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> The distinction between buying and renting a house, or buying and leasing a car In the UK you can buy a freehold house for £250k and that's it. Or you can re

> The distinction between buying and renting a house, or buying and leasing a car In the UK you can buy a freehold house for £250k and that's it. Or you can rent one for £800 a month, although that confers certain rights. But between those two, you can buy a leasehold house, which has obligations to pay a ground rent. You can buy a freehold house where you are obligated to pay a management company to maintain common areas. "Buy" and "Rent" are certainly not clear cut. With a car, I can rent a car from Hertz, or I can buy one for cash, or I can lease one, or I can buy one with a loan payment secured against the car, again there's no clear line between "buy" and "rent"

zabatuvajdka 5y ago
I think there is because “rent” and “lease” implies your intent is to stay there short-term. “Buy” says you literally are buying the home whether it’s with your money or someone else’s via some mortgage terms. With an Apple device it certainly is muddy waters because you purchase hardware while simultaneously in some weird lease agreement for the software. I guess it’s like buying a house in a gated community with very strict home owners association. You can purchase the house but if you want to put a new door on it you gotta go through the motions to ultimately get denied the color you want, etc. And if Apple was the association they’d have a neighborhood watch ensuring 8PM curfews.
- IanCal 5y ago
  > . “Buy” says you literally are buying the home As they said, with leasehold or some things with freehold it's not quite so simple. I used to have a leasehold house, which I "bought" but also sort of rented, or at least rented-ish the land while owning-ish what was within the bricks. I have a freehold house now, but there are restrictive covenants which technically govern what I am allowed to do to my own property (these are not council/etc permissions but private ones).
  - iso1210 5y ago
    Indeed, until recently I lived in a freehold house which had a covenant saying my hedge could be no higher than 4' high, couldn't change the colour of my front door, couldn't park a van on my drive, that I had to pay a specified private company money each year to do various things, with no say over that company. The term "buy", at least in the UK when it comes to housing, is a sliding scale.
    - alistairSH 5y ago
      It’s not much different in the US. Leasehold arrangements are less common, but still possible, particularly when dealing with “mobile” homes (that generally aren’t mobile at all once placed).
    - anticristi 5y ago
      I nominate Sweden to be the weirdest country when it comes to housing ownership. When buying a flat or a non-detached house, you usually fall into an ownership law called "bostadsrätt". In essence, you don't buy a house. You buy stocks in a housing association, which grant you the right to use the chosen flat/house. The housing association is pretty much run like a company, with a yearly board meeting, a CEO, a CFO, etc. Your ownership is proportional to the surface area you bought.
- iso1210 5y ago
  > I guess it’s like buying a house in a gated community with very strict home owners association So it is buying then.
  - beardyw 5y ago
    When the lease runs out it reverts to the freeholder, though often after a considerable period of time. So not owned forever.
- smichel17 5y ago
  In a home owner's association, the home owners are part of the association. You have to play by the rules, but you are also part of the body that makes the rules. In this case, the party setting the rules is more like the rich person who originally built and "sold" the houses (but still enforces curfew, and changes the rules whenever they feel like it).
alistairSH 5y ago
But those various ownership models aren’t buried behind 100s pages of EULAs. Or, when they are, you hire a lawyer to represent your interests in the purchase.
- SigmundA 5y ago
  Never dealt with code enforcement or a home owners association eh?
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    You seem to have missed the last half of my comment. And completely missed the main point - buying/owning a house can be complicated, so we frequently involve lawyers to represent our interests. Buying a phone shouldn't be so complicated. But, not only are EULAs overly long, they're often written in legalese which is beyond the comprehension of the average person.
tialaramex 5y ago
Leasehold houses are a crazy idea and the government should certainly have stepped in early as developers began selling the freehold (and thus the entitlement to receive ground rent indefinitely) as an investment. Historically most of these leases were "peppercorn rent" which means they had some notional requirement of rent to be paid, but you were not in fact expected to pay rent. But legally any consideration works, so if you can charge a peppercorn (as a legal fiction to make this a contractual arrangement between freeholder and leaseholder since cutting up the freehold was for whatever reason impossible) you can charge £250 per year. Or £1000 per year... Because the government didn't step in early and say "Oh, that's just an obsolete feature, you can't do that with it, we'll remove it" and pass legislation in say 2005 to set the maximum ground rent at a notional £1, the "investors" got bolder. They added escalator clauses, after all £1000 per year is a nice earner today, but it won't be much in a hundred years, so let's say it doubles every 25 years to account for likely inflation plus some profit. Actually wait, the idiots are still buying them, let's say it doubles every 10 years. And next thing you know, some of the people who "own" a house are paying almost as much rent as people who don't "own" a house, oops. Funny that the property owning, rich investor classes in the Tory party don't seem to be in a big hurry to actually fix this, although they do say it's a "Priority" (like everything else) when confronted. I wonder how much money Rishi earns every day from this "mistake" that he never got around to doing anything about as chancellor for example...
- mathewsanders 5y ago
  Never heard of peppercorn rent until reading your comment- as a nice coincidence I was reading a Reddit thread on weird NYC trivia that included a link out to this article of the Queen visiting NYC in 1970s to collect 279 years worth of back rent for Trinity Church (which was literally 279 peppercorns) https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/10/archives/queen-warmly-received-on-new-york-city-tour-queen-warmly-received.html https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/10/archives/queen-warmly-rec...
mikro2nd 5y ago
The dividing line between "buy" and "rent" can be as clear-cut as you like, or as much a grey-zone continuum as you like as long as it is spelled out clearly up front to the buyer. The problem is not that there are gradations of "ownership". The problem is that Apple (and many others) conflate the terms and deliberately obfuscate exactly what your rights are when you "buy".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smichel17 5y ago
The main difference between each of those scenarios and the one I describe is that we have words to describe them. From your post: freehold, leasehold, buy, rent, loan (and I'll add: mortgage). You don't need to read the fine print to know that these are meaningfully different. I'm on board with the idea that there's a lot of arrangements in between full ownership and pure rental, as long as we have terms to describe the meaningful differences.
- iso1210 5y ago
  There's a big difference between freehold on a new build estate and freehold on an older house, the former has various conditions attached. But in all these cases we use the word "buy" to buy the car or house, just like we use the word "buy" to take in posession of a slab of electronics
fennecfoxy 5y ago
Freehold for £250k made me laugh! But mostly cry. Salty, salty millenial tears.
- iso1210 5y ago
  Literally bought my house for £250k, completed 11 days ago. Sold previous house for £240k a few minutes earlier.

zabatuvajdka 5y ago

I think there is because “rent” and “lease” implies your intent is to stay there short-term. “Buy” says you literally are buying the home whether it’s with your money or someone else’s via some mortgage terms. With an Apple device it certainly is muddy waters because you purchase hardware while simultaneously in some weird lease agreement for the software. I guess it’s like buying a house in a gated community with very strict home owners association. You can purchase the house but if you want to put a new door on it you gotta go through the motions to ultimately get denied the color you want, etc. And if Apple was the association they’d have a neighborhood watch ensuring 8PM curfews.

IanCal 5y ago
> . “Buy” says you literally are buying the home As they said, with leasehold or some things with freehold it's not quite so simple. I used to have a leasehold house, which I "bought" but also sort of rented, or at least rented-ish the land while owning-ish what was within the bricks. I have a freehold house now, but there are restrictive covenants which technically govern what I am allowed to do to my own property (these are not council/etc permissions but private ones).
- iso1210 5y ago
  Indeed, until recently I lived in a freehold house which had a covenant saying my hedge could be no higher than 4' high, couldn't change the colour of my front door, couldn't park a van on my drive, that I had to pay a specified private company money each year to do various things, with no say over that company. The term "buy", at least in the UK when it comes to housing, is a sliding scale.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    It’s not much different in the US. Leasehold arrangements are less common, but still possible, particularly when dealing with “mobile” homes (that generally aren’t mobile at all once placed).
  - anticristi 5y ago
    I nominate Sweden to be the weirdest country when it comes to housing ownership. When buying a flat or a non-detached house, you usually fall into an ownership law called "bostadsrätt". In essence, you don't buy a house. You buy stocks in a housing association, which grant you the right to use the chosen flat/house. The housing association is pretty much run like a company, with a yearly board meeting, a CEO, a CFO, etc. Your ownership is proportional to the surface area you bought.
iso1210 5y ago
> I guess it’s like buying a house in a gated community with very strict home owners association So it is buying then.
- beardyw 5y ago
  When the lease runs out it reverts to the freeholder, though often after a considerable period of time. So not owned forever.
smichel17 5y ago
In a home owner's association, the home owners are part of the association. You have to play by the rules, but you are also part of the body that makes the rules. In this case, the party setting the rules is more like the rich person who originally built and "sold" the houses (but still enforces curfew, and changes the rules whenever they feel like it).

alistairSH 5y ago

But those various ownership models aren’t buried behind 100s pages of EULAs. Or, when they are, you hire a lawyer to represent your interests in the purchase.

SigmundA 5y ago
Never dealt with code enforcement or a home owners association eh?
- alistairSH 5y ago
  You seem to have missed the last half of my comment. And completely missed the main point - buying/owning a house can be complicated, so we frequently involve lawyers to represent our interests. Buying a phone shouldn't be so complicated. But, not only are EULAs overly long, they're often written in legalese which is beyond the comprehension of the average person.

tialaramex 5y ago

Leasehold houses are a crazy idea and the government should certainly have stepped in early as developers began selling the freehold (and thus the entitlement to receive ground rent indefinitely) as an investment. Historically most of these leases were "peppercorn rent" which means they had some notional requirement of rent to be paid, but you were not in fact expected to pay rent. But legally any consideration works, so if you can charge a peppercorn (as a legal fiction to make this a contractual arrangement between freeholder and leaseholder since cutting up the freehold was for whatever reason impossible) you can charge £250 per year. Or £1000 per year... Because the government didn't step in early and say "Oh, that's just an obsolete feature, you can't do that with it, we'll remove it" and pass legislation in say 2005 to set the maximum ground rent at a notional £1, the "investors" got bolder. They added escalator clauses, after all £1000 per year is a nice earner today, but it won't be much in a hundred years, so let's say it doubles every 25 years to account for likely inflation plus some profit. Actually wait, the idiots are still buying them, let's say it doubles every 10 years. And next thing you know, some of the people who "own" a house are paying almost as much rent as people who don't "own" a house, oops. Funny that the property owning, rich investor classes in the Tory party don't seem to be in a big hurry to actually fix this, although they do say it's a "Priority" (like everything else) when confronted. I wonder how much money Rishi earns every day from this "mistake" that he never got around to doing anything about as chancellor for example...

mathewsanders 5y ago
Never heard of peppercorn rent until reading your comment- as a nice coincidence I was reading a Reddit thread on weird NYC trivia that included a link out to this article of the Queen visiting NYC in 1970s to collect 279 years worth of back rent for Trinity Church (which was literally 279 peppercorns) https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/10/archives/queen-warmly-received-on-new-york-city-tour-queen-warmly-received.html https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/10/archives/queen-warmly-rec...

mikro2nd 5y ago

The dividing line between "buy" and "rent" can be as clear-cut as you like, or as much a grey-zone continuum as you like as long as it is spelled out clearly up front to the buyer. The problem is not that there are gradations of "ownership". The problem is that Apple (and many others) conflate the terms and deliberately obfuscate exactly what your rights are when you "buy".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

smichel17 5y ago

The main difference between each of those scenarios and the one I describe is that we have words to describe them. From your post: freehold, leasehold, buy, rent, loan (and I'll add: mortgage). You don't need to read the fine print to know that these are meaningfully different. I'm on board with the idea that there's a lot of arrangements in between full ownership and pure rental, as long as we have terms to describe the meaningful differences.

iso1210 5y ago
There's a big difference between freehold on a new build estate and freehold on an older house, the former has various conditions attached. But in all these cases we use the word "buy" to buy the car or house, just like we use the word "buy" to take in posession of a slab of electronics

fennecfoxy 5y ago

Freehold for £250k made me laugh! But mostly cry. Salty, salty millenial tears.

iso1210 5y ago
Literally bought my house for £250k, completed 11 days ago. Sold previous house for £240k a few minutes earlier.