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Corporate ownership of housing is good. Every time I’ve rented from a corporate landlord, it’s been great. They’re organized, have staff, fix problems promptly.

• GoodJokes 5y ago
  You live in bubble and are failing to look at all aspects of your situation including your own wealth.
  • n8cpdx 5y ago
    Can you explain how wealth status of renters affects the competence of corporate landlords? FWIW, I've also had nothing but good experiences in corporate-owned/managed housing.
    • GoodJokes 5y ago
      OC can afford good corporate housings most people can’t. I am very sure OC’a median rent apt is great, but it is only made available, by corporations, to those that can provide the biggest profit margin. Also, OC fails to even consider the long term price impact of privatization of the housing supply. The bubble is large.
• pgeorgi 5y ago
  Ownership moves from corporate to communal, which also manages several thousand units already. There's no individual owner involved in this scheme.
  • beiller 5y ago
    Yes but looked at another way, this is taxpayers subsidizing real estate investment. The act of buying all the units by the government actively raises the collective price of real estate making it an even more lucrative investment.
    • the_other 5y ago
      The taxpayers should also gain from any appreciation of the housing stock, no? Seems like a reasonable, if very abstract, take on community ownership (on paper).
      • AdrianB1 5y ago
        Short term, many people gain from artificially inflating the value of goods in a supply restricted market, but that is just market manipulation, no real value added. Those apartments will be demolished one day and the value will drop from $100,000 to $0 in a second.
  • Kiro 5y ago
    So it moves from one landlord to another. In my experience (in Sweden) the communal landlords are no different from corporate, and most people don't even know if their landlord is communal or corporate.
• yunohn 5y ago
  Believe me, I’ve lived in both individual and corporate owned rentals. I fully agree that the latter are better organized, and economies of scale are real. But I’d much rather nobody invest in housing, and governments handle scaled affordable housing - so that there’s accountability and no profit motive. P.S. Please no replies claiming anything run by the gov will fail; those are boring and called whataboutism.
  • harryh 5y ago
    Government run housing can have its own problems too. For example in Singapore, there have been huge issues with gay couples being unable to rent housing. This can happen with some private landlords too, but at least in that situation there can be multiple suppliers and you only need one to rent to you.
    • yunohn 5y ago
      While we’re using anecdotes, corporate owned housing can have issues too. They discriminate against renters with low income, unstable jobs, mixed-race families, etc etc - examples from “first world” Netherlands, where companies like MVGM own majorities of rental housing.
      • harryh 5y ago
        Indeed! As I acknowledge in the last sentence of my comment. Because of these things, I think the healthiest housing markets are those with a good mix of suppliers (both govt and private). Supplier competition comes with many benefits.
        • yunohn 5y ago
          My point about MVGM and the rental corporations mentioned in the post, is that they’re massive and bordering on mono/duopolies. That reduces the “mix of suppliers” you’re talking about. Moreover, most corporations act similarly when driven by profit, so it’s a false choice.
      • 5y ago
• vanilla_nut 5y ago
  Meanwhile, every time I’ve rented from a corporation the property management has been evasive and incompetent, punting issues down the road and fixing issues with as little effort as possible (often leading to lasting damage and more expensive repairs down the road). All of the private owners I’ve rented from have been incredibly helpful, quick to deal with issues, and willing to flex on move-in/out dates, month-to-month terms, etc. Sometimes it’s about the personal touch, not “economies of scale.”
  • heavenlyblue 5y ago
    Hm. This is a US-centric website discussing a piece of news from Berlin. Which country are you speaking about?
    • vanilla_nut 5y ago
      That’s my experience in the US cities I’ve lived in — NYC and Denver. As discussed in another comment, the truth of the matter is probably closer to “neither private owners nor coporations are universally good or bad.”
  • igobyterry 5y ago
    Oddly, I agree with you. When I rented from a personal landlord, when the dishwasher was leaking water across the kitchen they told me it was my problem to replace it with a like model as it must've been my abuse. I barely cook so I have no idea what I could've done wrong. When I rented from a corporation it was no questions asked, even when I was at fault. They were even proactive with things like filters for the heating/cooling.
    • vanilla_nut 5y ago
      My takeaway? Private owners and corporations can both be total jerks to renters. Generalisations about them will (generally) miss the point.
  • rcpt 5y ago
    > the personal touch landlords. Give me a break..
• humaniania 5y ago
  It's not good. It's better than awful. What a horrible way to decide how to structure society. Landlords are parasites that expect their tenants to pay >100% of their mortgage costs every month or they'll be heartlessly ejected into the street.
  • computerphage 5y ago
    I mean, as opposed to other businesses where owners expect customers to pay <100% of the costs of the product?
    • thrav 5y ago
      There’s a bit of a difference here, in that the landlord is also coming out the other side with an appreciating asset, not pure costs and the consumer coming out of the transaction with the asset.
      • willcipriano 5y ago
        So it is services generally that you have a problem with?
        • wallacoloo 5y ago
          > the landlord is also coming out the other side with an appreciating asset This isn’t true of services in general. Are you reading the comment you’re responding to, or are you just being belligerent?
          • willcipriano 5y ago
            The restaurant isn't disassembled when you leave, when you eat a meal at a establishment you pay for the upkeep of a building that will grow in value over time and yet receive no upside. If you take an Uber, you pay the auto loan of the person driving you. I guess a pure service like housecleaning doesn't leave behind a productive asset, although the business itself is one.
• klyrs 5y ago
  I've never had a prompt and responsive landlord. But at least with an individual, you get the responsible party on the phone. With property management companies, you need to navigate the corporation in order to get work done, and some are quite skilled at putting stupid barely-legal obstacles in your way. > Economies of scale are real. Agreed. Try getting google on the phone for support.
  • fspeech 5y ago
    Actually it depends on the line of business. It is quite easy to get Google on the phone for Google Fi for example. As for their "free" services, you are not their real customer but the product they sell.
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      It's famously hard to get any kind of support for GCP and the Android store as well, so I'm not sure this applies only to their "free" services.
• MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  In 2004 the state of Berlin sold 65000 flats for 405 million euro. Now they are buying 14700 flats for 2.46 billion euro. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSW_Immobilien https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSW_Immobilien . Back then they had the same coalition in power as today, the taxpayers money at work.
  • bildung 5y ago
    The important context here: The conservatives who were at the helm pre 2004 created a big banking crisis that brought Berlin on the brink of insolvency, which forced the state to sell a bunch of public property: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal (German only, sorry)
  • bdowling 5y ago
    > In 2004 the state of Berlin sold 65000 flats for 405 million euro. So, the average price per flat was € 6,230. That sounds impossibly low. Or were these distressed, dilapidated properties?
    • AdrianB1 5y ago
      In the same period or a bit earlier, hundreds of thousands of apartments in Bucharest and other major cities were sold at preferential prices (read: heavily discounted) to the renters. It was a populist measure, people bought apartments and sold them a year later at 4-5 times the purchase price. Also the old Communist era small apartments were cheaply build and without much value. 6000 euro looks low, but I bought in 1998 from the open market an apartment for $13,000 (the transaction was in USD). These days, that apartment is around 3-4 times more expensive (I don't have it for many years), but it is still small and poorly insulated. "small" means less than 50 square meters, one living room and one bedroom.
    • pantalaimon 5y ago
      Back then the general sentiment was that Berlin was going to shrink. A lot of high-rises were razed in the eastern districts, others were converted into low-rise buildings as part of the "Stadtumbau Ost" program.
• hristov 5y ago
  What you are missing is that corporate ownership makes it much easier to raise rent. It is very hard for 100 000 individual small time landlords to collectively raise rent in normal conditions (i.e., with no housing shortage). Many will lower rent to get their properties rented faster. But if you have a dozen or so large corporate owners it happens almost automatically. This is very simple and well understood economics. If you lower the number of providers of a good or service they gain bargaining power. Large corporations work very hard to make sure there is as large as possible number of providers of every item they buy and every service they use. But somehow when it comes to ordinary people, we are supposed to pretend it is a good thing. No, it is not a good thing.
  • nohuck13 5y ago
    "It is very hard for 100 000 individual small time landlords to collectively raise rent in normal conditions (i.e., with no housing shortage). Many will lower rent to get their properties rented faster. But if you have a dozen or so large corporate owners it happens almost automatically." Yes, a 100,000-firm marketplace forces participants to be price takers. Yes, a 1-firm marketplace allows the firm to arbitrarily raise rents. Why do you think a dozen-firm marketplace "automatically" tends toward the latter? A dozen seems like a pretty high number. Explicit OPEC-style cartels are illegal (I assume) under anti-trust law so we're talking about about some pretty implicit forms of collusion.
    • wanderer2323 5y ago
      The way it works here, all the corp landlord have their rent prices track the housing market. So when average price of a certain class of home moves up 5%, so does your rent.
• bildung 5y ago
  You get the best of both worlds with housing cooperatives, where the tenants are also collective owners of the units. Those are pretty common in Berlin and the rest of Germany (at least Eastern Germany). You have a large enterprise giving tenants the advantages you described, while also removing the incentive to rise rents on every possible occasion.
  • jagger27 5y ago
    I wish there was more of this in North America. It’s either rent and own nothing, get soaked by a condo corp, or own a McMansion freehold out in the burbs.
• tmpz22 5y ago
  I had my deposit stolen recently by a large corporate landlord in SF when COVID lockdowns started. Large corporate landlords are the ones who calculate the legal costs of massive abuses and do it anyways.
  • rcpt 5y ago
    California small claims court costs like $50. If you win there's a permanent ruling against the landlord. It's worth going through the process just to learn. It's also crazy how difficult it is.
    • MichaelZuo 5y ago
      Do you mean that it’s noticeably more difficult than the equivalent process in other states?
      • rcpt 5y ago
        I've never tried in other states. But on an absolute scale I found it ridiculous how many gotchas they put in place to keep you out of court. I remember sitting there watching so many people get told by the judge "you forgot to file proof of service" or whatever and get their case thrown out. And it takes a whole day. How many tenants can easily get a day off? If I were a landlord I'd keep every deposit no matter what.
        • MichaelZuo 5y ago
          By gotchas do you mean folks who misfile their paperwork, or that there’s actually hidden paperwork brought out after a proper filing?
          • rcpt 5y ago
            "misfile" yes. But it's amazing how easy it is to do that. This isn't like the DMV or a passport where most people can get it right after a couple tries. You really need to be on top of your shit to win in small claims court.
• 41209 5y ago
  It’s also much easier to avoid scams. Plenty of individual owners will rent out units they don’t actually own , rent it out while in foreclosure, etc. That said, always see the unit first. Avoid luxury apartments! Get the cheapest place in the best neighborhood
• dgellow 5y ago
  When I was in Berlin I got the exact opposite experience. Same in Hamburg. Are you actually talking about Germany?
• wonnage 5y ago
  The worst is renting a condo and then something affects your unit that requires the HOA's involvement... might be faster just to move out.