4 ms·

There are very few jobs that provides as little value as being a landlord. Imagine all of them dying tomorrow, what happens? People just keep on living as usual

• ethbr1 2y ago
  I think you're underestimating how many people can clean their own drain (well). Which is its own solvable problem, but is a problem.
  • londons_explore 2y ago
    The modern way is to have a handyman (just like you have a gardner or cleaner). The handyman has a list of gutters to empty, squeaky hinges to oil, HVAC filters to clean, etc. Keep adding these small tasks to the list, and when the list gets long or something urgent comes up, call the handyman out for a half-day.
  • kelseyfrog 2y ago
    It's a problem whether the occupier is a renter or homeowner. The landlord is, in my experience, just going to call a handyman anyway. May as well cut out the middleman as thats something I can do myself.
  • _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Funny the same people that say stuff like this say that the person who can't even clean their own drain should plan their own retirement using a 401K as the vehicle and if they fail at it and starve well that's their fault, there's no way we could have seen it not working out.
• BeetleB 2y ago
  > Imagine all of them dying tomorrow, what happens? The majority of landlords in the US (at least in the small scale - not sure about big complexes) do not own the property outright. They have a loan (e.g. mortgage) just like anyone else. So what will happen? The banks will become the new owners. And they'll sell it at a discount to someone else (with a loan, of course). I know it's easy to complain about landlords, but if you suddenly kill all landlords and ban landlording, you'll get a lot more homeless people.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    I guess in this hypothetical, imagine all ownership of the rental units suddenly transferred to the tenant. Would the net effect to the economy be positive or negative?
    • JambalayaJimbo 2y ago
      The construction industry would collapse as buying confidence would disappear. Buildings with large amounts of renters would likely fall into disarray over the long term.
      • bradlys 2y ago
        Are you saying that basically all co-ops are inept? I’m not saying they’re perfect but many do just fine.
        • BeetleB 2y ago
          Co-ops that are involved in building apartments? They're so few they're irrelevant. It still needs the members to put in a fair amount of money - likely a lot more than the average renter can afford. And it requires "decent" members. Try being a landlord for the "median" renter, and you'll see how many irresponsible people are out there. A lot of below median folks have zero interest in maintaining their place - even if they own it. They'd make for very poor co-op members.
    • card_zero 2y ago
      Seems like the same problem results: now what if you're a new renter? You can't live anywhere, because there's no landlords. Does somebody just give you a house, in this scenario, and if so, who?
    • BeetleB 2y ago
      In the short term, positive. But then their kids will grow up and no one is willing to invest in new housing. Unless you want to live in government built housing.
• JamesBarney 2y ago
  Say tomorrow we outlawed being a landlord. Every multi-family and apartment unit would be demolished and turned into SFH, or sold off as condos. And everyone would have to live with parents or friends until they could afford a down payment. That sounds like a worse world than the one we live in.
  • exe34 2y ago
    would they be demolished? or would their prices drop to the point that the people paying the mortgage might be able to afford to actually own the equity?
  • ethbr1 2y ago
    Why wouldn't they just convert to owner-occupied apartments? There's an argument to be made about affordability, but there are a lot of arguments against paying someone else, for which you receive no equity, and they get to keep any price appreciation of the property. It'd be interesting to see a rental market that banned anything but rent-to-own contracts, where some portion of your monthly rent had to buy equity in the property you occupy. (With standardized terms for disposal, sale, etc)
    • timr 2y ago
      Because most people can't afford to buy the apartment they are renting. Some huge percentage of US citizens can't scrape together enough money to pay for a car repair. How are they going to afford an apartment?
      • ethbr1 2y ago
        Doesn't that indicate we should be building more and cheaper housing? The other components of the market aren't fixed and immutable. If state governments wanted to mandate denser rezoning and smaller minimum unit sizes once unaffordability reached a certain level... they could. Pointing at expensive housing and saying "We therefore have to make it cheaper by forcing more people into bargains in which they receive none of the gains" seems like the tail wagging the dog.
• kristopolous 2y ago
  Although I agree with the sentiment, is there a quantifiable way to demonstrate this? For instance, do people who declare their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std deviations above some control group? I'd imagine they do but I try hard to not just imagine data matches my priors. (Yes, this almost always makes me unpopular)
  • londons_explore 2y ago
    They can be parasites even without being richer. Merely the fact that a typical landlord works far fewer hours than most other careers. Even a property portfolio of 100 properties probably isn't a full time job if you have managing agents.
    • JambalayaJimbo 2y ago
      This is nonsense. The vast majority of landlords have to work a day job in order to finance the property in the first place.
      • kristopolous 2y ago
        Sure but many groups of people work to service debt, such as the purchase of a house, education, medical expense or a small business loan. Demonstrating that landlords are not all of the leisure class is insufficient to imply they are equally living hard scrabble working lives compared to the population writ large.
      • pasquinelli 2y ago
        the vast majority of landlords are small potatoes not worth talking about. understand that, when people talk about landlords, they're probably talking about the landlords of the vast majority of rentals.
  • ajross 2y ago
    > For instance, do people who declare their occupation as landlord have some demonstrable income distribution x std deviations above some control group? Not really. Being a landlord takes a bunch of money to sink into the real estate assets. If you don't put it in there you'd just leave it in a mutual fund or whatever and be making passive income of about the same order. Real Estate is a solid investment choice but it's not *that* much better. Basically this argument is for the form "being a landlord looks like a working class job but pays better and that's not fair". But the actual truth on the ground is "being a landlord is just a different way of being wealthy, and you have to fix plumbing on the side instead of working a day job in an office".
• kibwen 2y ago
  There's a good reason that "rent-seeking" is one of the biggest insults you can hurl at a business model.
  • robertlagrant 2y ago
    Yes, because it's trying to make your business as legally necessary as a tax. It's to do with regulation, not renting things.
    • kibwen 2y ago
      No, it's to do with being a useless middleman who extracts wealth without serving any productive economic purpose. Regulation isn't required in the slightest.
      • robertlagrant 2y ago
        How do you do that without laws to keep your useless business' product/service in business?
        • kibwen 2y ago
          Markets naturally tend towards monopoly. The idea that monopolistic incumbents are always disrupted in laissez-faire markets is incorrect; incumbents have plenty of non-regulatory levers to keep themselves on top once they stay on top: kickbacks to suppliers and distributors, industrial espionage/sabotage, slanderous ad campaigns, cornering the markets for inputs, forming cartels with monopolistic producers of complementary products, poaching key employees, etc. If you think the government is the only barrier to competition, you haven't given this enough thought.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  That seems like an easy, reflexive way to ride current wave of discontent over housing prices. I am not suggesting that landlords are not entirely blameless in the equation, but suggesting they add no value at all is shortsighted. Not to mention the obvious, the new owner would become the new landlord and the process would start all over. I have to tell you though. This weird attitude makes me hesitate on my next move. My family unit was discussing keeping current house ( and likely rent ) and moving into something further away. I will admit that this anti-landlord sentiment makes consider just straight sale to the highest bidder. Like.. I have a married friend, whose dad is an actual landlord asshole ( and he was confronted over that ), but not everyone is an asshole despite what some recent actions by humans may suggest.
• itake 2y ago
  Who manages repairing an upkeep on the property if not the landlord?
  • gambiting 2y ago
    The person living there, obviously.
    • Ygg2 2y ago
      I've seen way too many people wrecking the place they rent for that to be true.
      • gambiting 2y ago
        Yes but if they had to fix the boiler themselves or they get no hot water - then they would, don't you think?
    • itake 2y ago
      I am a homeowner and I hate that part of my “job”. I enjoy coding. I do not enjoy dealing with unreliable contractors and months of partially finished projects
• givemeethekeys 2y ago
  You can say similar things about shareholders or anyone else who allocates capital. Calling landlords parasites is like blaming tech employees for gentrification. You're missing the bigger picture.
  • bradlys 2y ago
    We gotta start with baby steps. You’re not gonna get people on board otherwise.
• ppeetteerr 2y ago
  In a rent-controlled area like in parts of Canada, it's not unusual for the tenant to improve the apartment they are renting with the consent of the landlord. This is ultimately to the tenants' benefit. Imagine investing $1200 into new flooring. Spread over 3/4 years of rent controlled rent, it comes out to $25 a month.
• skybrian 2y ago
  The world has a lot of buildings. Buildings are valuable. Every building you see, unless it's been abandoned, is owned by someone or some entity that's responsible for acquiring, protecting, and maintaining it. Some do a better job than others. Not that landlords do construction work themselves - that's a different industry. But someone has to arrange financing. Many renters are not trusted by banks enough to get a mortgage, often for good reasons. They still need a place to live, though. Someone has to try to prevent people from damaging the buildings and repair them when they are damaged. Maybe that's the super, but someone has to hire them. The people who damage buildings are often pretty nasty. In theory, the state could do this. In some countries, the state does a lot of it. But someone has to do it. It's an essential job, and if not a landlord, there will be a manager that does pretty much the same thing. Just about everything can be outsourced, but it adds overhead. The labor doesn't go away, it just gets moved around. Not everyone is ready and willing to be responsible for a building.
• smileysteve 2y ago
  As if landlords clean the drains, provide a decent paint job. Maybe in an apartment, a maintenance person might; but smaller rentals; at most the landlord charges the tenant and calls a plumber; in reality the tenant is often responsible for calling and paying the plumber; At worst, the landlord has never had the plumbing cleaned or inspected, the tenant or landlord hires a plumber, the plumber finds an object stuck at the tree roots in the pipe, and the landlord charges the tenant for the whole job, threatens the security deposit, and when the tenant refuses to pay, the landlord evicts them.
  • BeetleB 2y ago
    Move to a place with better tenant laws. Although I'd wager probably all states have the basic laws to protect tenants from what you're saying.
• Ekaros 2y ago
  I tell you even worse group. Stock owners. Those people put some money to fancy ETF or investment fund. They do absolutely zero work and some how expect that money to appreciate or even give out dividends. While the poor workers of these companies get pittance or sub-standard wages with which they can barely afford nothing. And then those same companies exploit their customers while always pumping up the prices and extracting maximal margins... Really if these people just died and the companies moved to their workers or customers what would change? Landlords provide one thing capital. And capital expects returns. Maybe at times there is not enough competition in where capital is spend, but in general it is not that great place to put capital.
  • JustAndy 2y ago
    And what other way do you recommend to invest your money in order to not get devalued by inflation?
    • Ekaros 2y ago
      Well, investing is always exploiting labour of others... Exactly like being landlord... Well I suppose, your own private means of production you only use yourself could be reasonable.