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Having rented a single family home from a "small" landlord, and rented an apartment in a large building owned by a corporate landlord, and having had far worse

Having rented a single family home from a "small" landlord, and rented an apartment in a large building owned by a corporate landlord, and having had far worse experiences with law-breaking and exploitation from the "small" landlords, I really have no idea at all what motivates this thinking. At least the corporate landlord isn't going to control the local planning process to block housing, like small landlords and homeowners residents do. But to me, a corporation owning a home and renting it out is no worse than anybody else renting it out, and given that they likely are more rule-abiding and knowledgeable about the rules, it's often a big win.

bombcar 3y ago
Small-landlords are almost always a "mistake" on one side or the other. Most of them have an incorrect assessment of the costs associated with being a landlord, and this depresses the rental market and also traps them, making them do unethical and illegal things, like not maintaining properties, etc. And if the only reason they're renting their property is because it appreciated and they're carrying a low-interest rate mortgage, they're almost certainly not accounting for the costs. When people realize you can't rent properties profitably and pay a property management firm to manage it, they realize they're not a landlord, they're an underpaid property management firm for the bank. That only makes sense if appreciation is nuts and you can go long on huge leverage. The surest thing to strip down the number of landlords is to slow appreciation, when appreciation is sky-high even idiots doing everything wrong come out smelling like roses. I think a strong thing to work on would be to reduce the "single rental LLC" trick that people use to separate the various properties