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If you’re making profit from the fact that someone has not enough money or a good enough credit score to buy their own place, whilst you may be the nicest landl

If you’re making profit from the fact that someone has not enough money or a good enough credit score to buy their own place, whilst you may be the nicest landlord in the world you’re still technically exploiting the situation for your own gain. I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a parasite, our landlady is lovely, but you have to be frank about the fact that someone else is working to enrich you to some level.

ilyt 3y ago
Well, we need to have better system for temporary housing first. Not everyone renting is poor or can't afford buying one either and you can't really expect people to go against their own interest. It would be nice if most of the renting was city-built and ran, with maybe buyout option if you live there for more than 5-10 or so years. THen city could easily control development, earn a bit of profit, and control the costs
- sidlls 3y ago
  We need a better solution for housing in general. I don't actually want to be a landlord very much. I have a 7-figure portfolio including two rental properties, and I still rent. I'm not sure I could ever convince myself to buy in the bay area until/unless I had a substantially larger portfolio ($20M+). The numbers just don't add up.
juve1996 3y ago
> I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a parasite, our landlady is lovely, but you have to be frank about the fact that someone else is working to enrich you to some level. You can make this argument about literally any purchased good. Everything bought by a worker is the same thing.
- smogcutter 3y ago
  You’re so close to figuring it out
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    what exactly is the point, then?
    - throwawaytemp29 3y ago
      Capitalism = exploitation? That seems like the point they are trying to make. And it’s mostly not wrong, although we haven’t found a better way. Perhaps more accurately, human behavior = economic behavior = exploitation, regardless of the economic system. Expanding it out, I doubt it’s specific to humans, more like a property of known life forms.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        You also have to believe that a willing Exchange that benefits both parties is exploitation. It also doesn't help that exploitation is so poorly defined in these discussions that it could simply be substituted by "bad" or "something I don't like".
        ShroudedNight 3y ago
        The financial asymmetry of having certain baseline costs to sustain our biomechanical meat bags despite wildly divergent means can easily lead to transactions that are mutually beneficial, while still reenforcing the leverage of those who already have plenty.
        skinnymuch 3y ago
        I’d be interested in your response to the person who replied to you. It’s a compelling argument against exploitation being vague. Which isn’t even true unless you mean conversations between liberals and conservatives.
        s1artibartfast 3y ago
        It is a interesting and workable definition for further discussion once it is provided. In my experience you ask 10 people what exploitation means and you get 10 different answers- everyone has their own. That said, I like it and would be interested in exploring it more. Exploitations is a transaction that increases leverage for future transactions is one that I havent heard before. Im also curious about the inverse.e.g. what transactions reduce leverage?
detourdog 3y ago
Doesn't one also have to admit that everyone has to be somewhere and for most people it costs money. What does it matter where one's housing money goes? The only concern is that one is satisfied with the housing they are paying for.
throwaway22032 3y ago
Nonsense. I rented for almost ten years before buying my place. The idea that my landlords were exploitative is complete bollocks. They provided me with a useful service. I would never want to own an apartment or house in many of the areas that I rented. I didn't want to be there long term.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
I always find statements like this to be a strange rhetorical tactic of debate. They presuppose that a personally held view, and oftentimes fringe one, is universally true and accepted and then make a bold unsupported criticism. The charitable take is that people making them don't know that their view is controversial and think it is shared fact. The less charitable take is that they are intentionally misleading, and doing it as a debate tactic to claim ground while avoiding discussing the real disagreement.
- memonkey 3y ago
  All throughout history, it is usually another society who comes in and takes an already occupied land by force and then charges a fee for the previous people to continue using it. Then there are complex laws set up to make it impossible for these previous people's to own their land again, becoming indebted in one way or another. After a while, after this land has been transferred, typically amongst the families of those who first took the land (or their friends), some people forget this history or are ignorant of it, and just go along with what has been done for years. Inevitably, those with the excess monetary value gained from rent is used to expand and establish these kinds of societal institutions so that it is part of the zeitgeist and thus a controversial take to think this kind of institution is an immoral, or bad, or exploitative one.
  - NLPaep 3y ago
    Source?
    - memonkey 3y ago
      I believe you can Google "landlord history" and you'll get a plenty of results with some brief history of the term. If you want to read further, look at history on colonization or apartheid which sets up these types of infrastructures or variations of it. History w/ Native Americans and what is going on in Israel are two recent/ongoing examples. As for pre-capitalist history, you can look up "feudal land tenure", and before that is just different concepts of modes of land ownership across different geographies.
teekert 3y ago
So? Sell it to some shitty landlord? What’s the best option here? Even if you sell low to low income people, they may be forced to sell at some point, to the highest bidder. I think OP is doing something really great: provide affordable housing on good terms.
fauigerzigerk 3y ago
You're implying that owning a property is unconditionally more favourable than renting. That's not neccessarily true though. My wife and I recently decided to buy after renting voluntarily for decades. We did all sorts of calculations. In some scenarios renting comes out on top. In others buying is more favourable. Ultimately, our decision was based on the uncertainty created by the referencing system, on the recent spell of inflation and on changed personal circumstances rather than any long term financial advantage. I don't like the sort of relationship that exists between landlords and tenants in the UK, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily one of financial exploitation. Small landlords have their money tied up in a badly diversified, inflexible asset that comes with unpredictable maintanance costs. I would never invest my own money like this. If all goes well for the landlord, they make a profit. If not, only the bank makes a profit (unless interest rates rise too quickly and they have issued too many fixed rate mortgages). If you buy your own home, the bank makes a profit and if you're lucky it turns out well for you financially. There's no guarantee that it will.
- ryan_lane 3y ago
  This isn't any different than running a business, except that landlords generally feel entitled to make a profit from their investment, no matter the economic situation, and laws generally favor that. Backing that is the army of folks like you who tend to side with the "small landlord", which normally leaves out that the vast majority of small landlords are quite wealthy, and tend to own multiple properties. Yes, there are a small number of cases of a small landlord, with one property that they're having a hard time breaking even on, but those folks have a bad investment, and if they can't afford their investment, they should sell it to try to minimize their losses. Renters aren't on the hook to make them profitable. By holding rental properties, they're inflating the value of homes for sale, making it harder for people to buy, and forcing people into renting. We don't pity people who make stupid business decisions, so why should we pity landlords?
  - fauigerzigerk 3y ago
    I never said we should pity them (I certainly don't) or that they are entitled to a profit. You're exactly right that they are running a business. They are running a business that comes with costs and risks. It can go right or wrong like any business. That's fine. What I'm disputing is that it is necessarily exploitation and that owning your home is always the preferable choice. I do understand where your sentiment comes from. The name "landlord" basically says it all. It hasn't always been a normal business and there is still quite a lot of that history left in the relationship between landlords and tenants (as well as in the grotesque distribution of land ownership in the UK). About inflating the value of homes for sale I'm not sure. On one hand the available land is limited and so demand should inflate prices. I'm not even sure private ownership (or at least inheritance) of land should exist at all. On the other hand, the price of homes as well as the level of rents is mostly determined by how many homes are built. More (private and public) capital flowing into building new homes makes home ownership and rents more affordable. Buy-to-let landlords provide some of that capital. The other thing that could be done is changing planning rules and the taxation of land ownership so that more affordable homes get built. I don't think home ownership deserves the status it has. Renting is fine. Affordability is far more important than who owns the place.
nroets 3y ago
There are many reasons why a landlord will either not get rich or get rich at a much slower pace than alternatives. Just to mention a few: 1. Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse. 2. Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out. 3. Overpaying or over capitalizing. 4. While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in. Please don't use terms like 'exploit' without specific details. I prefer to be a tenant so that I have less worries, more freedom and more capital available for other investments.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Oh no. Being a landlord should be risky. If it isn't, something is incredibly wrong.
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  This is a short wiki with aspects that go over exploitation in a political science sense. Which is what is being discussed here (landlords and Econ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Exploitation_and_Class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Exploitati... by economist and political scientist John Roemer It goes over exploitation. The wiki summarizes the thesis.
- ryan_lane 3y ago
  > Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse. I can tell you've never done property management, because the most profitable areas are bad neighborhoods. In the US, section 8 housing is effectively guaranteed income, at favorable rates. The tenants don't really have much say in the conditions of the apartment, and all that's needed is to pass the housing authority inspection (which only cares about safety, not quality), so costs are generally low. Being a slumlord is extremely profitable. > Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out. For the vast majority of the US, you can evict a person for nearly any reason with 30 days notice, and can evict someone for non-payment with 5 days notice. Holidays can extend that by a few days here and there, but for the most part, you can avoid tenants being months behind in rent, especially if the market is saturated. Some landlords like to let their tenants fall behind because as long as the tenants eventually pay the rent, they get the late fees, which can increase their rents by 20% or so. Preying on the poor is also very profitable. > Overpaying or over capitalizing. You can do the same with any investment. Unlike other investments, though, you can write off most of your expenses, and you can carryover loss for essentially forever. Even bad real estate investments can be beneficial. There's a reason real estate investment is heavily favored by the rich. Landlords aren't guaranteed to get rich, but it's extremely difficult to actually lose money as a landlord, unless you're a really shitty investor. Nearly everything you spend money on can be used for tax deductions (sometimes for years or forever after the loss), so even losses tend to be beneficial, when you're diversified properly. The law is way too favorable to property investment. > While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in. I did property management for a long time and can tell you this simply isn't a real problem. Squatters rights take a long time, and the police will forcibly remove them. No one loots an empty apartment.
tensor 3y ago
I actually think your opinion is the damaging one. Do you honestly think a world without being able to rent because we've eliminated landlords is a good one? There are many scenarios where people would far rather rent than buy. E.g. you are trying to get to know a city to decide where to buy a house. You want to work in a city for a few years. You've just moved to a country and don't want to buy a property until you get a feel for where in the country you want to live, or maybe until you get permanent residence sorted out. And that's not even covering cases where people don't have the money to buy yet. And no, it's not realistic to expect that people will all always have money to buy. Maybe they are young and just entered the workforce. Maybe they are an immigrant looking for a better life and came with little cash. There has to be a rental market and thus there have to be landlords. Being a landlord does not make one "evil" or even taking advantage of people. It's needed and frankly shitty job. I'd personally never want to do it. I'm being frank, your attitude is pretty toxic does not help the people who need the help the most.
- dublinben 3y ago
  You're proposing a false dichotomy where the only two options are private landlords and no rental properties whatsoever. There are so many alternate systems of providing housing to people, including social housing, non-profit rental housing, housing cooperatives, building cooperatives, cohousing, intentional communities, community land trusts, communes, land value taxes, etc. Also, being a landlord isn't a job. Owning property isn't a job. Property management can be a job, but the typical landlord is barely lifting a finger to do much of that.
  - ryan_lane 3y ago
    I worked as a property manager for years (of around 200 units, across numerous owners) and can vouch for the fact that the vast majority of landlords do absolutely nothing except for receive a monthly statement, and complain if the profits aren't high enough. They made an investment and want you to maximize the returns. A very, very small percentage are active in their management, and those folks tend to be the worst form of slumlords, because they're so cheap they won't hire people to professionally manage the properties.
coredog64 3y ago
I don't get this take at all. Yes, I own my house, but it comes with a significant number of trade-offs: My employment is limited to what the immediate neighborhood can offer[0], I'm on the hook for major repairs[1], and moving is an expensive proposition. When I rent, the premium over what I'd pay for a mortgage is priced into that convenience. [0] Things were better during the 100% remote environment of the pandemic, but many employers are now doing RTO [1] In the recent past, I've had to replace my AC and my roof. The AC repair bill was equivalent to 6 months of mortgage payments and the roof was equivalent to a year's worth of mortgage payments.

ilyt 3y ago

Well, we need to have better system for temporary housing first. Not everyone renting is poor or can't afford buying one either and you can't really expect people to go against their own interest. It would be nice if most of the renting was city-built and ran, with maybe buyout option if you live there for more than 5-10 or so years. THen city could easily control development, earn a bit of profit, and control the costs

sidlls 3y ago
We need a better solution for housing in general. I don't actually want to be a landlord very much. I have a 7-figure portfolio including two rental properties, and I still rent. I'm not sure I could ever convince myself to buy in the bay area until/unless I had a substantially larger portfolio ($20M+). The numbers just don't add up.

juve1996 3y ago

> I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a parasite, our landlady is lovely, but you have to be frank about the fact that someone else is working to enrich you to some level. You can make this argument about literally any purchased good. Everything bought by a worker is the same thing.

smogcutter 3y ago
You’re so close to figuring it out
- endisneigh 3y ago
  what exactly is the point, then?
  - throwawaytemp29 3y ago
    Capitalism = exploitation? That seems like the point they are trying to make. And it’s mostly not wrong, although we haven’t found a better way. Perhaps more accurately, human behavior = economic behavior = exploitation, regardless of the economic system. Expanding it out, I doubt it’s specific to humans, more like a property of known life forms.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      You also have to believe that a willing Exchange that benefits both parties is exploitation. It also doesn't help that exploitation is so poorly defined in these discussions that it could simply be substituted by "bad" or "something I don't like".
      - ShroudedNight 3y ago
        The financial asymmetry of having certain baseline costs to sustain our biomechanical meat bags despite wildly divergent means can easily lead to transactions that are mutually beneficial, while still reenforcing the leverage of those who already have plenty.
      - skinnymuch 3y ago
        I’d be interested in your response to the person who replied to you. It’s a compelling argument against exploitation being vague. Which isn’t even true unless you mean conversations between liberals and conservatives.
        s1artibartfast 3y ago
        It is a interesting and workable definition for further discussion once it is provided. In my experience you ask 10 people what exploitation means and you get 10 different answers- everyone has their own. That said, I like it and would be interested in exploring it more. Exploitations is a transaction that increases leverage for future transactions is one that I havent heard before. Im also curious about the inverse.e.g. what transactions reduce leverage?

detourdog 3y ago

Doesn't one also have to admit that everyone has to be somewhere and for most people it costs money. What does it matter where one's housing money goes? The only concern is that one is satisfied with the housing they are paying for.

throwaway22032 3y ago

Nonsense. I rented for almost ten years before buying my place. The idea that my landlords were exploitative is complete bollocks. They provided me with a useful service. I would never want to own an apartment or house in many of the areas that I rented. I didn't want to be there long term.

s1artibartfast 3y ago

I always find statements like this to be a strange rhetorical tactic of debate. They presuppose that a personally held view, and oftentimes fringe one, is universally true and accepted and then make a bold unsupported criticism. The charitable take is that people making them don't know that their view is controversial and think it is shared fact. The less charitable take is that they are intentionally misleading, and doing it as a debate tactic to claim ground while avoiding discussing the real disagreement.

memonkey 3y ago
All throughout history, it is usually another society who comes in and takes an already occupied land by force and then charges a fee for the previous people to continue using it. Then there are complex laws set up to make it impossible for these previous people's to own their land again, becoming indebted in one way or another. After a while, after this land has been transferred, typically amongst the families of those who first took the land (or their friends), some people forget this history or are ignorant of it, and just go along with what has been done for years. Inevitably, those with the excess monetary value gained from rent is used to expand and establish these kinds of societal institutions so that it is part of the zeitgeist and thus a controversial take to think this kind of institution is an immoral, or bad, or exploitative one.
- NLPaep 3y ago
  Source?
  - memonkey 3y ago
    I believe you can Google "landlord history" and you'll get a plenty of results with some brief history of the term. If you want to read further, look at history on colonization or apartheid which sets up these types of infrastructures or variations of it. History w/ Native Americans and what is going on in Israel are two recent/ongoing examples. As for pre-capitalist history, you can look up "feudal land tenure", and before that is just different concepts of modes of land ownership across different geographies.

teekert 3y ago

So? Sell it to some shitty landlord? What’s the best option here? Even if you sell low to low income people, they may be forced to sell at some point, to the highest bidder. I think OP is doing something really great: provide affordable housing on good terms.

fauigerzigerk 3y ago

You're implying that owning a property is unconditionally more favourable than renting. That's not neccessarily true though. My wife and I recently decided to buy after renting voluntarily for decades. We did all sorts of calculations. In some scenarios renting comes out on top. In others buying is more favourable. Ultimately, our decision was based on the uncertainty created by the referencing system, on the recent spell of inflation and on changed personal circumstances rather than any long term financial advantage. I don't like the sort of relationship that exists between landlords and tenants in the UK, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily one of financial exploitation. Small landlords have their money tied up in a badly diversified, inflexible asset that comes with unpredictable maintanance costs. I would never invest my own money like this. If all goes well for the landlord, they make a profit. If not, only the bank makes a profit (unless interest rates rise too quickly and they have issued too many fixed rate mortgages). If you buy your own home, the bank makes a profit and if you're lucky it turns out well for you financially. There's no guarantee that it will.

ryan_lane 3y ago
This isn't any different than running a business, except that landlords generally feel entitled to make a profit from their investment, no matter the economic situation, and laws generally favor that. Backing that is the army of folks like you who tend to side with the "small landlord", which normally leaves out that the vast majority of small landlords are quite wealthy, and tend to own multiple properties. Yes, there are a small number of cases of a small landlord, with one property that they're having a hard time breaking even on, but those folks have a bad investment, and if they can't afford their investment, they should sell it to try to minimize their losses. Renters aren't on the hook to make them profitable. By holding rental properties, they're inflating the value of homes for sale, making it harder for people to buy, and forcing people into renting. We don't pity people who make stupid business decisions, so why should we pity landlords?
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago
  I never said we should pity them (I certainly don't) or that they are entitled to a profit. You're exactly right that they are running a business. They are running a business that comes with costs and risks. It can go right or wrong like any business. That's fine. What I'm disputing is that it is necessarily exploitation and that owning your home is always the preferable choice. I do understand where your sentiment comes from. The name "landlord" basically says it all. It hasn't always been a normal business and there is still quite a lot of that history left in the relationship between landlords and tenants (as well as in the grotesque distribution of land ownership in the UK). About inflating the value of homes for sale I'm not sure. On one hand the available land is limited and so demand should inflate prices. I'm not even sure private ownership (or at least inheritance) of land should exist at all. On the other hand, the price of homes as well as the level of rents is mostly determined by how many homes are built. More (private and public) capital flowing into building new homes makes home ownership and rents more affordable. Buy-to-let landlords provide some of that capital. The other thing that could be done is changing planning rules and the taxation of land ownership so that more affordable homes get built. I don't think home ownership deserves the status it has. Renting is fine. Affordability is far more important than who owns the place.

nroets 3y ago

There are many reasons why a landlord will either not get rich or get rich at a much slower pace than alternatives. Just to mention a few: 1. Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse. 2. Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out. 3. Overpaying or over capitalizing. 4. While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in. Please don't use terms like 'exploit' without specific details. I prefer to be a tenant so that I have less worries, more freedom and more capital available for other investments.

UncleMeat 3y ago
Oh no. Being a landlord should be risky. If it isn't, something is incredibly wrong.
skinnymuch 3y ago
This is a short wiki with aspects that go over exploitation in a political science sense. Which is what is being discussed here (landlords and Econ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Exploitation_and_Class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Exploitati... by economist and political scientist John Roemer It goes over exploitation. The wiki summarizes the thesis.
ryan_lane 3y ago
> Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse. I can tell you've never done property management, because the most profitable areas are bad neighborhoods. In the US, section 8 housing is effectively guaranteed income, at favorable rates. The tenants don't really have much say in the conditions of the apartment, and all that's needed is to pass the housing authority inspection (which only cares about safety, not quality), so costs are generally low. Being a slumlord is extremely profitable. > Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out. For the vast majority of the US, you can evict a person for nearly any reason with 30 days notice, and can evict someone for non-payment with 5 days notice. Holidays can extend that by a few days here and there, but for the most part, you can avoid tenants being months behind in rent, especially if the market is saturated. Some landlords like to let their tenants fall behind because as long as the tenants eventually pay the rent, they get the late fees, which can increase their rents by 20% or so. Preying on the poor is also very profitable. > Overpaying or over capitalizing. You can do the same with any investment. Unlike other investments, though, you can write off most of your expenses, and you can carryover loss for essentially forever. Even bad real estate investments can be beneficial. There's a reason real estate investment is heavily favored by the rich. Landlords aren't guaranteed to get rich, but it's extremely difficult to actually lose money as a landlord, unless you're a really shitty investor. Nearly everything you spend money on can be used for tax deductions (sometimes for years or forever after the loss), so even losses tend to be beneficial, when you're diversified properly. The law is way too favorable to property investment. > While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in. I did property management for a long time and can tell you this simply isn't a real problem. Squatters rights take a long time, and the police will forcibly remove them. No one loots an empty apartment.

tensor 3y ago

I actually think your opinion is the damaging one. Do you honestly think a world without being able to rent because we've eliminated landlords is a good one? There are many scenarios where people would far rather rent than buy. E.g. you are trying to get to know a city to decide where to buy a house. You want to work in a city for a few years. You've just moved to a country and don't want to buy a property until you get a feel for where in the country you want to live, or maybe until you get permanent residence sorted out. And that's not even covering cases where people don't have the money to buy yet. And no, it's not realistic to expect that people will all always have money to buy. Maybe they are young and just entered the workforce. Maybe they are an immigrant looking for a better life and came with little cash. There has to be a rental market and thus there have to be landlords. Being a landlord does not make one "evil" or even taking advantage of people. It's needed and frankly shitty job. I'd personally never want to do it. I'm being frank, your attitude is pretty toxic does not help the people who need the help the most.

dublinben 3y ago
You're proposing a false dichotomy where the only two options are private landlords and no rental properties whatsoever. There are so many alternate systems of providing housing to people, including social housing, non-profit rental housing, housing cooperatives, building cooperatives, cohousing, intentional communities, community land trusts, communes, land value taxes, etc. Also, being a landlord isn't a job. Owning property isn't a job. Property management can be a job, but the typical landlord is barely lifting a finger to do much of that.
- ryan_lane 3y ago
  I worked as a property manager for years (of around 200 units, across numerous owners) and can vouch for the fact that the vast majority of landlords do absolutely nothing except for receive a monthly statement, and complain if the profits aren't high enough. They made an investment and want you to maximize the returns. A very, very small percentage are active in their management, and those folks tend to be the worst form of slumlords, because they're so cheap they won't hire people to professionally manage the properties.

coredog64 3y ago

I don't get this take at all. Yes, I own my house, but it comes with a significant number of trade-offs: My employment is limited to what the immediate neighborhood can offer[0], I'm on the hook for major repairs[1], and moving is an expensive proposition. When I rent, the premium over what I'd pay for a mortgage is priced into that convenience. [0] Things were better during the 100% remote environment of the pandemic, but many employers are now doing RTO [1] In the recent past, I've had to replace my AC and my roof. The AC repair bill was equivalent to 6 months of mortgage payments and the roof was equivalent to a year's worth of mortgage payments.