They should see it as a job, and maintain their damn properties.
I am a condo super and constantly have issues with these multi unit owners who rent out, as their tenants call me about every broken fixture and I have to remind them that their landlord is their super, not me. I only take care of the common areas.
Landlords don’t realize that their job is to be the property manager, super, handy man and administrator for the property they rent out. They’re not just supposed to sit on their ass and collect a check.
I looked after a house that my brother owned while he was out of the country for a few years. The first tenants were a group home that destroyed the place so much we had to gut the drywall and they never paid the rent until I hounded them endlessly every month. Every month.
The other tenants were just regular families and pretty good for the most part.
I would say I was dealing with something related to that house all the time. Every three weeks for stuff. Leaky faucet, roof shingle gone, branch fell on the lawn, sewer backed up. Big and small, all the time.
And they always called late at night or very early in the morning. This was before texting and email was common, etc.
My brother was paying me to do this, I would have done it for free but he insisted, but I was so glad when he sold that place.
I dealt with everything promptly. A family friend ran a property mgmt business and his crews did all the work promptly and billed us direct. People still always seemed annoyed and dissatisfied. Never again.
I’m somewhat “glad” I’m not renting a place owned by some rich chucklefuck, but one owned by a company. I know, sounds weird, but at least my rent money is going to something useful, since they employ their electricians, plumbers etc., hire a cleaning firm to clean the stairwell, and have a website where I can report problems, look at my energy consumption, stuff like that.
You rent from a responsible company it sounds like. In my part of the country, there are a few massive companies that own a large amount of property and do fuck-all, have no online portal for anything, take weeks to deal with things like leaking pipes and such. I’m newish to the state so I’m not sure how they get it away with it legally but I’ve heard a lot of horror stories from these companies. I rent a place now from some rich dude for a very reasonable price, he owns a handful of properties and they do well on the maintenance and everything, it definitely depends.
I think the main money maker isn’t rent. It’s owning (or at least having a mortgage on) property that doubles in value every ten years.
The rent often just pays for the mortgage and upkeep. The main payday comes when they sell it all off to the next parasite.
Whenever I do the math on buying a multi-family, I find you’d either not be breaking even or barely breaking even with the mortgage, insurance, and taxes by charging market rent. The current landlord is basically claiming future rents as his own when he sets the asking price at level that takes all of the current market rent price for himself.
If you buy the property and want to have enough to do repairs / renovations and cover unexpected risks like tenants that can’t pay and won’t leave, you HAVE to go up on rent, otherwise you will go broke and lose the property.
Maybe there was a golden age when being a landlord meant instant cash flow and money making opportunities, but I find most of the stuff on the market today are just people looking to cash out all future value in the property and assuming the next landlord will basically just jack up rent to cope with the high cost of that cash out.
Being a landlord is pretty risky. You could end up with a bad tenant that ruins your property or won’t pay and won’t leave. You also are responsible for costly repairs and renovations that can have long breakeven timelines. You have to cover that cost some how, and that is by charging rent. Who would assume that risk without a reward?
That’s how it should work, but home hoarders want an income from rent and so the system doesn’t work.
I disagree. Property prices should not be spiralling out of all sanity at the rate it’s doing, especially in city areas.
That’s what’s causing people to buy them, because it earns more than stocks and shares.
Bricks and mortar should never have been viewed as an investment.
Real Estate long-term ROI - 4% per year
NASDAQ long-term ROI - 11% per year
It’s about diversity, and the various tax advantages to owning the property/business/etc.
Good luck getting 11% a year in the stock market. I think your stats include the pandemic and I don’t think we’ll see increases like that again, at least we can’t count on it.
It really depends on the nature of the rental and your area. If instead of building a house you build 4 closely stacked duplexes and charged each one double what the mortgage would be you’d definitely make money, but you’d also be an extortionate leech. In my area someone built 4 nice duplexes on a double lot (probably around 1.5 acres) and is now renting them at $1800 each. The land was probably less than $55k and the cost of construction was likely less than $1 mil. At 5% interest on a 30 year loan their monthly payment would be $5,600, but they’re bringing in $14,400 per month.
$1800 for rent is an extortionate price in my area (it’s big city apartment rental prices, with a pool and gym), even after interest rates went up.
On the other hand, I knew a couple who were landlords for nearly 20 years. They rarely raised the rents and even in 2022 they were still charging <$1000 per month for a full house because that paid the costs and for them it was an investment, not a source of income.
They finally sold their rental homes and made about $70k over what they originally paid on each house. Doing the math that comes out to be a roughly 8.5% annual percentage return without counting the rent gained each month. That’s a fairly solid investment without being a sucky person.
Well for a couple reasons.
- I don’t have a million dollars
- I couldn’t qualify for an investment loan worth a million dollars without making some really poor/speculative decisions
- Being a full time landlord is super profitable and trouble free until it isn’t. If you get some troublesome tenants your sweet business decision can become a freaking nightmare.
- This estimate doesn’t include taxes or insurance
- I think these rental prices are outrageous and I’m surprised anyone agreed to them. Not sure who these people are, but someone took the deal. Maybe there was some sort of arrangement so that they didn’t pay the listed rental price (like x number of months free, waived deposit, etc).
- I wouldn’t be surprised if the owner is overleveraged unless they were already independently wealthy or they got in before the interest rates went up.
For a while between 2020 and 2022, if you had your home paid for, you could take a mortgage out on that property and invest that money and make more money on the return on investment than the payment for the mortgage and the taxes owed on your profits. That’s how low the interest rates were for a while. I have a coworker who refinanced his house for 2% on a 30 year fixed rate, inflation is generally higher than his interest rate. Doing that sort of thing, taking a loan out on one house to invest with, is stupidly speculative but I wouldn’t be surprised if people did it.
It’s hard to get a good return on your investment in residential real estate without using leverage.
For instance: You don’t buy one place outright. You buy 5 with 20% down. You may not have positive cash flow, but at long as it isn’t negative not only do you get all the increase in value, you also get more equity every month as the tenants pay your mortgages.
If you bought it outright and over some period of time the tenants have paid your entire investment and the price of the property doubles, you doubled your money. If you buy 5 and over some period of time the tenants pay your mortgage and initial investment and the properties have doubled in value you have increased your initial investment 10X. And before the big expensive renovations come in, you can sell and buy something else if you’re not equipped to deal with that.
Also if you are just breaking even to get free property but you want to start getting passive income, after a few years you can refi to a longer term and lower your mortgage payments to get in the black every month.
This isn’t advice, fuck anybody buying up single family homes to rent, just showing one way they can generate both wealth and passive income for nothing. Literally nothing if they’re using a property management company.
Fuck anybody buying up single family homes to rent. I know I already said that, but it bears repeating.
That’s how a mortgage works. But the point is that after those 30 years you have a million dollar asset. That you had your tenants pay for.
For a regular plebs like us that’s not a winning proposition because we can’t have our money tied up for 30 years but for people who don’t need their money liquid, it’s free real estate
Sure, but I think this example also commingles labor with ownership (as is often the case).
Like you said, your plan involves building a four-family home. That’s labor and worth fair remuneration. It’s just that, in order to get that remuneration you’d be taking payment from tenants who build no equity for their money. Yeah, you’ll have to renovate in 30 years, but you’d still have property and the money paid in rent while they don’t.
A landlord can also simultaneously do valuable work supervising and managing a property. That’s not mutually exclusive with profiting from ownership, and we can separate how we evaluate the two. It even comes up with billionaires: Bill Gates obviously did work worth payment as CEO of Microsoft, it’s just not where he got most of his fortune. It can simultaneously be true that he’s a talented guy who deserved to be paid, but most of his fortune came from exploitative business practices and profiting off of the labor of others.
Also, to be clear, there’s a difference between structural and individual criticism. Obviously slumlords are pieces of shit, but there’s a difference between that and someone who really does work as a property manager doing right by their tenants, or a family renting out a part of their home to make ends meet. I can think that landlords should be judged on an individual basis, while landlording as a thing shouldn’t exist.
Guidelines for buying rental properties say they should pay off in 10 years.
Buying here is cheaper (1600 per sq meter in the commie blocks part of the city) and rent is about the same. Outside of those blocks you’d usually get copper and no real insulation, with street parking. A brand new apartment in a nice place might net you 15-20 eur per square meter.
Of course, I live in the ass end of Europe where wages are half of what they are in the west so it makes sense our rents, food costs, etc are higher. The peasants shouldn’t have too much to their names.
Tenants also pay any loans associated with the apartment building repairs, or the repair fund collection, not by law but because apartments are in demand and tenants are not. The law actually says it’s the responsiblity of the owner, but there’s literally nothing saying that responsibility can’t be shifted.
I’m not sure what you used to calculate it, but it definitely isn’t only “expensive cities with inherited properties”… I did the math on the last house I rented: lived there for 8 years. It was a duplex in a city in a very cheap cost of living state. Just my rent alone for those 8 years more than covered what the entire duplex was purchased for 3 years prior to me moving in. That means if both sides were occupied, which it was for all but 1 month in the 8 years I was there, it’s paid for in full in 4 years. Even if you “have to renovate” in 30 years, hell even 15 years, you have 10 years of pure profit even after considering insurance and property taxes and probably even maintenence costs…
Maybe your area doesn’t have high demand for rentals or you under-valued your rent price, but there wouldn’t be so many people doing it if it wasn’t profitable.
The big money’s isn’t in the rent, the rent is just to pay the mortgage and upkeep. It’s that you’re getting in debt that someone else is paying for you while they gaurd your asset which is only gaining in value, you then sell that somewhere in the futute.
On average, the same amount of money dropped into the NASDAQ will have much better overall returns. Real estate ROI is about 4% per year, where the stock market has held close to 11% over the long haul nearly a century.
For small-time landlords, it’s often about “I have a place for me or a family member to live if things go bad”. For bigger ones, it’s the tax-shelter and the low volitility of real estate, as well as diversity in case you need to sell when their stock is down.
I’m on your side mostly but the property prices going up in those 30 years would net you a fortune alone. You could likely sell it as is and triple your money
Well yes it would but not entirely.
The old saying ‘buy land because they aren’t making anymore of it’ is true. As the world population grows, owning large amounts of land will be scarcer and scarcer. Most young people can’t afford a home in any western nation across the world and it’ll only get worse the world over as time goes on and the population continues to grow.
Being a landlord isn’t a way for someone who doesn’t have wealth to acquire it. It’s a way to park your existing wealth in quickly appreciating assets preferably purchased from other losers when they lose their asses and collect monthly rent too.
If on day one you have 700k and you purchase an existing property and in 30 days after you rent it out your property is still worth 700k and you are now ahead of the game in 30 days not 30 years.
If you purchased at a reasonable time a year later its worth 750 and you’ve collected 84k 1% of property value per month.
Most owners are in the top 10% to start with.
quickly appreciating assets preferably purchased from other losers when they lose their asses and collect monthly rent too.
I wouldn’t say quickly appreciating, though. It’s a fairly slow growth rate for someone with that kind of money. They diversify into real estate because it creates some tax protections (your costs) and it’s fairly stable. Like buying into a terrible small business, but one that magically won’t fail. The things that could cause total loss to real estate are usually handled in standard insurance, unlike a business that can just tank.
The thing is, as you and the other person said, it’s all about the big companies who own tons of real estate AND the big companies that manage rental properties.
My landlord’s two brothers who inherited a bunch of properties from Daddy. One of them lives in Scottsdale and the other in Hawaii. It really gets my goat knowing that 1 out of every 3 dollars I make goes to some overprivileged daddy’s removed boy. I probably pay their golf membership or marina docking fees.
Thats the american dream isnt it? To be exploited until you do the exploiting? God I love America
What’s the problem? If you don’t buy a house you need to rent one, houses aren’t free. Yeah those owners never worked for it, but isn’t that the case with every rich kid? Why don’t you buy a crappy house you can fix up yourself?
Landlords do a lot! They own the house. They move your money from your account to their account. And once in a while, they spend some of your money on fixing the sink that you pay them to use.
Better than the neighbors from where I grew up turning their land into two big trailer parks.
It used to be a nice little place, just out of town right off the main road. We never even really had to lock our doors. Later on, shitheads from the trailer parks would break in, steal anything not nailed down, made the whole area crap.
One of the landlords had their house broken into when she was staying with her husband at the hospital for a couple days. Complained that the trailer park people don’t pay and just hitch and leave if you try to force anything.
Still has the trailer park going strong over a year later.
People who use their property are distincly less of a blight on society than those that just own stuff.
And all it cost was everybody else’s peace of mind, windows, and property.
Step 1: have an extra house
Step 1: Use the equity you’ve built up in your primary dwelling to put a down payment on a second house, which you can rent out. Congratulations, you now have a second job to fill your evenings and weekends.
Step 2: Hope like hell you get a decent tenant who pays the rent on time and doesn’t destroy your property.
Step 3: Pay all of the taxes, mortgage payments, maintenance costs, repairs, legal fees, etc., which the rent will just barely cover. Of course, most of the mortgage payment goes to the bank as interest.
Step 4: Keep crossing your fingers that you don’t rent to someone who will destroy your property, fail to pay rent, sue you, or cause any other major headaches.
Step 5: After 20 years of doing this, you have now paid off that second house. Yay!
Cool, now try being the renter who paid off your mortgage for 20 years and has nothing to show for it.
The system is exploitative to both sides if they have low capital. The only winners are the capitalists who already have more than enough.
I agree there is a problem where people that rent and want to own can’t because of affordability. However, renting is less risky. Renters aren’t on the hook for major problems with a property. Imagine a leak goes undiscovered and causes major damage and mold to your apartment. What do you do as a renter? You move out, find a new place, and maybe even sue your landlord for damages and health impact.
What does your landlord do? Try to find enough money to cover the repairs, vacancy, and hire a lawyer.
Let’s not act like renting isn’t without its benefits. I think the factor most people overlook when they think about owning property is RISK. Risk means you could lose something or be liable. Renters have limited risk. If you’re taking on risk, you should be rewarded for it, otherwise you wouldn’t do it. Also, the reward is supposed to make you resilient to risks materializing. If the reward isn’t big enough, then when a risk materializes into a real problem, you won’t have enough capital to recover from it and you’ll go bankrupt.
Who rents for 20 years and then acts all surprised that they don’t own the house? If your end goal is to own a house, start by buying a house. If you can afford to rent and pay off someone else’s mortgage then you can certainly afford to pay off your own mortgage.
The problem is not the landlord. They made it possible that there was a house to rent.
The problem are other voters who prevent zoning laws that allow property that is cheap enough to buy.
If you are a renter, there is a big probability you move a lot, and buying is simply not so convenient due to your current situation. But it is unfortunate that many people also can’t afford to buy a house or apartment and are only able to rent. What are you, as a landlord, supposed to do if you are living paycheck to paycheck with the mortgage you took for the apartment that you rent ?
Using equity from current property to buy a new property? LOL
My friend, you are begging for pain… but appreciate it. Live that grind til you get repo’d
Don’t forget to leave the property empty if you’re not getting market prices for it.
Isn’t it fun how they’re are more empty homes than there are homeless people?
Isn’t it fun how they’re are more empty homes than there are homeless people?
That’s why rents are cheaper in Italy. House owners really don’t want their houses be empty, especially for a long time.
Why? Because if word spreads there’s an empty house, it will no more be empty the next week, and Italian laws make it very, very difficult to kick out squatters. Also, lots of damage.
Imagine trying that in America.
