6 ms·

Forgive me, but I find it a bit hard to be sympathetic in a broad sense to the organizations that make their money from rental income.

jacoblambda 7y ago
As someone who has made an effort to build a connection with my landlords, being a landlord is not in any way an easy job. Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. This is doubly so in a rural university town where the seasonally renting(2/3rds of the year) population is anywhere from 10 to 30 times the size of the permanent residents in the surrounding area. Also more generally, the lack of university students in these rural university towns could potentially cripple the local economy for a long time. Many of the local businesses are only able to sustain themselves with the income they receive during the Fall and Spring semesters.
- clumsysmurf 7y ago
  > Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. Good landlords are hard to find. There is so much information asymmetry when choosing a rental property. They can get large troves of data on you, but the reverse is not so easy if possible at all.
  - q084yn39cptyth 7y ago
    Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?
- klodolph 7y ago
  Being a good landlord is not an easy job, but individual landlords (good or bad) are in the minority. The majority of properties are owned by PMCs, and the difference is larger when you look at MDUs or college towns. By their nature, PMCs are after profit, and improvements are an expense to minimize. The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. Why bother to replace moldy carpet, if the tenants don’t stick around to take you to court for it? Having rented from PMCs in the past, having worked in college housing, the idea that you would feel sympathy towards a PMC in a college town is pathological.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    > The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. I grew up in a tourism economy and absolutely hated it for this reason. Not having to do repeat business allows businesses to do all sorts of sleazy thigns that would have gotten around and had them out of business in short order anywhere else. Because their bad behavior never comes back to get them the scumbags can out compete the honest businesses for all the things businesses need so the cost of commercial rent, a plumber's services, tires for a skid steer, etc, etc, all reflect an income level that a business needs to behave badly to obtain. Eventually the entire local economy runs in a mode where prices are massively variable because everyone rips everyone else off as much as they think they can and you can never trust anyone you do business with to give you a fair price and a massive amount of time and effort is wasted on price discovery because nobody can trust that they're not paying some integer multiple of what someone else got charged for an equivalent. Deriving income from a large transient population is just an all around recipe for a crappy low trust society.
  - michaelbrave 7y ago
    Just to add to this, I attended college in a small town. Almost all of the housing was owned by people or organizations that weren't local. So almost all of the money that people thought was coming into the town wasn't.
baggy_trough 7y ago
Baffling comment. Providing rental property is a legitimate business.
- klodolph 7y ago
  Read more Adam Smith. In practice, PMCs in college towns are bad actors. At least, on average. They are basically sitting on an investment (land) and providing the minimum level of work necessary to keep money flowing. It’s a legitimate business in the sense that it is “legal”. However, the profits do not correspond to the value that they provide to the economy.
  - ColanR 7y ago
    > providing the minimum level of work necessary Is that how you measure the value of the business?
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      Yes, landowners and the maintenance they to or fail to do has massive impacts on the lives of their tenants. In an "as-is-where-is" state the only recourse when the roof leaks is to move out. That is expensive and disruptive, and you can't even recover the funds. This fantasy of shareholder value, where everyone takes care of himself, consequently everyone is taken care of is just that: fantasy.
    - klodolph 7y ago
      Obviously not—it’s not the amount of work done, but the value which the work provides. Landlords contribute a small amount of value relative to how much they are paid, compared to other businesses. Most of the value is provided by the land itself, and the landlords merely have a monopoly on it. So I am less inclined to be sympathetic to PMCs which are suddenly being paid less, since they are generally overpaid. We have to be careful to distinguish rent from actual productive economic activity, because rent provides no value and requires no work. Speaking here of “rent” in the Adam Smith sense of the word.
alexbanks 7y ago
Totally. Existing purely to screw over tenants in favor of maximizing profits by ripping off regular people. Adios.
corpMaverick 7y ago
I understand.Big renting companies are aweful. Individual landlords are different.

jacoblambda 7y ago

As someone who has made an effort to build a connection with my landlords, being a landlord is not in any way an easy job. Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. This is doubly so in a rural university town where the seasonally renting(2/3rds of the year) population is anywhere from 10 to 30 times the size of the permanent residents in the surrounding area. Also more generally, the lack of university students in these rural university towns could potentially cripple the local economy for a long time. Many of the local businesses are only able to sustain themselves with the income they receive during the Fall and Spring semesters.

clumsysmurf 7y ago
> Good landlords spend an immense amount of time on maintaining their properties and making sure that their renters have all their needs tended to. Good landlords are hard to find. There is so much information asymmetry when choosing a rental property. They can get large troves of data on you, but the reverse is not so easy if possible at all.
- q084yn39cptyth 7y ago
  Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?
klodolph 7y ago
Being a good landlord is not an easy job, but individual landlords (good or bad) are in the minority. The majority of properties are owned by PMCs, and the difference is larger when you look at MDUs or college towns. By their nature, PMCs are after profit, and improvements are an expense to minimize. The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. Why bother to replace moldy carpet, if the tenants don’t stick around to take you to court for it? Having rented from PMCs in the past, having worked in college housing, the idea that you would feel sympathy towards a PMC in a college town is pathological.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  > The nature of college towns mean that there is a constant supply of “fresh meat” in the market, often moving to or from other cities, further disincentivizing improvement or good behavior on the part of the PMC. I grew up in a tourism economy and absolutely hated it for this reason. Not having to do repeat business allows businesses to do all sorts of sleazy thigns that would have gotten around and had them out of business in short order anywhere else. Because their bad behavior never comes back to get them the scumbags can out compete the honest businesses for all the things businesses need so the cost of commercial rent, a plumber's services, tires for a skid steer, etc, etc, all reflect an income level that a business needs to behave badly to obtain. Eventually the entire local economy runs in a mode where prices are massively variable because everyone rips everyone else off as much as they think they can and you can never trust anyone you do business with to give you a fair price and a massive amount of time and effort is wasted on price discovery because nobody can trust that they're not paying some integer multiple of what someone else got charged for an equivalent. Deriving income from a large transient population is just an all around recipe for a crappy low trust society.
- michaelbrave 7y ago
  Just to add to this, I attended college in a small town. Almost all of the housing was owned by people or organizations that weren't local. So almost all of the money that people thought was coming into the town wasn't.

baggy_trough 7y ago

Baffling comment. Providing rental property is a legitimate business.

klodolph 7y ago
Read more Adam Smith. In practice, PMCs in college towns are bad actors. At least, on average. They are basically sitting on an investment (land) and providing the minimum level of work necessary to keep money flowing. It’s a legitimate business in the sense that it is “legal”. However, the profits do not correspond to the value that they provide to the economy.
- ColanR 7y ago
  > providing the minimum level of work necessary Is that how you measure the value of the business?
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    Yes, landowners and the maintenance they to or fail to do has massive impacts on the lives of their tenants. In an "as-is-where-is" state the only recourse when the roof leaks is to move out. That is expensive and disruptive, and you can't even recover the funds. This fantasy of shareholder value, where everyone takes care of himself, consequently everyone is taken care of is just that: fantasy.
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Obviously not—it’s not the amount of work done, but the value which the work provides. Landlords contribute a small amount of value relative to how much they are paid, compared to other businesses. Most of the value is provided by the land itself, and the landlords merely have a monopoly on it. So I am less inclined to be sympathetic to PMCs which are suddenly being paid less, since they are generally overpaid. We have to be careful to distinguish rent from actual productive economic activity, because rent provides no value and requires no work. Speaking here of “rent” in the Adam Smith sense of the word.

alexbanks 7y ago

Totally. Existing purely to screw over tenants in favor of maximizing profits by ripping off regular people. Adios.

corpMaverick 7y ago

I understand.Big renting companies are aweful. Individual landlords are different.