IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing.
Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction!
North Carolina has done some good by loosening up code around tiny homes, but, a lot of municipalities want to enforce big homes only because they like the property tax of high value houses, 4 bedroom and all. Small town I'm in basically won't allow expansion of housing because the people that live here don't want the village to get any bigger, but if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it, it's when there's demand for housing and someone with a perverse incentive to block it that we should want to solve for.
They don’t create supply in any way, the only ones who do that are builders. But sure they maintain houses. Although just the bare minimum, they will never fix it nicely - just enough to rent it out.
For a house to be available for me to rent, both things need to happen.
Someone had to build it, obviously. But just as necessary, someone needs to offer it up for a rental.
Depends a lot on the landlord. Many will fix it up nicely because they can charge a higher rent. Much of my work is repairing rental properties and I've seen all types of landlords. I try not to work for the cheap ones if I can help it because I don't want my name associated with the crap they want me to do.
I spent over a decade living in various rentals after I moved to a new state. I didn't have the money to buy when I first moved, and even if I had, I didn't know the area well enough to know whether I would want to buy where I first lived. And having the ability to just pick up and move meant I had a lot of flexibility for chasing job opportunities. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to love about the home I own now, but it absolutely ties me down and anchors me in ways that renting never did. I for one am glad to have had people willing to rent property to me.
Like I said in another reply, I don’t consider landlords to be inherently bad. But there are a lot who will try to take advantage of you if you let them. You have to be lucky to get a good one - I only had a couple out of the dozen or so and I wish them the best.
A renter is someone looking to rent. If someone buys a home then rents it out they just +1 the supply of rental units.
A high proportion of real estate sales are owner churn, not the purchase of brand new never used before properties.
I just can't bring myself to agree with the hard-line socialists who think landlording is fundamentally a bad thing. There are a lot of problems with it, but it does have a legitimate place in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property.
Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.
The concept of "landlords do nothing while collecting passive income, therefore not creating any value but instead are just exploiting that they own the land" would be correctly described as "rent-seeking behavior".
Criticising landlords is fine, but words (and phrases) have actual meanings, and the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords.
They're orthogonal. In a competitive market, landlords earn no economic rent. In a market with supply restrictions, however, landlords will earn a return "in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production" [1].
This is almost never true. Leases come with a million stipulations, and they get to decide what you can and cannot do. It’s exclusive in the sense that the landlord can’t force other tenants on the place you’re renting.
Rent income is not wages, that's the critical part you're mistaken. Income and wages are not the same thing. Rent income is as much wages as Elon Musk selling stocks is to him, or a bank making income on interest payments. Renting is a business, it's income is business revenue, not wages.
There is this terrible view that landlords are "just like you and me, hard working regular people" - not that it's false, but so are the people that own mom & pops shops, or a local subway franchise, they're all business owners making business profits, not wages.
Business practices that harm the public should be regulated and curtailed. With taxis for example, the medallion system was used to limit the number of Taxis in operation. Similarly, not only should an individual be limited to (directly or via an ownership/shareholder interest in a company -- even with them or their family) a reasonable number of properties, but the number of rental properties in an area should itself be limited. Property owners can either sell houses, or sell condos and make income via condo (regulated) condo fees.
Food, shelter, health-care/medicine should be heavily regulated, if private parties take part as intermediaries between individuals and their food, shelter, health-care, they should expect lots of red-tape and limits. Ideally, the government itself would be driving these markets directly by building and selling properties, hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, etc.. that's not socialism or communism. That's just common-sense capitalism, everyone, especially the richest make more money this way. not only that their money will spend better this way.
The kind of capitalism we have now is a short-sighted parasitical money-grab. The kind where if fully realized, you'll build your own mansions and sky scrapers but you'd be complaining about the slums and crime nearby, how you can't get good help, skilled labor, and spend a ton of money on bribes instead of paying a fraction of that in taxes.
In theory, reaganism and trickle-down economics could have worked. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats. But in reality, it's more of the "scorpion and the frog" story. In this case, landlords can own a reasonable number of decent homes and make decent income, and then diversify the money in other markets. But currently, it's a race to become the biggest slumlord or until the markets collapse again.
This is completely false. This might be surprising to learn, but for normal car dealerships (not buy-here, pay-here or used car dealerships) a huge amount of their compensation rides on receiving holdback payments from manufacturers, as well as per-unit bonuses that often have cliffs.
Cash buyers paying invoice price are welcomed (if they aren't too big of a headache) because they push a dealership over or at least closer to the next sales-volume bonus cliff.
Holdback alone is worth more than any realistic origination fee.
> The kind of capitalism we have now is a short-sighted parasitical money-grab.
Perhaps they ought to be more careful when filling out paperwork. Or perhaps they’re not accidents.
Clearly you have never interacted with most land lords
Point is, in choosing to be a landlord and buying property, an ideal world would respond to this demand pressure by building housing, didn't mean to suggest the landlords themselves put on their hard hats and frame a new building. Just that they're also part of the marketplace.
Proof: Propose a 100% land value tax, which definitionally only removes that part of income that is generated by the community around their property, and see if they go for it.
Well sure, but it's good to incentivize looking for sources of wages other than (literally) rent-seeking.
Noone says it's nothing else. But rent seeking is a big component of it, you just focus on other minor parts.
In general, locking down some limited but critical commodity (e.g. land) is bad for any economic system. It doesn't really matter whether it's "Wall Street" or "your neighbor". A healthy economy is geared towards creating an added value.
I am trying to read this charitably, but it is hard to read as anything but: 'landlords do not add value'.
One thing to keep in mind. It might be that it's "democratic" in that all the homeowners are allowed to vote for or against the zoning policy (or for or against the local leaders who set zoning policy) but ONLY the local homeowners are allowed to vote. Those who rent (or who can't even afford to rent) live in a different district and aren't allowed to participate in the election.
If that's the case, then voting doesn't represent "the will of the people", just the will of those people permitted to participate.
To what extent, and by what mechanism, should the government of those two areas weight my preferences on housing policies in those areas? (I think it is properly exactly zero, even I say really, really want to.)
Growing municipalities kind of have to choose if they want to become bedroom communities or industrial/business communities and if they choose the former optimizing for rich people is the easy lazy not sticking their neck out choice and what does government employment optimize for if not retaining people disposed toward that sort of decision making.
What’d make sense for me is if a rental has a documented history of being poorly maintained, past some threshold the property can be auctioned off, with the proceeds going towards funding public housing. This should help filter slumlords and bare-minimum-effort speculators.