Does having an AirBNB setup make someone deserving of the guillotine or does that only apply to owners of multiple houses? What about apartments?
Please explain your reasoning as well.
If you own housing that you rent out more than you use it yourself, you’re a landlord.
If you rent out your house or apartment while you’re on vacation, I wouldn’t call you a landlord. But if you have a house or apartment that you only ever offer on AirBNB without ever using it yourself, you’re a landlord.
Btw, I don’t agree that being a landlord makes you deserving of a guillotine, but I do agree that we should limit the ownership of housing to natural persons, with a limit on how much space a person can own.
I appreciate a sane viewpoint.
Buy a second house, fix it up, then sell it OR rent it to help cover the debt and maybe generate enough income to retire early. It’s one of not very many ways regular(ish) people can reliably climb the financial ladder or not work until 75.
Nobody needs 40 properties, but I don’t see anything wrong with one or two. I’m not a landlord myself, but I’ve rented and owned and can see the appeal of a second property.
I can say that having only one rental… is not enough. We have started the process to sell our rental as we were only making < $1500/year on it. It just wasn’t worth it. But if we had had around 3-ish rentals then maybe it would’ve been better as they could better support one another. We charged a lot for rent, but, after taxes, insurance, near constant repairs, and now the threat of not being able to secure insurance (due to companies leaving the higher risk area that we were in,) it just isn’t worth the hassle for a single home rental unless it is next door to your own house, and you are doing the repairs.
My take is that 1-2 houses still isn’t enough. Especially if you’re trying to replace active income generation (jobs and such). Nobody needs 40 units (that would be it’s own property mgmt. job), but one or two is most certainly not enough. I could probably get by with the income of ~10 if a property mgmt company was supporting me.
The problem isn’t that people are trying to make money off of rentals, it’s that people are trying to make too much money off rentals by raising monthly rates to rent-trap level, and low-to-non-existent repair-rates.
Yeah I kinda figured that was the case but I didn’t want to sound like some rich prick that people here in the comments would like to eat lol. As I understand it, you’re just better off taking the interest off your bank accounts vs trying to swing a single rental. Flipping can work but it requires an amount of skill that not everybody has, especially if you have to hire contractors to do the work for you. But yeah if I were to do it, I would probably run straight to a management company.
It seems to me that the average “slightly above average Joe” could afford a second property; my parents are not wealthy (they are semi retired and generally gross less than 20k/year, but own all their stuff outright) but found a house to rent to my brother and I while we were in college and it was a huge boon for everyone involved. My family income is significantly higher, but we don’t have a pool full of money to swim in. From the outside it looks like real estate is an attractive, stable way to grow an investment as opposed to stock market dabbles.
As an aside, and this is all an incredibly “first world” kind of a situation, but I’m not sure how you address the bitterness of some circles (like maybe this thread?) toward the layer of people who got ROI on hard work: I’d also be a proponent of limiting legacy wealth and eating billionaires. I was in college for 15 years at a state school and worked 10 at a university before I made big boy money and got stuff on my own. Not everybody who has some extra money got it by lucky birth or by exploiting the masses and I’ve still got loans to pay, why not own some houses for people like past-me to rent and make a little extra for the effort? I guess it’s easier to see it this way from this side of the problem.
As an aside, and this is all an incredibly “first world” kind of a situation, but I’m not sure how you address the bitterness of some circles (like maybe this thread?) toward the layer of people who got ROI on hard work: I’d also be a proponent of limiting legacy wealth and eating billionaires. I was in college for 15 years at a state school and worked 10 at a university before I made big boy money and got stuff on my own. Not everybody who has some extra money got it by lucky birth or by exploiting the masses and I’ve still got loans to pay, why not own some houses for people like past-me to rent and make a little extra for the effort? I guess it’s easier to see it this way from this side of the problem.
I usually handle this by reminding people-at-large that landlords are not the problem. “Rent-seeking” landlords are the problem. I’d imagine that given the ARR-mindset of some of the larger players also contributes to the negative stereotype. Where the goal is not “Providing a Service”, but instead it is “Building Capital”, that’s where I start to lose interest.
I too, feel that if your annual income is greater than 8 zeros, then you should get a plaque from the IRS saying “Congratulations, you’ve beaten capitalism this year, now go outside and touch grass.” and everything above that is used to actually better society. This is what progressive taxes that were reduced 40 years ago were intended to do (Source: Effects of Reaganomics).
If you are owning houses just to use them as AIRBNBs, yes. Profiting off of artificial scarcity and already having money is bad. Being wealthy doesn’t mean you deserve to be more wealthy.
A landlord is a landlord, regardless of the particular lease terms. In general, they aren’t automatically good or bad. They’re just people acting as rationally as anyone else with respect to their material conditions and interests.
If you’re asking why they get a bad reputation, I think that’s also pretty straight forward:
- Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
- landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
- landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
- and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
Personally, I don’t think that landlords should be guillotined, but housing policy that’s accommodating to them is bad policy. We should be strengthening tenant protections and building new housing to the point that private landlords become practically obsolete.
and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
That’s kind of an interesting point. To homo economicus a house would be no different than a cargo trailer or a storefront, and could be rented just the same. To homo sapiens there might be some ancient territoriality at play, and you see things like the castle doctrine where trespassing is equated to a physical assault.
My landlord is actually a community nonprofit group that owns several units in our neighborhood. They do rent for the most part based on income. I forget the exact breakdowns but iirc it’s capped on the upper end at an actually reasonable percentage of your income so you’re not paying most of your paycheck to rent. Then my wife and I are on the low end because we’re on a fixed income. Before we got approved for section 8 we paid their lowest flat rate which is basically just enough to cover property taxes and maintenance which iirc percentage wise was a higher percentage of our income than their normal rate is but it still wasn’t crazy for us.
Then they use the excess to do things like update the units to make them more energy efficient, community organizing, etc. They’ve also bought out a couple of abandoned houses in the area and redeveloped them so people can actually live in them.
I personally don’t have a problem with landlords per se. Not everybody wants to own a home and deal with all of the maintenance and things that go along with it. I don’t even necessarily have a problem with them getting paid to deal those things. What I personally have a problem with is housing being used as
passive incomea free money cheat.
Your last paragraph was pretty much where I was a couple years ago. I don’t remember who helped clarify this for me, but housing maintenance is very much a real job and deserves the same respect and compensation as any real job, but it can very easily be disjoint from being a landlord. Making money from owning the housing other people live in is distinct from maintaining that housing, and just because several people do both things doesn’t mean that we should treat them as the same job.
Yeah I feel like that puts it into better words than I was able to.
That sounds exactly like a housing co-op, you’re usually part landlord in that situation as a member of that community (much like electric co-ops and worker owned business co-ops). They are by far the best type of situation for people who don’t want to take on the full responsibility of “owning” the house themselves as it’s spread out between all the members and the “agreement” usually is a 100 year contract. If it’s through the government strictly with subsidies etc I guess it’s more of socialized housing, either way those two don’t fit the description of a profit driven landlord that OP was suggesting above.
The only other form of housing that I think is legitimate in our dystopian future is Rent to Own where all rent is collected into an account which will purchase the house at a contracted set price (maybe add negotiations for remodeling etc but with outside mediators so no one is getting bamboozled). If you don’t want to help someone get into permanent housing, then don’t buy additional properties.
I don’t know if it qualifies as a cooperative. I know they’re a nonprofit and they’ve got a board that we can just join for some fairly cheap dues even for our fixed income. My wife was actually on it for a while before our twins were born.
There’s way too much money in the hands of the wealthy. What are they going to do with it all? Invest in the stock market. All the good investments are overvalued. All the bad investments are have been saturated too. What else can they do with all of that money. They gotta put it somewhere.
So they put excess money into real estate. So the price of real estate has been driven up so much that it’s over valued like any other avenue of investment.
The stock prices being overvalued isn’t good but isn’t something that’ll affect regular people. But their real estate investments being over valued? Well that real estate isn’t an investment to someone that simply needs a place to live.
And that’s the problem, the price of housing is priced above what the people what people outside of the investor class can afford. And the investor class wants a return on their investment in the overprices real estate (that they collectively drove the price up on) so charge a lot for rent. Of course maybe if people moved to another area that would put downward pressure on the rent prices. But AirBnB is there so if this happens they can still get income from that when no one can afford the insanely high rent.
So the overarching problem is the wealthy have wayyy too much money and are dumping their excess wealth into real estate and pricing people that just need a place to live out of the market. AirBnB isn’t the cause of the problem but it makes the problem worse.
One of many problems caused by the unwillingness to simply tax the wealthy.
Landlords are landlords. Rather than simply guillotine landlords forever, it’s better to have publicly owned housing. It’s not really a gray area, the system itself is fucked and should be abolished, but exists precisely because publicly owned housing isn’t widespread yet.
Doesn’t having publicly owned housing make the state a landlord effectively?
It can, but not necessarily. The issue with landlords is rent-seeking, if the state funnels all of the income towards maintenance, building new housing, or even lowering housing prices without taking profit, they have removed all issues with landlords.
As a landlord, their goal is to make profit. As a state, their goal is to provide a service.
Someone who hords houses.
If you have an beach house that you uses every year, and rents it when it’s not using or you have one second house that you got from a deceased family member… If you need to work to maintain this second house…
That’s fine. It will not cause a inflation on the house market, it’s not just an investment.
In my city (not in US), there are a booming market of very small apartments that rich people buy just to protect their money from inflation. As result, higher prices, less units available for the general public, and the new units that are available are terrible.
Billionaires have a completely different level of capital as the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and business owners who have $1-5 million in assets. I’m not going to fault somebody for being successful and using their money to buy capital to make more money. Billionaires are the only ones who should be named, shamed, and blamed. It’s an entirely different level of greed and exploitation, because it’s totally needless. It’s like you already won capitalism, but that’s not enough, no, you have to rig it so that nobody else ever wins like you did. Those people are so rich they can employ bot farms to throw fuel on the social media fires that keep us all hating each other instead of them. It’s pretty simple. Don’t trust anybody with a private jet.
It applies to anyone who has a property they only use to generate income via rent
Hotels are a gray area as they provide some amount of service
A landlord is anyone that owns a property, and rents it out, whether it’s commercial or residential, short-term, long-term, or even leasing land to hunters.
Landlords aren’t a problem per se. Think, for instance, of student housing. When I moved to go to school, I needed a place to stay, but I didn’t intend to live there for a long period of time. It would have been entirely unreasonable to buy a house or condo in order to go to school. I couldn’t stay at home, because my parents lived a long way away from any university. (Dorms are utter hell, as are co-ops. I’ve only ever had one roommate that wasn’t a complete and utter bastard.) You have a number of people who have the expectation in their career that they’re going to be moving from city to city frequently, or will need to be working on-site for a period of months; it’s not reasonable to expect them to buy either.
Then there are businesses. Most businesses don’t want to buy, and can’t afford to do so. Commercial real estate is it’s own mess.
Taxing landlords won’t solve the problem; landlords simply raise rents to achieve the same income. Preventing landlords from incorporating–so that they’re personally liable for everything–might help. But it would also limit the ability to build new housing, since corporations have more access to capital than individuals. (Which makes sense; a bank that would loan me $5M to build a small housing complex would be likely to lose $5M.) Limiting ownership–so a person could only own or have an interest in X number of properties–might help, but would be challenging for Management companies are def. part of the problem in many cases, but are also a solution to handing maintenance issues that a single person might not be able to reasonably resolve.
Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I’ve seen just how badly gov’t mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There’s very little way to directly hold a gov’t accountable, short of armed revolution.
I don’t think that it’s the simple problem that classical Marxists insist it is. It’s a problem for sure. I just don’t think that there’s an easy solution that doesn’t cause a lot of unintended problems.
The answer to this question is hugely region dependent, so you’ll probably get vastly different answers that are all still valid.
Where I’m from, we’re in a housing crisis. There aren’t enough homes for everyone, property prices have ballooned well beyond reasonable year over year, to the point that anyone under 40 will not be able to buy their own home in their lifetime unless they have rich parents or work very very high paying jobs.
In this climate, someone buying a house so they can charge an insanely high rent (because rents and property values are closely linked) is… I’m not sure what the word is, but they’re clearly more driven by personal gain than any sort of common good.
Airbnb is the same issue when you have such limited housing supply. Someone else isn’t in a house because that house is off the market for people to live. There’s a reason why Airbnb is tightly restricted and banned in many cities.
Now while your stereotype landlord might be a lazy, parasitic ghoul, the fact of the matter is people need to rent just as much as they need to own. If someone owns another piece of property and they rent it out and maintain it, it’s kind of difficult to complain too much about it.
I know people who have had fantastic landlords that kept up the properties, did proactive upgrades, and seldom raised rents. I also know people whose landlords broke the law many times by refusing to deal with maintenance problems on a timely basis, increased rent by the maximum legally allowed amount every year, and were quick to evict the tenants because “family was moving into the home” (they didn’t). You get a great mix of shitheads and good people in any market.
The people arguing at either far end of the spectrum can easily be ignored. At best they have an axe to grind and use every opportunity to engage in hyperbole to support their naive position. At worst they’re trying to manipulate public opinion for their own purposes. At any rate, the more extreme and absolute an opinion you read online, the more easily you should be willing to reject and ignore it.
Ok, but all that nuance aside, if someone comes up to me and asks “Landlords. Guillotine or no?” then I’m going to say “guillotine!” because there wasn’t any room left for a conversation.
The bottom line. We devised a system (note, it’s not some natural system, people made this) that allows a finite resource to be claimed indefinitely.
A developer comes and builds an apt complex, then collects rent on it FOREVER. The initial value they added to housing flexibility and additional housing expires, but the value they extract does not.
As available land disappears over time (which all finite resources do when being consumed), wealth inevitably coalesces to the owners. It seems fair at first, but it ignores what makes an economy work. It allows people to not work and extract value from others over time. It is not sustainable.
You can own an entire forest just so you can enjoy a stroll by yourself, while an entire group of people are left on the outside owning nothing. If you can’t use your land and block access, you’re hurting society more than helping.
It’s somewhat like an insidious monopoly growing slowly. Rent to own as an option is a much better system.
I didn’t think about how much rent-to-own helps this situation. Current rent prices would basically expedite the process and many more would have ownership much sooner. I like this idea.
Man there’s so much indiscriminate hate in here. I rent out an apartment to some tenants, and I rent myself, elsewhere. So I’m both a landlord and a tenant.
The rent I receive doesn’t even cover the cost of the apartment. I’m losing money on it every year. So I’m subsidising someone’s housing.
So why all the hate?
I like moving around so I’m not going sell and buy every couple of years.
Deserving of the guillotine? What? This question doesn’t feel sincere, and I wonder whether you’re really going to be trying to understand other people’s reasoning. I’ll bite though. We have enough homes for everyone to have their own home, but a very large number of people rent or are homeless. Big corporations buy up all the property and convert it to rentals so even those who can afford to buy property have a very hard time finding anything, and what’s available has jacked up prices. We’re talking people like blackrock. THOSE people can burn in hell, those people are taking advantage of every single person who rents from them. It’s a scale, you know. Blackrock is evil - my grandpa who rents out his old house is not, even if I disagree with the fact that he’s renting at all. Charging someone enough to pay the mortgage and give you a paycheck is well… I mean it’s demanding more money than what the property is worth from someone. They’d be better off without you there as a middle-man. At best you’re taking advantage of a small number of people, at worst you’re literally blackrock. There’s no reason a single person should not have their own home, because we already have enough homes to go around.
even if I disagree with the fact that he’s renting at all
Why do you disagree with this, out of curiosity? Having rental properties available is necessary. Not everyone can buy a home (not even taking the monetary reasons into account - think students, people on temporary work assignments, people who are in the country on a non-permanent visa, etc. - there’s plenty of reasons why someone might want to rent even if they had the money to buy.) If your grandpa is taking care of the property and his tenants, and is charging a reasonable price, what’s the problem?
Charging someone enough to pay the mortgage and give you a paycheck is well… I mean it’s demanding more money than what the property is worth from someone.
If the owner is on top of maintenance and home improvements and all that, and the difference between the mortgage and what they’re charging isn’t extreme, I’d argue that this isn’t necessarily true. If the mortgage is $1000/mo and someone is charging $3000/mo in rent, that’s excessive, but charging $1300 rent on a property with a $1000/mo mortgage isn’t unreasonable. Again, see the above reasons for why someone might choose to rent who had the means to buy.
It’s OK to expect a return on an investment, even if that investment is property. It’s not OK to take advantage of artificial scarcity to bleed people dry who have no other option, and to cut every corner that it’s possible to cut while doing so. That’s the distinction.
I take issue with the entire concept of renting, from the very core. A landlord is a middle-man between the person living in a building, and ownership of said building. The landlord having to to the maintenance doesn’t make living in a rental a better experience, it just means more dealing with a middle man any time you need something fixed. It would be pretty nice if I could just call a plumber when my toilet has issues instead of hoping that the leasing office actually sends a repair-man this time. It’s not fun having to pick up mail at the post office for ten months because the leasing office and the post office are arguing back and forth over who’s responsible for fixing the apartment mailboxes after they were vandalized. Rentals will charge you money every month for a pool you don’t want or use even though it’s closed 9 months of the year. All renting has ever meant for me, has been a complete lack of control of what I’m allowed to do in my living space, and a constant fear of eviction should something go wrong, and landlords that do everything they can to never repair anything, or maintain the property at all. But onto the individuals that rent out a house or two, they still aren’t adding value to living in a rental. All they do is sit in the middle and collect that extra cash on top. It’s not that they’re not doing any work at all, but being a landlord is not a job, and it’s not doing the people living in that space any favors. People can’t afford to buy because companies like blackrock are buying up all the property to make rentals, and upcharging all of the property. I’m not saying, either, that there shouldn’t be options for temporary living, but our current rental model is so very clearly not it. Do you have any idea how much it costs to rent month buy month? My 700 square foot apartment is over $3,000 on that plan.
So, who would people who only need to temporarily rent go through? A business instead of an iindividual? How is that better?
Public/gvt housing.
Deserving of the guillotine?
It only took me about 15 seconds to find this comment so yeah:
When AirBNB first arrived, I think we thought it would be a tool to let people rent a spare room in their house short term to travelers, with a built in system for reviews and reputation building to ensure that it’s safe for both parties.
Turns out it’s a platform that enables wannabe real estate moguls to buy up housing and convert it into unlicensed hotels for a tidy profit.