Where do you live that any of that is legal? The USA?
As a USian, my experience with the rental market was “move every 12-18 months to get the Teaser Rate for your unit, receive a notice from your landlord that the price of the unit is going up hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars, pick up and move to a new unit”. I once moved across the hall because the unit next door from me was being advertised at $200 less than the place I was staying. I only started looking because my smaller unit was getting a $300 rental increase. So, net $500, because landlords are insane. US Rental markets are an absolute clown parade.
As a homeowner who’s mortgage goes up every year thanks to insurance and taxes. I’ve started to understand why rent always goes up.
As much as I hate scumlord landlords, to play devils avocado there are certain factors that can cause constant rent rises. namely insurance increases, property taxes, and loan interest rises that may have to be factored in. Continuing to increase rent purly because thats what the market says it should be is a full dick move… But also some blame needs to lie at the feet of the government for carving out tax breaks to encourage rampant speculation on housing prices. Homes should never be investments… there are plenty of other avenues to make money. If the price goes up, it should be a slow gradual increase, not because you can negatively gear etc.
It’s funny seeing all this landlord hate as someone who lives in a country where it’s rare with shitty landlords. We don’t really have “landlords” like you do, it’s mostly a few big real estate companies who own the vast majority of apartments and are actually good as they compete. I’ve lived in this apartment for 10 years and my rent has increased by 8% but now water and electricity is included, and they have completely renovated the house with lots of nice new things and tech, never denied requests for repairs and have very good communication with us. They’re added solar cells to the roof, a big information screen in the entry with real time arrivals for trams and busses at nearby stops, chilled delivery boxes so when we order grocery bags we don’t need to be home when they’re delivered, we have 5 laundry rooms; one on each of the 4 floors and a bigger one on the ground floor, all with 2 big washing machines, dryers, drying cabinets and drying rooms and they’ve added filter that filter out microplastics etc., they’ve added a big bike storage room with tools, pumps and lockers with chargers for e-bikes, mailboxes that send a text when we get mail, a common room with a kitchen, sofas, tv that anyone can book (for free) and the “landlord” hosts a fika there every week with pastries where we can give feedback and make requests, and sometimes other events there too, and there are three elevators (to small, one big) and a trash room with recycling in the building. My apartment is one bedroom with full size kitchen, 31m², and ~$540 a month. I’ve gotten new appliances, renovated bathroom and other things since I moved in. And they used some of the material from the renovation to make artworks on two of the building faces, a big hanging lamp in the middle of the spiral staircase and furniture for the lobby and yard. There’s also so many nice plants both along the outer walls and in the yard, some with edible fruits and/or flowers.
That is super cool. looks like you’re in a really good spot.
I think people should take some responsibility and choose to be born earlier next time. If somebody buys a house before you do, we’ll… That’s on you.
So long as they’re paid I don’t think they care. If everyone came together to refuse paying rent then that would get the message across.
Its almost time everyone! :-)
This is mistaken. They don’t ask why tenets hate them. They don’t care. Tenents are just part of business, so they aren’t people in that case.
That said, I do know some human landlords, they do exist. They aren’t bad people. And they do care about the quality of repairs and such.
It’s a terrible incentive structure. Tenants have no motivation to repair the place they aren’t going to live in a year from now and landlords only have to put a bandaid on any problem until a tenant falls for it.
Either a tenant plans to be at a place long enough to invest their time/money or the landlord has to be selfless and repair the house cause it’s the right thing to do.
Capitalism in a nutshell.
There was a local law coming up that essentially said that landlords would be required to fix properties within a 3 month period (I think) or the county would seize the property and auction it to the public, then whoever buys it would have the same amount of time or same thing. I could see it being abused somehow but it sounded good on paper.
I could see it being abused somehow
Richer fuckers will buy them cheap at auction, spend pennies “renovating”…
It always kind of blows my mind when landlords do dodgy repairs. You’re halfassing your own property. Short sighted pennynpinching that’ll bite you in the ass down the road.
In a lot of cases, the landlord pays for a management service. That services job is to keep rent flowing and expenses down.
That said, cheap repairs make financial sense. Most will be good enough to not cost a ton later, and the few that aren’t… well, they usually take a while before they end up costing a lot. So the money is in the hands of the landlord longer, and they can invest it in more properties… so they get all the savings from the cheaper repairs, plus the investment income of that savings. From that they can pay for the things that go horribly wrong. Most of the time it will work out in their advantage. And of course they can always sell the house before the expensive repairs to someone who will do those repairs themselves and flip the house. That is the problem with money based decisions.Leaks that saturate the floor boards cost me nothing. No idea what kind of damage that did down the line because I don’t live there anymore.
At least the landlord saved £1k with some dodgy plumbers though.
Yeah, it never saves you money in the long run. Never cheap out on repairs.
My “favorite” is when you get a rent increase despite overall dropping rents. The landlord would rather risk vacancy AND lower rent from the next tenant for the pure joy of inconveniencing you with a move.
I lived at a place many years ago, and the landlord wanted to increase the rent from 900 to 1300. Which was just a fantasy number for the area. I countered with 1000, because moving is a hassle and it was an ok place. They said no, so we moved.
Then the place was vacant for years afterwards. I always chuckled when I walked past it. Great job, instead of getting a steady income, you try to gouge your tenant and get nothing! Art of the deal level right there.
Perhaps they gave you the f-off, we don’t want anyone living in our house anymore number… Either way thats a horrible thing to put someone through.
It works.
Whilst for some it might just be the inertia of “I increase the rent every year”, for many it will be a careful calculation, assuming that staying in the same place has an increasing value to you over time. It also helps with the overall dropping rents “problem” by helping to increase the average, and encourage other landlords to do the same.
I’m not convinced that landlords’ collusion to fix the cost of rent is the “careful calculation” that you’re describing. From my perspective, it’s quite the easy choice for them to extract more money instead of less money.
I only potentially benefit from an overall market reduction in rent (which rarely occurs) if I move to a new apartment because they refuse to negotiate a lease renewal at a lower rate.
No. They don’t collaborate.
Don’t misunderstand your enemy, folks. They’re selfish, like Donald Trump.
“In April 2024, 17 landlords and property management companies filed an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage in federal court in Dallas, Texas. The landlords alleged that RealPage’s YieldStar algorithmic pricing tool allowed property managers to tacitly collude to set rental prices, effectively fixing rents in specific markets and suppressing competition.”
Uh. My dude, they do in fact collaborate.
No. They don’t collaborate.
Sure.
Yeah, in a market economy if they all started dropping prices it would just be a race to the bottom, which is good for some tenants but will probably result in less repairs and could lead to some properties going bankrupt and being bought out by larger companies.
The real value in these properties is equity, as in how much profit they will be able to realize upon sale, while the continued operations up to that point are a budgetary tightrope walk.
My region has legal language called the Landlord and Tenant Act, which prohibits the landlord from raising the rent by more than 2% per year. When one vacates, the new tenant of course will have their rent start at ‘market rate’, but at least while living there one’s rent is protected. As well, if reno-victed, the tenant must be given similar space for similar rent once renos are complete.
This falls down a bit, as transgressors get to go against an adjudication panel, and that sometimes goes all-in for the landlords. But mostly it keeps the dickishness down.
I am very lucky to have gotten a cheap apartment by town, and it gets cheaper by comparison way faster than it gets rent increases. The market average is about £400 higher now
stuff like this makes me so happy i live in a housing co-op. we had to raise rent by 5% a year due to rising energy costs, but that allowed us to put 50kW more solar on the roof and start drilling for a geothermal heat pump.
Refusing repairs is a dick move, but raising rent can be a consequence of rapidly rising property taxes and increasing insurance premiums. Would be nice if renters got an actual itemized invoice showing what goes into the rent cost.
Itemized invoice would be killer! There’d have to be an item called “pure profit”, shining some light on their greed.
Most landlords pretend that the money that goes towards paying off the mortgage is a profit. Lots of the ones I see are always like “I make no money off of this” while the tenant pays off their loan for the house for them. Idiots.
They live paycheck to paycheck. It’s just your paycheck
I made nothing! I only got an entire house and didnt do any real work for it!
You’d need proper accounts the P+L and importantly the balance sheet for full transparency At least until they start paying their accountants more for corporate fuckery - though I think many do already to dodge taxes.
But the real fucker is in the bank loan, you probably can’t borrow at the same rate until you have as much collateral as them. Even though your rent is literally the asset, and you and the previous tenants keep buying them more collateral that puts them in a better position to borrow more and acquire more.
Good old Free market, no barriers to entry, no first mover advantage, no congestion effects . . . /s. I’m sure rent control is terrible invention, ruins cities.
UK solved this like a century ago with council houses. But then Thatcher sold them off.
Houses and flats owned by the local government and affordable to rent. But now supply is so limited that they only go to the most vulnerable and most people can’t get one.
A lot of the ones sold off are now owned by private landlords.
I see are always like “I make no money off of this” while the tenant pays off their loan for the house for them
I took a cab ride the other day, in a car the driver probably has bought via a loan, to a pick up an item from a store in commercial space they’re probably leasing, brought in via money they borrowed short-term to finance the purchase of goods to be sold. Tell me which of these CoGS fees they were correct to collect from my payment, and which of these you would rabidly avoid because of the filthy lies.
In my area there are two types of rental properties available.
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Nicer newer apartment complexes that are corporate owned that have overly restrictive lease agreement and have rents that are two to three times what a mortgage would cost on a house of similar square footage, if any were available which of course there aren’t. And the icing on the cake is most of them are owned by a single holding company which puts most of its profits into buying property and building new complexes to keep its tax rates down.
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Older run down apartments with chipping paint, creaky floors and drafty windows that used to be single family homes and have now been split into two to four rental units. Oftentimes the owner of the property lives in one of the units and their only source of income is the renters of the other units. Repairs happen only if absolutely necessary and improvements are out of the question because that cuts into their living expenses.
Of the two I think the corporations are more insidious and deserve more of the ire that seems to go towards private landlords. But that being said both business models are clearly problematic and exploitative and it doesn’t take a degree in economics to see that comparing them to small businesses that pass some of their startup costs onto their customers is a false equivalency and a bad faith argument.
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Property taxes and insurance premiums on what is mostly passive income. No invoice needed. For most of us, rent is the majority of our paychecks, which are earned by working.
So you’re saying that landlords are keeping prices down out of the goodness of their hearts, and it’s external costs causing the increase?
That’s very anti capitalism. You’re supposed to charge as high as you can at all times, regardless of costs.
"The son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work–though not always even that --only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.
We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger." - Peter Kropotkin (The conquest of bread)
It’s the price fixing. If the market was the way it used to be, you could afford rent.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any strong feelings on the topic of NATO?
I bet these guys have all been reading far left propaganda, like Adam Smith.
Honestly the very nature of Propaganda is right-wing as it leans into authoritarianism and against truth and rationality. Example: Right-Wing Dictatorship China.
Gay marriage is non negotiable
