Comment by vaxman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaxman | Hacker News Reader

Landlords will soon strong-arm their tenants into granting "permission based access" to their personal financial accounts to fintech firms like FunnelLeasing (that, in turn, use services like Finicity.com) to monitor their tenants IN REAL TIME from the moment of application, throughout the entire lease period, and at every renewal, with AI models making decisions about how to rate the relationship on a level never before possible.

It will literally be possible for the landlords to know which of their tenants are insolvent before many of those tenants know! (An insolvent tenant that has not yet filed for bankruptcy can usually be summarily evicted under contract law, but previously, collecting such evidence of insolvency was time consuming and not cost effective, giving the tenant time to pull out of their tailspin before missing rent payments and filing a bankruptcy petition.)

In practical terms, it means that people just starting out (or starting again) are going to be heavily marginalized and wind up on the streets, group homes, etc. after one of life's many possible adverse events leads to the suspension of their income and depletion of their reserve funds (layoff; family medical issue; automobile accident, etc.) https://youtu.be/56u6g0POvo0

> An insolvent tenant that has not yet filed for bankruptcy can usually be summarily evicted under contract law, but previously, collecting such evidence of insolvency was time consuming and not cost effective, giving the tenant time to pull out of their tailspin before missing rent payments and filing a bankruptcy petition.

The ability to evict someone before missing rent payments seems absurd. Are you saying this is an element of simple 'contract law' somehow, or that, often, boilerplate leases (contracts) specifically have clauses that allow eviction over insolvency without missing rent payments?

I'm not sure what will happen in the future, but I would be surprised if an AI model estimating a person's insolvency would meet requirements of evidence. Maybe the AI knows the renter, say, used a payday lender twice in the last month and that has a 98% correlation with insolvency in the next three months (making up all these numbers, I have no idea, but it sounds almost believable). I would still be surprised if a judge allowed this to become evidence of insolvency. But of course it depends on the jurisdiction.

What is absurd is the new ability for a landlord to each morning see a list of notifications that open to the financial dossiers of those of tenants that were flagged by an overnight AI analysis as being factually insolvent, based solely upon realtime "permission based access" to those tenants personal financial accounts. The "AI model estimating a person's insolvency" is not itself evidence, but the dossiers that were flagged by the AI is direct evidence because it is composed of actual financial statements created directly by the tenants own banks, along with a credit reports showing the tenant's trade-line performance.

Dude… as a landlord in a major American city, I’m lucky to be able to choose my tenants.

And while I’m talking about the regulations we face, let me further enlighten you. By making evictions extremely difficult and time-consuming to obtain, cities like mine have ensured that nobody in a marginal situation will be given a chance. We might like you, like your story, maybe even want to help. It doesn’t take getting screwed very many times before business sense has to take over.

Fwiw, as I’ve mentioned over the years a few times, I’m a liberal… but some of these rules in favor of tenants are fundamentally broken and hurt those they’re supposed to help.

Not sure what your point is, but if you are renting to parties who don't have sufficient income or liquid assets to pay their bills WHEN DUE, then even if they are paying you, you still have recourse to end your contract with them. The question is, how would you know (and be able to prove) with a level of certainty sufficient to justify reclaiming possession of your property on such grounds without being successfully sued? Why not just wait for them to default on their rent? Well, if your tenants gave "permission based access" to their financial accounts over to a third-party service that you subscribed to, that third-party service could tell you and produce copies of the tenant's financial statements issued directly by the tenant's bank. The point of my original post is only that this new technology will result in increased homelessness.

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