this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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I said they take property off the market, not housing. By buying it and holding it indefinitely, that property is no longer available for purchasing.
Yes, services. Services that an owner could very well get done himself/herself without the bureaucratic overhead of having to use the landlord as an intermediary to a contractor.
The only landlords that could get things done faster than doing it yourself are those who have contractors and supplies on call. In other words, management companies or multiple-property landlords—the same ones who are in it solely to profit from the lack of available housing in urban areas.
The property is still available for families who want to rent it. You take all the rentals off the market and those who want to rent housing will have no choices.
There's still many properties available to purchases. Having a mixture of some properties for rent and some of sale gives people choices.
Many people don't have the skill or resources to manage their own property, let alone pay for large expenses all at once.
You're conflating "property" with "housing".
We can agree that the land and building is still available as housing, but it's not property. The renter has no stake in the real estate. They don't own it. It's not their property, and their privilege to stay in it is subject to the terms of the actual owner—the landlord.
Sure, if you can afford an $700k apartment with a down payment of jack-diddily-squat because most of your income went to paying off some other guy's mortgage and topping up their savings.
While we're at it, let's keep pretending that people purchasing property for the sole purpose of rental doesn't artificially increase demand and drive up pricing.
If you don't have the skill to Google the number of an electrician or other tradie, I don't know what to tell you.
That's what a mortgage is for.
And therefore don't have to incur the burden of large expenses such as replacing a roof, a sewer line, etc.
If you want to cherry pick an example of the most expensive areas of the country instead of the more reasonable examples of a $70k single family house. But then the person buying the property is responsible for all the repairs and maintenance.
The lack of housing development with increased demand creates a housing shortage. When there's a shortage, pricing goes up. The United States is at least a decade behind where they should be in housing development.
A mortgage just pays the bank for the loan. A mortgage payment does NOT pay for repairs on the property. If the furnace goes out in the middle of winter, it's up to the homeowner to come up with the money -- typically thousands of dollars all at once.
If someone bought a house without doing an inspection, that's their own fault. If it's a natural disaster, that's why you have insurance. If it's expected wear and tear, you would have emergency savings to cover it.
At least as a homeowner, I know I can actually get it fixed before freezing to death. Can't say the same when waiting for profit-driven landlords to go through the script of checking it out themselves, finding some reason to claim its not broken, and then eventually pestering them for long enough that they do their damn job and hire someone to fix it in a couple weeks.
The median price of houses in the country is $420k.
I'm sure I could build a nice doomsday-prepper shack in the woods somewhere for $70k, though.
And you don't see how landlords—who are buying more real estate than they actually use—create increased demand?
I refer back to my first point.
Not everyone who owns a house has emergency savings. Not everyone is good at saving money.
Not sure where you're getting that false narrative from.
Or a single family house in a Midwest city. The United States isn't just the coasts, you know. There's a huge portion of land in between.
People live in those properties, they're not "unused".