Before, the tenant was happy because they got below market rent for 4 years, and I was happy because I could defer pricing work without long term penalty or risking a move-out during an already busy year. This new law will likely result in my tenant paying more, and me working more at times I don’t want to work.
It’s not the end of the world, it’s just one more annoying piece of red tape that doesn’t seem to help anyone.
You are doing no one any favors except short-term renters who never get an increase. In other words, your so-called benefit is actually a detriment to long-term renters.
Unclear on why doing it all at once is worse than doing it regularly and extracting more rent in the period in between. Is the theory that they will be unable to adjust their budget in 60 days?
Let's say the rent is $1000/month (for simplicity). That's $12000/yr in the first year. If you increase the rent by 12% ever 4 years they'll have 3 years of paying $1000/month, followed by a 4th year of $1120/month and so on.
If you instead raised it yearly by 2.87%, which give-or-take is the same as a 12% one-off increase we can calculate the net rent paid over the period in the two scenarios:
$1000*12*3 = 36000
r=1000;x=1.0287;
(r*x^1*12)+(r*x^2*12)+(r*x^3*12) =~ $38106
The result is that by deferring rental increases you've given your tenant a benefit of $2106, and we can safely assume the rent is a lot higher than $1000/month. I.e. every month of the rent not keeping with market increases is more money for the piggy bank.No, the market kicked out most tenants. The tenant should be expected to also monitor market prices for their rental and know automatically when they're getting a deal or when to expect an increase.
"The market" is not an entity with its own volition, and speaking of it as if it were obscures the reality that it's comprised of individuals and collectives making individual or collective choices about what to charge and what to pay.
The tenant still gets below market rent for 4 years, you and can defer pricing work for as long as you want without penalty or risking a move out during a busy year.
I think you might be overly worried for your situation. Your 12% example is an amortized difference of at most 1.5% compared to the new 7% cap (1.12yroot3 vs 1.07yroot5).
It also may change the equilibrium behavior, because it upsets a social norm and affects landlords' estimations of what other landlords will do.
It’s not a lot of work, but my FT job isn’t being a landlord, and we’re talking about a property that nets maybe $8k/year. It’s been a better rate of return than the stock market, but the alpha is small relative to my SWE salary.
I guess another possible outcome of this is pushing marginal small landlords out, or pushing them to use property management firms since the fees possibly start making more sense. Neither of these seem like good outcomes to me.
$1000 +7% = $1070, $1070 +4% = $1112.80
$1000 +12 = $1120.
Increase by 7% followed by an increase of 4.67289719626168224299065420561%.
The point is that the 12% hike every 3 to 5 years can be accomplished over the same time frame because the max the law allows for is 22.5043% in 3 years and 40.25517307% in 5 years.