What a benevolent lord!

To them the only kmaginable alternative is them still having the housing, but just letting it sit empty.

As mentioned above this person actually manages to be worse than typical parasitic landlords. She expects them to move whenever she decides she wants to live in the UK again for a bit...

Money rots the brain and the morals...

Tbh that's the reason she bought and rents it out in the first place, so I'm sure she's aware

I don't know how it is the UK, but usually there is a contract period and a minimum period to respect to break the contract.

When you added it all up I am pretty confident I spent about 8K USD on my last move. When she is done having fun her sefs will be out that money.

I had a sociopathic narcissistic ex-boyfriend who did that. He owned a townhouse that people were renting out, and when his wife left him and their house was foreclosed and he got evicted, he kicked out his tenants and moved into his townhouse.

HE KICKED OUT HIS TENANTS SO HE COULD MOVE IN 😟

I do not approve of this master/slave dynamic that the housing industry has created. It's inhumane, unethical, sociopathic,

It’s not a lack of understanding, it’s just that you’re omitting another huge group that is the other half of the corporation problem and also involves private landlords.

The person who owns a duplex and lives in one of the two units is not a problem. A business owner with a taxpayer above their storefront is not a problem.

But the large group of private landlords that buy up single family homes with the sole intention of turning them into forever-rentals are a huge problem and a much larger group than the niche private landlords you mentioned. These people don’t get a pass for doing the exact same things the corporations are doing but on a smaller scale. These people live in their own single family homes, which are financed by denying other people the chance to buy their own by removing them from the housing market and turning them into price-gauging forever-rentals.

I think you meant "HP did it with printers" but all told well put. There are worse and better cases, and some victimisers are also victims themselves

To be fair people like Mr Barber often are very supportive of zoning that prevents enough housing to be built and any measure which makes their property appreciate much faster than inflation is sufficient to eventually completely destroy the useful housing market for anyone who doesn't own.

You are absolutely right that corporations buying up all of the properties are the biggest problem, but I think the reason most people in this thread are irritated with the landlord from the OP is because they make it sound like they are doing the world a favor by leasing their own building.

Even if they aren't directly profiting off of the rent they collect, like say for example they are simply breaking even each month, they are still indirectly profiting by having an affordable place to return to whenever they decide they want to move back to the UK again. "Where would people live if not for me?" is kind of a ridiculous claim, because either the tenant would take over ownership of the property or another investor would purchase the property and take over the existing lease if that weren't possible.

That's the fun part: you get to de-home them with the full support of the law.

In their 13th property they own outright from landlord profits

Maybe at the same place they would go if he didn't rent out his appartement but still kept it for when he goes back?

Not for profit, there isn't. Profit as a concept in contemporary economics already doesn't pass the sniff test, but housing especially doesn't.

You are so brave to post this on lemmy

The issue is (the normal and accepted practice of) charging people "market" rates for something that is a necessity.

Like healthcare, housing market isn't free because the demand part of the market isn't free.

People tend to mistake choice (the amount of available products that do the same - eg 100 colors of the same 100× overpriced cornflakes) with free market.

You are not going to go live in another country to work there and be homeless. And, if you could buy the place instead of renting, ofc you would want to do that. Even if you dont have the full nominal amount of moneys, as long as your credit payments (eg bank financing) would be lower than rent (well, actually just if the interests payments are lower than rent), you are just losing money paying rent. Even in case of like a really long loan, if you decide to sell the real estate after a year, every penny that you paid to you borrowed nominal is now "yours again" since the loan diminished by that amount and the selling price is within that margin/about the same-ish.

The profit incentive of current owners (ie the ones that just happened to have the opportunity to buy that real estate before you did, or were even born) is the main driver for hiking prices/rents.

And all of the free actors on the market, which are owners that control the supply part of the market, have exactly aligned interest of charging higher rents (that consequently/additionally result in higher real estate prices bought as investments) ... guess where the market is headed. Not only at higher market prices, but also supporting other hurdles to buying real estate.

3rd paragraph is me. I rented the vast majority of my life. I didn't want to mow the lawn, shovel snow, clean gutters, fix/replace major items, eg: hot water heater.

Nope. Not interested.

And not having to take a big loan or have a lot of money on hand to live somewhere.

Similar logic to "job creators".

Imagine thinking this is an actual rebuttal. They can't afford buy this house whether or not she owns it. If they could, they'd buy it or one like it. They can afford to lease it because apparently rent there is lower than mortgage, I've lived in places like that, 10,000 a month to buy over 22 years but 1300 a month rent. You nitwits want to blame people doing ok for themselves when maybe look in the mirror.

This was my mom. It was the house she grew up in, not worth much. She ended up renting to a bunch of people over the years, way below market, and eventually let a family living there save up enough for a down payment to afford a loan to buy it from her. They're still friends with them and the new owners take good care of the place. My parents are much happier knowing it's being used well vs being landlords.

Isn't that just charging rent in turnips instead of money?

Like how, we screen everyone, rent mostly to old people and single mothers, and have camera in public areas and around the buildings.

ever since covid and this inspection bull, we get daily calls letters, emails from corporations expressing their interest in buying our not for sale property.

That's why. Someone's asking a "friend" to lean on you and make you sell so that a corporate landlord can consolidate more of the rental market.

I'll be honest, that building sounds like a piece of crap. Inspections are easy to satisfy if you keep the building up. First of all, not many building inspectors take bribes (even in Chicago). Second of all, the updates they ask for aren't crazy. Third of all, if you think the building inspector was bribed, discretely ask them about it as if you also want to bribe them. You can find out.

It sounds like you have some issues that they let you slide on before. Maybe the old building inspector retired during Covid and now you have somebody who'll actually enforce the rules. You have an old ass building with a bunch of old ladies in it. That's exactly what a run down building is like.

Oh, so you'll be able to inherit a house one day. Stop bragging

I mean, at least from a construction worker it sounds more like a badass boast.

"I MADE THESE WALLS WITH MY DAMN BARE HANDS!"

Ah, the "I am a smaller asshole, because others are bigger assholes (but I am still an asshole)" argument

I am so tired of the argument that "renters can't afford to buy the property."

Is the landlord making a profit? If Rent - Costs = Profit then the people who can afford the rent can afford the costs, and the money that would have been profit for the landlord can instead be savings for emergencies (that the landlord would have paid out of the same funds while still making a profit.)

stop!

If I'm understanding you correctly, I disagree. Homeowners aren't providing a service to renters by allowing them to live "risk free". The "risk" that a homeowner is incurring is the risk of becoming a renter, same as the risk that an owner of a company incurs is just the risk of having to become a worker.

The reason they're not able to pay for home ownership is because people buy homes to rent for profit. If poor people only had to compete on price with other poor people instead of with investors, house prices would go back to 20th century levels where you could buy one for 3x your salary.

As a poor, I'd be happy renting at an affordable rate from the state if the "rental income" was used to fund maintenance and development of state owned housing or plugged back into other social services like my tax dollars are.

I don't like private owners and private investors profiting of my need for shelter.

Yeah, the whole "what about people who want / need to rent because of their current circumstances" problem really is easy to solve.

Create a crown corporation (for those not familiar, a not-for-profit entity owned at arms length by the government) to handle all rentals, with a mandate to offer rents at a (very low) rate established by a formula that accounts for factors of property value (footage, amenities, location), population density and rental demand in a given area.

Then you make it so that only this crown corp is allowed to charge residential tenants rent. Anyone else who wants to make money off of their second properties and the like will have to sell them to the crown corp. Anyone like in the OP who wants to rent for some months of the year will enter an arrangement with the crown corp where the corp rents the property on their behalf at the rates established by the formula.

Who would rather pay monthly payments to a third party if they could pay the exact same amount but get to keep most of the money for themselves (ie in real estate ownership)?

Who do you think pressures local politicians to not allow more housing be built or more dense housing be built?

If parking in handicapped spots was legal, that wouldn’t make you less of an asshole for taking the spot, for the same reason it doesn’t excuse landlords. I have no idea how you’ve come to equate laws with morality but breaking the law doesn’t make you an asshole. Being an asshole does.

It's about the audacity to even state that last question.

I'm in a similar boat as that guy, I rent out my apartment while living on the other side of the pond. My only reason for not selling but renting it instead is that I was born into that apartment and plan on living there when senescence starts taking a grip on my body. I basically rent it out long term for utilities+upkeep cost and haven't raised rent in five years despite some crazy inflation going on in the country.

But never even thought of asking this shit ass stupid question. Sure, not everyone is meant to own property, especially seeing the sorry state the cleanliness of my apartment is in between the renters the last eight years. But I'm not delusional to think that there was no privilege involved in me owning that apartment. Unlike what that piece of shit posits.

Bro even Adam Smith calls out this behavior as negative.

If you want to maintain your own piece of property yourself, then go buy one.

I'm trying man, I'm trying. It'd be nice to not have to maintain someone else's for once in my life.

Most people would buy if they could. But too many are forced to rent because of those landlords cutting the queue and paying through their nose because to them it is an investment and not a home.

I mostly agree with this. I guess the argument against this is that if all rent-seekers just sold their properties instead of treating them as an income stream, then theoretically there would be more properties on the market and properties would be more affordable for those who want to buy.

To me, individuals choosing to sell instead of rent-seek would have such a small impact on the market, and those properties would just be bought by corporations that will rent-seek.

It seems clear to me that if we really want to fix things, we should ban corporations from buying single family homes instead of attacking working class people who are trying to build a passive income stream.

Not to mention we often have such an imbalance between renters and landlords, in either direction.

Either you have state law that heavily favors the landlords with no protections for renters against exorbitant rent increases, no enforcement of the land lord’s duty to the property on the lease, and no recourse for renters.

Or you have state law that heavily favors the renters, with no easy way to evict problem tenants, caps on rent increases that don’t allow the landlord properly account for risk, and no recourse against tenants who don’t pay or cause damage to the property.

Either situation leads to higher rents.