How is this legal.
In a word, corruption.
In two words, legal corruption.
In three words, blatant legal corruption.
In four words, United States political system.
In the case of the screenshot, absolutely.
I have a question though, and I am curious about the perception here so please be honest as to what you think about my situation. (EDIT: I have received a few responses, and they are terribly informative of all of your perceptions. I want to thank you all for contributing your knowledge to my understanding, as I think by ingesting it, it has made me a better person. Thank you!)
In my case, I own a condo. I worked my ass off doing technical shift work and my parents were fortunate enough in their lives to give me a gift of $20,000 dollars in my local currency to try to buy a home. I am floored. I never thought I would afford the opportunity to potentially own a home of any kind.
I buy a small condo. Two bedrooms. One living room with an attached kitchen. The floors of the building are thin. I can hear my upstairs neighbors walking around and opening and closing doors and drawers at all hours. The insulation is bad, it is cold in winter and hot in summer. I am happy. I have a roof over my head, and I answer to no one for the walls, the fixtures, the plumbing.
I lose my job because the business I worked for fucked up and lost some clients. Because of the lack of cash flow, I and many others are laid off.
I hold on for as long as I can but eventually the cost of mortgage, insurance, groceries add up. I go on unemployment insurance. The economy is fucked because of covid, no one hires me for a year and 6 months.
My unemployment insurance runs out after having submitted 4 resumes daily this entire time, maintaining a log of them for the government EI program.
When I only have a couple thousand dollars left in my bank account, if I want to keep the ownership of my home, I have to move in with my parents again and rent my condo out to keep it at all. My dream of being able to just exist in a home I own is at stake.
The government EI program calls me in for questioning to insure I am a legitimate case. I feel some of the most stress and fear I have ever felt. Logically I know that I have been doing everything I can, but somehow I still feel guilty for having to take advantage of it. I perform the interview, I bring a document detailing the URLs, Descriptions, Dates, everything of every job I have been applying to. The interviewer shows shock on her face. I get the impression that the level of detail I have been maintaining is uncommon. They let me leave without incident.
For rent I charge the exact amount that I have to charge to cover mortgage and insurance, legally required, to maintain my the ownership of my home and nothing more, no profits. I have lived under abusive land lords before and the way they operate disgusts me. I will never be that, I would die before I let myself become that.
A Ukrainian family, Husband and Wife with their 3 year old Daughter are the first to apply. I discuss the property and their lives with them and they are some of the strongest, most responsible, wonderful people I have met in my life who came to my country to escape the situation in theirs. I accept them as my tenants immediately because I recognize how absurdly lucky I am to have these people living in my home, given how smart, how responsible, how kind they are. I promise to myself that at the first opportunity, I will show them the same kindness.
I finally find a job, even though it doesn’t pay much, and begin reducing the cost of their rent because I can finally afford it. I begin paying rent to my parents because they are owed that. My bank account begins saving about $100 a month in case I have an emergency I need to cover.
The interest rates lower and condos begin to become cheaper. I intend to lower the cost of the rent based on this when my tenants renew the lease.
This is the last 5 years of my life.
Am I a leech?
Absolutely not. Do what you got to do to move back to your condo.
my parents were fortunate enough in their lives to give me a gift of $20,000 dollars
just FYI, when you use a dollar sign you don’t also have to type out the word “dollars”
Am I a leech?
Technically, I guess so, you’re profiting just by owning the property. And having tenants exactly balancing out the costs of owning property.
Morally? Fuck no. What you’re doing you are doing to survive, not to live excessively.
Thank you.
I don’t think most people really think a vacation home or single rental makes you a leech, but when your entire portfolio is single family 2-3 bedroom houses you’re kind of sucking the air out of the local market. I know in my city there are tons of “small landlords” with less than 30 houses, half of them don’t even live in the city but in ex-urbs an hour away. They don’t do anything for the neighborhoods and see their income stream as completely legitimate.
This is tough, because even though you are charging your tenants the exact amount of your minimum mortgage payment, you are still earning equity in an appreciating asset-- eventually you will be able to turn their rent payments into profits. Now, in my opinion, your level of exploitation is very low, and barely worth considering at all.
I would like to move back into my home when it is affordable, but these people are so wonderful that at whatever juncture I owned the property outright and was not paying mortgage, I would lower the cost of their rent to just the insurance cost if that happened, and allow them as much time as they required to find something that works for them before doing so. I know they would understand. I have been up-front about my situation with them from the very beginning because I am not a liar. I am incredibly fortunate to be afforded the potential ability to do such a thing, because my parents are not too concerned with the living situation. It would also bring me immense joy to only charge them $700 or $800 as rent if the mortgage were paid off, just to cover the insurance costs. It would bring me greater joy if I could charge them nothing without bankrupting myself.
Like I said, I never want to exploit anyone. I just want to try to survive like anyone else, to keep what I have. If there are opportunities along the way to help other people, I would much rather that, and if it costs me an absolute zero, or occasionally a little into the negative at this point, that is fine by me. I would love to have these people live in my condo forever for the actual lowest possible cost, or to have their own fully owned home, but if I go bankrupt, the fucking bank or insurer will just take the condo away from both of us.
Thank you for your opinion.
Its more of the levels and degrees of action taken rather than the action taken itself.
a person owning 1-3 properties, properly maintain the properties, not gouging the heck out of their tenants and looking for long term tenets who will be allowed to live in the property (hang pictures and make it to a degree their own) and generally stay 5-10 years, is in the realm of what i would consider a ethical.
As opposed to slumlords who buy properties to exploit for maximum profit, barely maintain it and cycle through tenants who merely occupy and never feel like they truly live there (out of fear of the expenses on the moving out) and pay for it for 1-2 years before moving because of constant rate increases.
Its the ethical and humane management vs exploitive management.
You will rarely ever hear a peep or complaint against the first. But the latter gets all the vitriol, and rightly so.
On the one hand you’re getting someone else to make full payments on your mortgage. On the other hand, it’s your sole property and the only way you could maintain ownership of it. You weren’t profiting over cost, or collecting money from the renters that would go to maintenance (the only actual service/labor that landlords perform). Your choices were practical, not profitable. At least less profitable than you might think. Profitable to the minimum that the system required for you to keep your one home. Short of a revolution where all mortgages are zeroed out, it sounds like you did the best you could.
I don’t believe binary logic is very useful. So I’m not going to answer “am I a leech” because I don’t think it has a yes or no answer.
You have an asset that you can’t afford, and to afford it you rent it out. That is absolutely valid in a capitalist society, and many people do it. This allows you to hold the asset instead of selling it. That means there’s one fewer property on the market, which means that if somebody wants that home they have to rent it from you, where your equity increases and they get a place to live. Again, in a capitalist society this is absolutely valid. And it’s not like you aren’t taking risk, you could get a bad tenant and they could damage the unit, in turn decreasing your equity. One common “protest” I’ve seen among renters is to poor grease down the sink, damaging the plumbing over the long time, creating a huge long term cost for the owner. Or flushing cat litter down the toilet, causing a blockage, and similar results. You are accepting risk, and capitalist society says if you accept risk you deserve reward. But from a human-focused perspective you get a very different conclusion.
An issue many people have with this is that the renter is gaining no equity and you are while you aren’t contributing production to society. In the world we live this is valid. Another example of this would be dividend stocks, if you hold KO (Coke) you get quarterly dividends, and really you’re not actually contributing anything. These are capital gains.
My biggest issue with capital gains is that they’re usually taxed lower than labour gains. I think that should be reversed. If capital gains were heavily taxed and that tax was used to better the community then I think it would have more justification. But I digress,
If you sold that property it would probably just go to an investor, but in a world where people couldn’t own investment properties it would go to a person or family who would live it in, allowing them to build equity themselves. The number of properties being held and rented out has an impact on the homes available to people buying, or rather being forced to rent.
But ultimately I believe that renting and charging rent is bad for society as a whole. But I also don’t think you selling your property wouldn’t have any meaningful impact. I think it needs to be a systematic change to be meaningful.
So I’d say you do you, but you are taking advantage of the system and renters. But that’s the reality of the world we live in. Doesn’t mean it’s OK, but does mean you can do it. Also means I won’t have sympathy for you if somebody damages your property. But maybe that’s because I’m a bad person, I don’t know.
I firmly believe homes are for living in, not generating income - even if that income is only to maintain your ownership on your asset. But if you follow that perspective your life will be a bit worse.
Like I said, I don’t take the binary perspective.
An issue many people have with this is that the renter is gaining no equity and you are while you aren’t contributing production to society.
This is true and I understand.
There is however a government program in my country where people newly immigrated to the country who are renting can rapidly increase credit based on input from their landlord.
While my tenant cannot gain equity as a result of this situation, I notified them of this program and they signed up, allowing me to increase their credit in this way.
I am fully aware this is not a great trade-off regardless, but I wanted to do what I can because I recognize that any rental deal sucks. When I rented from a shit landlord, every day of my life felt like hell because my money went into a black hole from which there was little benefit. I was not even making enough/paying enough to make credit to get a mortgage at the time.
In addition to this, my tenant wanted to try to set up their own business, and needed an address for the purposes of a business license, so I absolutely allowed them to use the condo’s address (whether or not I am legally required to - I did not even bother looking it up because I want to do everything in my power to help this person and their family out without bankrupting myself).
I agree with you as well that selling to an investment firm/for-profit landlord would be worse, and that there has to be some systematic change. A world where one cannot profit from property is one I would want to live in, because if this were the case, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
Obviously that depends on how you define “leach” and this community is going to give you a fairly skewed perspective.
You are a person in a bad position, nothing more nothing less. If you are providing a competitive rate for rent you are benefiting these people, especially since you were up front with them. Your plans were not to be a landlord but this is where you have been forced. Hopefully you are able to return to your home soon
there is one separating detail that is not shared between most of us. It really depends on how long that tenant lives there. if they are living there for a long period of time and like the place, then yes you are a leech, but a good one since they enjoy living there enough to stay. On the other hand, if you switch tenants often because of high rent costs or bad housing(maintenance included), then you are just simply a leech and not a good one because you are not even providing anything, you instead are holding the property that is simply rotting away with no way for the family holding it to be able to make changes or work towards making it better as they don’t own it. If they leave for other reasons outside of your control, then you are not a leech and provided good housing for someone.
Since this isn’t usually known by most and takes time to build that moral ideal, it is usually up to you to consider how to act and there is not really an incentive or demand for you to act morally good. Your current living arrangements, life choices and poor job market is not applicable here, you held a home and still operate on living on someone’s paycheck. I hope the best for you and anyone who might be put in a bad spot, I know I am in my own bad spot. Would I try to hold myself to a moral high ground? maybe, though pain is short and I will likely still act not morally good at times, though I am not going to consider myself otherwise but a leech if I do. I would rather make sure I can get new tenants by making sure I get the current one is able to get one that is better or their own property, and help someone new with housing. That is what I think a good landlord could do but if the family likes the house then I can help them afford to buy it off me. See it is just business.
That is only for leeching aspects. I bet there are more complex thinking involved but this is what I think who a financial/real state leech is.
They act like everyone could do this.
If everyone did this, the system would fail, because the profit here is scooped off the top with no actual production or service.
It would also require everyone to own 4+ houses which isn’t exactly feasible
Landlords don’t contribute to society
Quite the opposite in fact.
Yeah they contribute a lot of pain and suffering
I had to rant in a couple of comments because I drives me crazy when people defend leeching.
On a more constructive note: Housing cooperatives. I think they should be more widespread. Some people come together to build a house and then live in it for the cost it takes to actually support it. No crazy big apartments with a reasonable amount of people (roughly one bedroom per person), shared luxury such as gardens, in house shops, hell even a pool if you want. There is no leeching, just collective ownership.
Housing cooperatives (wiki) are quite great. Where I’m from they are rather common, but unfortunately the ‘buy in’ costs have increased a ton in the last couple decades. Even then, paying e.g. a third of what a comparable owner apartment costs, still makes it a lot more affordable for many people.
Wait, do I understand correctly that in your place, the buy-in costs are roughly a third of the value (insured value or similar) of the appartment?
It was my rough estimate, from looking at both years ago. You do have a higher monthly payment, beyond shared expenses, but that varies greatly depending on things like how much debt the cooperative has.
A wealth and property cap would make way more sense and solve way more problems.
This species isn’t ready for it yet, though, and continues to suffer accordingly.
Future generations are laughing.
Why not both?
If you want to collectively own houses, nobody is stopping you.
If it would destroy the economy if everyone did it, then it should not be doable in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
That’s where small business grants from the government comes in.
Helping people thrive without being beholden to ruthless opportunists or run the risk of bankrupting private investors is EXACTLY the kind of thing tax dollars should be spent on in stead of the MIC, subsidies for the most profitable corporations in the world, and other such enriching of the already rich.
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.
This is mythical thinking. Frankly, there’s just not that many products that need inventing, particularly that need a factory. We are past the era where a revolutionary bread slicer will change society. Most of the actual advancements we are seeing come from grants into general scientific research. Not from some lone Einstein with a vision.
What actually is happening is some of these discoveries are very good and they ultimately get scooped up and patented by some corporate entity that thought the research was marketable.
Recognizing that reality, that innovation basically never comes from the founders of a company, should really lead you to understand what’s broken about the US economy.
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.
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.
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.
Tangentially related: this comment chain reminded me of the categorical imperative (the first formulation in that article)
what’s the difference between real estate management and landlording?
A landlord can pay a manager to take care of the properties they own for them.
A manager, on the other hand, cannot pay for someone else to “landlord” for them.
Landlording is about ownership, management is about labor.
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.
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.
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.
That’s the question. Are they dumb and mean it or are they just assholes? I also tend to think it’s the second.
they’re trying really hard to believe it, and seeing others struggle to achieve it validates them. they want to believe. they need to believe. but some part of them doesn’t, or it would be kept on the down-low.
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 used to have my own place before my wife and I got married, and she had her own house too. When I moved in with her I decided to rent out my place to a friend, otherwise I’d have to still pay like $650 a month for my mortgage. I set my friends rent at $900 a month for him and a friend, with cats. I paid my mortgage and had some extra to save up in case a repair was needed. Average rent for an apartment (not a house) was 1200-1500 in the same area. My renters ended up taking better care of the house than I ever did. It was beautiful when they lived there. I ended up making about 5k to 10k extra bucks over the course of a few years and my mortgage was paid for me. Eventually they had to move out due to some issues between the two at which point I sold the house and made over six figures(net profit, not gross), off a house that cost less than $80,000 when I bought it.
See what I did there? I charged a reasonable rent and still made a totally stupid amount of money off of just one property. I wasn’t a goddamn parasite who tried to bleed my tenants for everything they were worth.
People like these total shitbags. They’re the reason why America’s youth have no future
That’s nice, but you shouldn’t have an extra property to rent out to others when there’s not enough to go around.
Using my “friends” to pay off a personal debt while making $250/mo in profit off them. See, it’s possible to be a good landlord, everyone!
Did you share any of what you made from the sale with your “friends” who helped you pay for it and kept it in good condition for you?
It seems like it was a situation where everyone felt like they got a good deal and nobody felt taken advantage of. He gave them a better deal than they were going to find anywhere else.
To me, it doesn’t sound like he was exploiting his friends.
Did those friends run the risk of having to pay for a new roof or anything else that can go wrong with a house? Tell me you’ve never owned a house without telling me you’ve never owned a house
Don’t try to talk sense into the senseless.
Did the landlord have to risk losing his own home when the person who owns it decides they are done being a decent human and kicks them out for a higher paying tenant, or sells the property to another landlord who will do the same? Do they have to beg someone to come fix their shit in a timely manner or do they just call a repair man who doesn’t charge them $250/mo for the privilege of paying off someone else’s mortgage so they can call the repair man for you?
I rent two apartments in a state where all of that is not possible. Evictions take months and if repairs are not made quickly the tenant is legally entitled to withhold rent. But while on the topic I am most certainly on the hook for inflationary swings in:
- any and all repairs
- gas and electric
- insurance
- property taxes
- landscaping and snow removal
There is no free lunch, no one side is correct. Stop pretending this topic is black and white. There are some good landlords, many bad. Same goes for tenants.
One reason it’s obvious you don’t have experience with home ownership is that you’re acting like the repair man is free and not easily an aggregate of 250/month when expensive repairs are needed. That is $3000 my dude, which is easily a single plumbing problem that the landlord, not the tenant, has to pay for out of pocket.
It’s clear you’ve never had to rent a property from a shitty landlord before or you’d know they would just evict you, condemn the property and sell the land to recoup their “investment” rather than pay $3000 of their hard earned money fixing the damage some ungrateful shit did to THEIR property. You keep coming up with convoluted hypotheticals that assume the landlord will always act in the best faith to justify a practice that fundamentally should not exist. One or two “good” landlords don’t redeem all of them.
He received over a million dollars for the house in the end, plus the 5-10K in profit.
That is $3000 my dude, which is easily a single plumbing problem
If you mean busted water and all the repairs, sure, but that’s on the landlord for not ever checking on their property (unless the tenant did something very stupid, which is possible)
I own my home and just had some plumbing work done in California (king of expensive) and 3k is about 10x what it cost me for a couple hours of plumber work
I live in the UK and many neighbours of mine are “professional landlords” and it is so annoying seeing them so relaxed and doing nothing while I am stressed and anxious at my job.
Your “friend” still paid a substantial portion of your mortgage and gained nothing from it beyond being out of the rain. You used him and paint it as mutually beneficial.
How is a stable comfortable place to live ‘nothing’? If being out of the rain was all it took we’d all live in tents and this conversation would not occur. Owning a house and keeping it repaired/functional is hard and expensive. You don’t do your side favors by acting like our boy kept his friend in a locked closet when we all know that isn’t true.
Why do you get extra properties to rent out to others while he has to pay the rent?
The only reason why he doesn’t have enough is because people like you have too much.
We’re coming for you.
I’m not going to argue with you. Shelter is not a commodity.
You still take someone elses money, just less of it.
See, when the Landlord charges reasonable rates, and actually provides services in exchange for that rent (helping update appliances to newer, having paperwork on hand for any code/inspections needed for property changes (that the landlord would ultimately benefit from,) and in general treating it as a matter of ‘I have obligations’ instead of ‘I will do nothing but I will absolutely blame the tennants for the inevetable crumbling of the property.’
I dislike the concept at base level, but that is a someone who is trying to not be a scumbag.
The renting part isn’t even that bad, the owning part and selling for profit is the problem.
Can we not shit all over normal people for doing normal stuff? This dude doesn’t run Blackrock, he had a single rental property.
Hundred years ago it was normal to beat women of they were out of line. Millenia ago it was normal to own slaves. It’s also “normal” for the US Healthcare to screw over people who need Healthcare. Just because something is “normal” doesn’t mean it’s somehow right. Slavery was normal but then different societies over time understood that slavery is not right and it stopped being normal. Beating women used to be normal but over time we learned that’s also not right and it stopped being normal. I don’t know about you but I don’t think ripping people off is right. However ripping people off has been normalized for capital owners (including land lords).
Nobody should be wishing for his demise (compared to Blackrock and its kin, who I do think should cease to exist), but at the same time he shouldn’t be padded on the back for not ripping off his friend as much as he could’ve. What he did shouldn’t be normal.
He didn’t rip off his friend at all. He took just enough to pay the mortgage and save something up in case of repairs. That isn’t ripping him off. That’s doing him a favor since he charged him so little.
He could’ve given the rest money back to his friend after all the repairs were done. He chose to keep that money.
So given the equity to his friends?
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Dude, they explained perfectly well how they ended up with two houses. 2 people had houses, they got married and only needed one. They weren’t preying on people, it just happened to them.
That doesn’t change the fact they aren’t normal people. Most people would love the hope of ever owning one house in America, as a dual income household, much less two single people who are rich enough to have their own homes.
Yeah fuck that guy for being born early enough to be able to buy an $80k house via mortgage
So what, they should just give their house away for free?
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If they sold it they’d be scumbag real estate agents, since we’re apparently taking everything to extremes.
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Yeah but what if they ebded up separating with their partner? It just made sense to keep the property. Renting it out just covered the cost and made sure it was not empty.
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There’s a line to draw between exploiting tenants, and compensation for providing dwelling.
You might even argue the OP creates this ambiguity based on interpretation of the wording, or poor communication.
For a productive conversation, let’s be crystal clear where that line is drawn.
This is something I think gets left out, but understandably so when there are so many issues with landlords.
But, as a property owner, you’ve got all the liability and are responsible for repairs and ensuring that the property is livable and usable. I think there’s a level of compensation you can be earning from your time, but I think that having extremely high rent PLUS the ROI of your property increasing in value over time is double dipping. When you consider that your money is invested in property and you’re getting value that way, it IS leeching IMO if someone else is doing all the upkeep and paying a premium for that.
Looking at the OP that way shows that those people are just exploiting others. But I do think there is such a thing as ethical landlording. But I think generally we’re not there.
Not everyone is in a situation where they can or even want to own a house. Renting is much safer in terms of sudden emergencies. Water heater blows out in a house? Fuck you, 3k to replace at least. In an apartment? That’s a landlord problem.
So?
Someone who needs a place to live in and doesn’t have the money or doesn’t want to buy their own place. IMO, it is a fair trade as long as the landlord isn’t a cunt. The reasons to why they don’t have enough to buy their own place have nothing to do with a single landlord, some people don’t want to take roots in a single place. If you wanna go to war with someone, go to war with companies, ban companies on owning and renting places, not people.
go to war with companies, ban companies on owning and renting places, not people with that I can agree. But taking money is still taking money.
By that thought everyone should be doing everything for free.
Based
TBH I think you’re even overstating how lucrative it is for the average person. Most houses don’t double in value, most areas don’t rent for $1500 USD, most tenants don’t maintain properties well.
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Are hotels parasites too? When you lease a car, are the dealers parasites? How about short term rentals for traveling nurses. Are those parasites too?
If I own a house and have roommates, am I a parasite too?
Grow up man. Renting a home has advantages that people like me pay for.
The place I’m renting is in an amazing area that I would never be able to afford. My son goes to school in a nicer, safer area.
I can move out whenever I want to without worrying about selling my place.
When something breaks, 1 phone call and my issue is fixed.
I pay less than a mortgage and the money I save, I get to diversity my retirement/investment. Instead of dumping my entire asset in a home.
Are those parasites too?
Yes?
retirement/investment
Probably also parasitic
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It’s simple to be successful:
-
have rich parents that can give you money
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have easy access to loan programs because you’re white and have rich parents
Or have bought pepe right before it went to the moon.
Yeah I guess I left out “lottery winner”
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All so that none of their tenants can afford any of those four things without constantly struggling!
That’s because they haven’t seen that tweet from a money genius who invented the cheat code on life. You just need more money streams for more money. Who knew? Here I was, just sitting with a gazillian dollars stuffed under my mattress nor knowing what to do with them.
To be fair, they’re exaggerating in order to scam people. Not that many people paying actual double mortgage, especially if you count any kind of upkeep.
But that’s just another way of leeching.
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.”
Let me show you how I make X passive income, by selling courses about making passive income
Coaches selling training courses to train new coaches and then for consulting to grow their coaching business is a whole thing as well.
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.
Note: These types of landlords are renting it out at 3x the cost of their mortgage though.
What’s weird to me is that the first one pays for their vacations and the second one pays their mortgage. If I had rental properties I would do it the other way around.
Groceries and vacations aren’t even liabilities. Fella doesn’t understand accounting well enough to fake use it properly.
Born on third base. Thinks they hit a triple.
