edit I am referring to my experience renting apartments from Property Management run communities. (Think Essex or Prometheus) Rent increases every year with them.
Nothing was mentioned on the renter site, and verbal promises (worth the paper they're written on, etc., etc.) made to renters said that they "heavily discouraged arbitrary rent increases as they felt properties were priced fairly in consultation with the owner"...
Meanwhile on the owner / landlord site: "We ensure you get the maximum return on your investment, including yearly rental increases of the maximum allowed by law or as close to it as possible".
Awkward moment for the PM showing me a place when I showed her that website and asked her to reconcile the two positions.
https://archives.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/how-renters-work-...
>Depending on the vigilance of the landlord, a seasoned serial evictee like Getzow can get away with a minimum of 45 days and sometimes up to a year of free rent. The actual number of serial evictees operating in San Francisco is difficult to track, but some attorneys who specialize in representing landlords estimate there are between 20 and 100.
I've never rented where I wasn't required to pay first month's rent and a security deposit as well.
Though it would have to be an insanely hot market for this practice to work - vacancy is extremely expensive for a landlord and the margins on being a landlord are fairly low (despite what the guy giving the "I'll teach you to be rich" presentation at the Holiday Inn will tell you). In fact, I've heard of landlords keeping rents to long term tenants a bit under market price just to keep them, I rented for six years without a single rent increase.
You realize that a lot of people have NO sense of budget and will be DOA the moment they take possession of a rental?
We literally look at the tenants ability to STAY A FLOAT so we do not harm them, their credit and also our pockets too.
You took the most cynical and 1 sided outlook.
There are WAY more people that would get themselves under water (financial and budget illiterate) vs. the situation you describe.
Your bias is betraying you.
Regardless, it's rarely in your own interest to conceal it unless you have privacy concerns.
1. Landlords are going to prefer candidates with higher salaries.
2. It's really unclear to me that landlords use your salary to determine rent increases. e.g. My rent has always been well under what could be covered by my salary and I'd move long before it reaches that point.
It's... optimistic... that you think they're going to take you at face value when you do so, rather than requiring employment / income verification.
And in most cases, "the information on this application is true to the best of my knowledge and I understand that my application may be rejected if I provide false information"...
Here's why I think it's implausbile:
* It's hard for me to believe this practice would be profitable. The revenue would be pretty small (since it only applies to lease renewals, not the initial lease at the advertised price), and it would presumably increase turnover, which is one of a landlord's biggest costs.
* If this is common practice, why is it not common knowledge? It would be clickbait gold, and any two tenants in a big building full of identical units could compare notes and put two and two together, to say nothing of the hundreds or thousands of office workes in property management companies that would have to be aware of it. I looked around for about two minutes and didn't find any articles denouncing it, so it seems likely to be either false or the subject of a remarkably effective cover-up.