership needs to be a right first, before it’s an investment.
Most people don’t own homes because they can’t versus want and that is because prices are allowed to be inflated by people owning multiple homes and property being used as an investment.
Tax second homes, limit corporate and foreign investment, then watch home prices fall back to reality.
Youve got landlord colored glasses on, which is just them being fully spray painted over to be blinders, like all the light switches in the houses you rent.
Even if not everyone can or wants to own a house, there’s no good reason for these houses being owned by corpos or individuals.
Housing is as much basic infrastructure/human needs as is health care, education, electricity, water supply, sewage system, internet access and should be in the hands of the public sector - alas, it most often isn’t and that alone should tell you enough.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be corpos allowed to provide service based on the public infrastructure, but the infrastrucure itself would be public in a fair and sane world.
If you can’t kick out leeches from abusing public infrastrucure, well, you end up in the world we live in.
Now you can call me communist or think about why the system we have is designed to help the rich getting richer.
This is no natural state we live in. It’s an abomomination.You want housing to be publically managed? Would you be willing to pay the significant tax that would be required to wholly maintain houses, water, sewer, electricity and Internet and landlord infrastructure?
We already do. Nearly every city in america has some form of a housing authority for the inpoverish and the application list for them extends for years because we dont invest more into them.
You’ve been deluded into thinking that public/government managed equals inefficient and expensive.
If anything public managed (or at least owned) housing would be cheaper, because of greed having been removed from the equation.
Allowing people and corps to stash basic services away is what’s expensive for the population because the leeches will always require the maximum fee the market allows them to invoice.Paying rent is “the significant tax” you’re talking about except because landlords don’t care about their properties past maintaining the investment value (which rarely correlates with actual maintenance or actual value) housing isn’t improved and at times is barely up kept.
In a society where every building was owned by the people living or working inside it, yes there would be a small buffer not currently being used and yes that would likely have to be publicly managed. That would neither be difficult or expensive from a government perspective and it assuredly would be far cheaper to society as a whole than rent is.
This isn’t even considering that my rent goes to some rich asshole instead of a government employee maintaining my community as a 9-5. I’d much rather create a new well paying job per 1000 homes than buy the rich another vacation or yacht.
Yup. That’s all it takes for the government to increase property taxes.
Nice work though
…is The Onion still fictional? It’s hard to tell anymore.
…is thehardtimes.net still fictional? It’s hard to tell anymore.
Landlord wanted to raise rent by another $200 to “keep up with market prices”. That was their excuse. To keep up with market prices.
In no way defending landlords, but a family friend who inherited another property decided to rent it out. They used a property manager (through an agency) because they had their own full time job.
At some point they found out the property manager increased rent a decent amount, while the economy was going in the shitter, without informing them. When they found out they were like “wtf, why’d you do that?” they replied “because the market rate went up and if we don’t then it will impact how much we can charge for other properties”.
He told them to fuck off, fired them and brought the rent back to what it was.
I often wonder how many landlords don’t even know what’s going on with their properties and would probably disagree with what the property managers are doing. Not that that excuses it though…
I think all landlords get demonized lately as a meme unfairly. Lots of times property taxes get jacked up, hoa fees, etc. So there is rationale to raise the fees.
But I had this exact phrasing happen to me before I bought my house. “Were raising costs to keep up with market rate.” I think its a mistake to do that to reliable, clean, respectful tenants if you dont have to.
But I could see someone doing that to a tenant who leaves trash, doesnt pickup after their dog, or plays loud music.
But landlords that treat it like a business and not just what is necessary are a joke for sure. But most of the hate I see landlords get are blanket and not fair.
Another thing I’ll say is corporations owning property only makes this worse. Half the townhouses in my community are owned by corporations and they always get shitty tenants who let their kids trash the place.
We have had incidents where kids pull out bricks from a garden wall and now its going to cost the homeowners 3,000 dollars.
I really think sometimes consideration and neighborly respect is dead. I fucking hate it.
Anyway, that’s the end of my rant. Both landlords and renters can be trash.
