cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/18963881
Get rid of landlords…
Fundamentally the service you are paying for is risk alleviation.
Buying a whole ass property and putting a 20 year mortgage on it is a pretty big risk, home prices fluctuate wildly, shit can go sideways, things can break, anyone who’s ever had to suddenly face a situation where “You now have to cough up 10s of thousands of dollars asap or your home becomes condemned” understands this. It happens.
Renting means the landlord assumes this risk for you, they now have to be the one who goes bankrupt if the boiler, washing machine, dishwasher, toilet, sink, whatever suddenly shits the bed and now you have a small pond in your living room or whatever.
Renters get to have a home to live in, with many renters rights, but they at any time can just walk away from the deal and go find somewhere else to live.
If you buy a home, do you think you can suddenly go “ah nevermind Im not feeling it anymore” to the bank and walk away from your mortgage? No, it’s an assumed risk you are now chained to for 20 years.
You either have to find some other person willing to buy that risk off of you (sell your house), which is a HUGE amount of effort and requires lawyers and realtors and etc, or live with it.
Renters get to swerve all that and THAT is primarily what you are paying for.
Once you own a home you begin to understand how enormous some random bullshit bad dice roll can quite suddenly empty your entire bank account.
A pipe explodes? a bird decides to fly through your window? Your shower suddenly cracks? Your washing machine shits the bed?
You are the only person around who is liable for all that now when you literally own it, which means you and only you are responsible for fixing it. Hope you had the money set aside.
If you are renting? You call the landlord and they fix it and you dont have to pay a single penny
Every single day you spend living in the home is wear and tear on the facilities. You use the machines, you open and close doors and drawers, that adds up to non zero costs.
Do you think Air conditioners never break down from use? Fridge blowers dont suddenly shit the bed? Furnaces dont require yearly maint?
That shit is expensive and if no one lived in the building, all of it could be shut off.
This is all stuff you are leveraging onto the landlord when you rent, so yes, obviously that is worth a monetary value.
Insurance exists for a reason, loans exist for a reason, and the difficulty in selling a home is artificial because it’s treated like an investment that appreciates instead of a commodity that depreciates like it actually is.
Landlords buy bad appliances all the time, they are incentivized to, the cheaper the better because they don’t have to live with the consequences except for repairing it when it breaks.
In exchange for not owning anything in the place you live and having a fundamentally worse experience for it you get to pay someone else their mortgage AND their repair fund. You don’t take that into account. Renters pay for everything, we just pay it every month instead of in lump sum hits like an appliance dying.
Landlords do not provide a service, at best they provide living mobility which could be improved drastically if housing wasn’t treated like a private investment but instead a public service - so what little service they do provide is artificial.
The home is not the investment, the land is. Land is scarce, especially in desirable places. The home itself does depreciate and frequently drags down the price of the property, with new owners often tearing the place to the ground after purchase.
Renters do not pay for everything. Ask any financial advisor and they will tell you it is cheaper to rent than to own. It’s a very common strategy to rent, then take the extra money you save and invest it into stocks and bonds for retirement. In the long run, if your investments match the S&P 500 (not hard to do with index funds) then you’ll have more money than you would have if you bought a home (at national average real estate growth rates anyway).
You might point to some place like San Francisco and claim the people who bought houses there back in the 1990s beat the market. Sure, but that’s the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. You could just as easily have bought a house in Detroit instead. I would also say you could play the same game about picking stocks after the fact, but that would be beating a dead horse.
So why do people buy houses if they’re a bad investment compared to stocks? Emotional value, mainly. Having a place to call your own is important to a lot of people.
So why do people buy houses if they’re a bad investment compared to stocks? Emotional value, mainly. Having a place to call your own is important to a lot of people.
Also, of course, the same reason one buys anything.
If you own it, you can do whatever you want with it (mostly). Wanna repaint an entire room? No problem. Wanna tear down a (non load bearing) wall and move it? Easy. Wanna tear up the lawn and add raised garden beds? Call before you dig but aside from that, go for it.
Most of that sorta stuff of course isn’t kosher if you are renting :p
If you buy a house as an investment you need to work extremely hard to actually net positive. Simply buying a house and sitting on it is usually net negative (reminder that the price tag you buy the house at isnt how much money you pay, you have to account for all the extra interest you pay over 20 years, which is usually a solid +35% or more of the cost of the house)
So your house has to appreciate not only more than the interest you paid, but then even more to also beat basic blue chip stock rates.
Which is, at best, a gamble.
The main way you actually profit is if you renovate the house to boost its value. And that takes a fuck tonne of work. If you hire other people to do it, it wont be profitable, you have to do it yourself to have a hope in hell of netting positive.
So hope you are good at mudding and taping walls, cause you are gonna be doing a lot of it~
All that stuff is dirt cheap if you’re not obsessed with buying new and not completely useless.
Ah yes, used rafters, used walls, and used drywall… definitely something Ill go to the store and just pickup…
Sometimes you can get lucky at re-use stores and they’ll have leftover sheets of drywall from large projects, but those usually get scooped up really fast and you usually dont have the curtesy of time to wait around for when that happens when you actively have a giant hole in your floor or wall that needs to be fixed…
So you’re advocating that because tenants pay the landlord to assume the risk - they shouldn’t have to worry about anything related to the property?
So for example if the door buzzer doesn’t work and the landlord knows this and hasn’t fixed it because it doesn’t affect them - it’s okay to just keep the main door always open and let anyone squat and shit anywhere in the communal areas of the building because the tenants don’t have to assume the risk of the properties losing value because any potential buyer dislikes the smell of feces? Cool, cool, but then as a tenant what do you propose I do so my building doesn’t always smell like shit?
Imagine writing out something this unironically reductive and actually hitting the reply button.
SMH
No I mean that’s a real case scenario for me - what do you propose I do so my building stops smelling like human shit all the time? is suing my landlord the only course of action?
Ok, I refuse to read the whole thing because you’re wrong right at the bloody start. You can in fact sell a house along with the mortgage. It’s not a fucking risk. Finding another buyer isn’t that big a problem as the demand is fucking huge, unless you’re selling a literal dump, in which case you’re a monster for wanting to rent it out.
As for taking care of the place, there are countless companies that’ll rent it out for you, if you really don’t wanna deal with your tenant’s bullshit. Like what the actual fuck are you even taking about? If as a land lord you chose to go the extra mile to squeeze out every penny, you don’t get to complain about it being hard when there’s an easy way out.
You can in fact sell a house along with the mortgage. It’s not a fucking risk. Finding another buyer isn’t that big a problem as the demand is fucking huge
Tell me you’ve never actually sold a house without telling me you’ve never actually sold a house.
There’s a mountain of paperwork, legalwork, fees, hiring, back and forth, inspections, certifications… etc etc involved.
If you seriously think it’s “easy” to sell a property, you’re clearly way to naive to even be participating in this convo in a meaningful way, as you have demonstrated effectively zero knowledge on the topic of realty.
Again, there are companies to do it for you. All you HAVE to do is show up a dozen times and sign papers. Sure you might lose a bit of money in the process, but since we’re talking “buying house money” the so called risk is negligible. We’re talking the amount of money you could put on a savings account and the monthly yield on that alone would seriously affect how many hours you need to work.
THANK YOU. Tenants don’t understand how hard it is to collect rent so that you can buy other properties, so that you can collect more rent.
We alleviate the burden by using their rent to save up the money needed to buy real estate.
Your response sounds a lot like you didnt read a single thing written.
Its closer to “collect rent to pay for the constant deluge of random shit breaking down and failing”
Typically landlords dont actually make a lot of “take home” pay per hour, its a full time job. People seriously underestimate the enormous amount of bureaucracy involved in maintaining a rental space. Theres mountains of legal paperwork all the time. Every single thing that gets fixed has to be tracked and filed and entered in and accounted. Money has to be tracked very carefully so you dont get audited by the feds. etc etc.
Its not as simple as “call the plumber”, its…
“call up the insurance agency, tell them what happened, send a bunch of emails, get the approved in network plumber assigned to you, the plumber agency calls you, you confirm the time the plumber will arrive, they then fax you a bunch of paperwork to fill out, you fill that out and then file your own copies, you then send that back to the plumber agency, they send you back some more info, you have to copy and file THAT now, then you have to go find your notification of entry paperwork and make a copy of that, then you gotta go let the tenant know when the plumber is going to arrive and deliver them the notification of entry…” … “then on the day of you get further coordination, you have to drive over to the location and use your keys to let the plumber in, give them access to what’s needed, then make sure they fix it, then they give you even more paperwork to fill out, then you make copies of that, then you file all that, then you have to followup with the insurance agency and let them know everything is fixed…” … “Then later in the year when you are doing your taxes, you have to go find all that paperwork and make sure it’s included as part of your filing, of course”
All for 1 single plumber trip.
And realize every single time something, anything has to be done, the landlord should be tracking that shit, and you can pretty quickly see why it starts to become a full time job.
Yes I did. You pay for everything with the rent you collect. You are not protecting anyone from any risk.
Not to mention homes appreciate, which is why you own them, so any of these “deluge of shit to fix” that you’re supposedly protecting them from can easily be paid for with credit backed by the equity of the home.
Or just buying a new home with a warranty or an old home with deferred maintenance priced in.
Lol give me a break, a tenant is not going to be filing insurance claims every month. That’s like a once or twice in a lifetime thing.
If it’s not you’re not going to have insurance for long.
Yes exactly, do tenants really think they could afford to pay for a new A/C suddenly? Could they use the 50% of their income they pay us now in rent to fix it? No, they’re too stupid to do that, they’d just spend it on beer and avocado toast if landlords weren’t around to take it from them.
It’s the truth, did you earn the money you’re using to fix things, or did the tenant?
I’m not a landlord but in 6 months my furnace needed to be replaced (9k) and my sewer line need to be completely trenched and replaced due to root intrusion. (17k)
This isn’t beer money we are talking about
Whoever came up with this has never owned a house and has no idea how fucked up tenants can be
Yup, totally agree. Renters are ready to take advantage of anything you can offer. They will come into your house that you worked hard to rest up and they will wreck the bejisus out of it. Every weekend I was there fixing a clogged toilet, looking a wet floors and walls in the kitchen. Just looking at my first big investment rot away.
In the end I broke even and I got out of that business. That’s a single people sort of work. It feels much like changing people’s diapers. Like the renters I got blessed with were lazy lazy people.
But then what is said is very true. I bet they could not afford to own a house so they end up stuck having to pay most of their earnings for a place to live. It becomes this vicious cycle where they don’t care about the house and expect that the property will be repaired and always like-new for them. And unfortunately it’s just not. A house depreciates, gets old and breaks down the minute you start living in it.
My renting experiences were actually mostly positive. It’s the last renter I had that made me throw in the towel. My full time job takes me to a lot of high rise apartment buildings and I see what they go through. Most tenants are decent people but the few bad ones and their friends mess it up for everybody. I’m seeing very slimy property management companies from out of state buy buildings here because it’s relatively cheap. Crooked HVAC companies are just as bad. I wouldn’t want to live in most of the places I visit
If you can’t handle it, sell your property. No one asked you to be a landlord. You’re not holding up the world, you’re just a parasite.
It’s basic math. The tenant gives money to the landlord who gets the privilege of investing it. It’s one among the many one way cash flow systems of capitalism that cause this graph.
Ah yes, my mom who ended up with 2 houses after remarrying (her new husband was terrible with managing finances so they decided to give the house and associated debts to her), barely scraped by financially, is a social parasite for wanting to rent out that other house because her new husband, after decades of physical labor, had become incapable of working full time and needed a way to have income later in life. Always had at least one tenant that was from hell in their own way btw and ended up selling the house to not succumb to the costs. Renting it out only caused losses.
Ok, here’s an idea, get a company to rent it out for you, some even pay you while the place is vacant (for a bigger cut ofc). Or sell the damn thing and put the money into a savings account. Even the worst savings accounts will do wonders with the amount a property goes for.
Like I don’t want to insult your mom that has gone though hell, but that right there just seems fucking stupid.
Say what you will about landlords, but fuck this meme format.
It still amazes me how people think these posts are solely referring to your specific uncle who owns two houses and not corporate landlords who own entire complexes.
It’s even worse when those corporate landlords have stipulations in the lease about not being able to repair anything yourself or you’ll be fined.
Meanwhile the property falls further and further into disrepair because even though I’ve put in 4 work orders about it they don’t care because all they care about is green number go up. Or you’ll get “Yeah we’ll send someone over at the time you specifically told us you’re gonna be at work. Also you need to be there when they show up or we can’t do anything about it 🤷♂️”
If all landlords actually properly maintained all their properties we wouldn’t be calling landlords leeches. But more often than not they put in the bare minimum and call it good.
I’m referring to both. 80% of rentals are owned by mom and pop landlords. They’re a much bigger problem than corporate landlords.
If you have your landlord call the plumber and pay for the plumber and you expect that to happen faster than you could do it yourself(because you are working your own job), then it’s hard to argue that is not a value-added service.
If you break the toilet and now consider the property unlivable, due to a broken toilet, that isn’t the landlord’s fault nor the fault of the toilet. It’s your fault.
Accidents happen and your landlord should be cool about it, but it’s still your own accident.
None of this applies to natural causes like environmental damage, of course, but a lot of what happens to rental properties is caused by tenants.
If you don’t own it, it shouldn’t be your responsibility to repair it. The only circumstance in which you should spend money beyond the rent you already pay to fix something that doesn’t belong to you is if you broke it and your rental agreement doesn’t cover accidents. Homes require maintenance, lived in or not, and a homeowner can decide to neglect that at their own peril. If something goes wrong, it’s the landlord’s responsibility to fix it, not the person paying them for the service of having a roof. If they don’t they’ll likely lose a tenant and therefore income, so fixing their investment property is just required investment maintenance, the cost of doing business as a landlord.
I’m well aware many places have laws that touch on this subject, many of which have been heavily influenced by landlords.
I mean if something breaks due to normal wear and tare then that’s the landlords responsibility but if you flush a Barbie down the toilet or pour bacon grease down the drain it’s your fault. Washington state has laws mandating tenants to report certain damages or loss of power, heat, and water while the landlord has a period of time to get that repaired. If your loss water due to a damaged pipe it has to be repaired in 24 hours, who’s at fault and gets the bill can be hashed out later.
Really, do you think when you rent a car that you can drive it into a brick wall, and it’s Hurtz responsibility to repair it because you paid for convenience?
completely depends on the rental agreement. I encourage anyone reading this to find all the loopholes and exploit the ever living shit out of them.
If I paid for Hertz’s $7 a day insurance and it says I’m not liable for damages in any way, then fuck yes I expect to be able to drive into a brick wall and walk away. Landlords who are too stupid, lazy, or uninformed to protect their capital from the people they’re exploiting to grow it don’t get special treatment, their capital is fair game. It wouldn’t be my fault if Hertz sold me that coverage, and it wouldn’t be a renter’s fault if a lease agreement let them off the hook for flushing a barbie down the toilet.
What’s the last time you scrubbed the floor at a McDonald’s out of the kindness of your heart, just because some pee splashed on it?
This rent piggy has the right idea! You’re paying half your take home pay for the convenience!
There is if you have no way to argue against their point. It’s like yelling at someone to “win” an argument. It often works.