No being a landlord is a good thing.
mke_geek
joined 1 year ago
It's not exploitation because people have a choice of where to live. There's hundreds of rentals in any given area and millions of rentals across the country. There's not just one place for people to live. There's also the option of living with family or friends.
No, McDonald's only provides food for those who choose to buy it. Not everyone eats at McDonald's.
Rental property owners aren't leeches. Leeches are the tenants who use the service the landlord provides and don't pay for it.
The homeowners who let their house rot because they couldn't afford to fix it or they just didn't care? There's been so many foreclosures that were blights on the neighborhood until investors bought them, fixed them up, and rented them to families who wanted a nice place to live.
emergency savings
Not everyone who owns a house has emergency savings. Not everyone is good at saving money.
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.
Not sure where you're getting that false narrative from.
I'm sure I could build a nice doomsday-prepper shack in the woods somewhere for $70k, though.
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.
And you don't see how landlords—who are buying more real estate than they actually use—create increased demand?
People live in those properties, they're not "unused".
"Providing" = making available for use
Again, there's no hoarding.
The article you linked is misleading. Houses are vacant for various reasons. Some are temporarily vacant:
- some are undergoing renovations
- some are between tenants
- some are for sale
Some are more permanently vacant because they're in such a state of disrepair that they can't be lived in.
Rental property owners rent out properties, which keeps people housed and off the streets. However there's been a lack of housing development over the past decade in the United States which leads to a housing shortage.
When someone is on a lease, the rent amount cannot increase during the lease period. At the end of the lease period, the person is free to move somewhere else.
Paying rent is trading money for a service.
Owning a property means shelling out money, sometimes unexpectedly. The furnace goes out in the middle of winter? Better fix that quick. Don't have the money? Let it get to freezing now your pipes burst and that's just thousands of dollars more to spend on top of the thousands of dollars to replace the furnace.
Home Depot is just one example. Any other example works.
People can grow their own food but choose to use the grocery store. The grocery store charges more for the food than they pay for it, because they're providing a service.
Pharmacies sell medication and people buy from them. They are providing a service of having all the medication in one place.
People trade money for goods OR services. That's how the economy operates.
They don't own it.
And therefore don't have to incur the burden of large expenses such as replacing a roof, a sewer line, etc.
if you can afford an $700k apartment
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.
doesn't artificially increase demand and drive up pricing
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.
That's what a mortgage is for.
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.
That's incorrect. Houses need maintenance. They are not self healing. Things break, items need replacing, grass needs to be cut, light bulbs need to be changed, etc. Tenants also need to be managed.