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
I think people that are arguing bigger rent increases that happen less often are bad are assuming tenants are stretching their housing budget to the max and won't be able to afford the large hikes. In which case they wouldn't have been able to afford it with smaller increases either.
It is well known that most people can not afford significant sudden expenses. I think the inability of some folks here to recognize how bad a 4 year rent hike can be have the privilege of not being in that group.
Note this works both ways. If the market goes down, if no one wants to live there anymore, tenants have a lot of room to negotiate. Vacancies are expensive and the hassle of getting a new tenant is not something many people want to handle even in good conditions.
I also contend that not all markets make this easy. I rent a single family home in a town of 4,000. This is not a super liquid market. There are not a lot of good comps - my house is a block from the town’s best park, and walking distance to the small downtown. On the other side, it is a substantially smaller lot than the average house. There are essentially zero houses that are equivalent, and I have to do a lot of digging (including calling up other folks I know that are landlords) to figure it out.
My tenant is not on the verge of financial collapse. They’re a manager at a local business, they probably spend about 20% of their gross pay on rent. They have demonstrated an ability to absorb the bump without issue.