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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 amou

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 6y 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 6y ago
  Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?
klodolph 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

clumsysmurf 6y 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 6y ago
Business opportunity in that current asymmetry?

klodolph 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.