Fixed that for you. As the radical leftist Adam Smith himself pointed out:
"[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
Landlords manage liquidity in the market, and maintain the property. Good landlords do serve a purpose. I teach my tenants, who are often renting for the first time in their life, how to not get screwed by other landlords. I point out to them all the places that they could get screwed. I tell them to take pictures of everything when they move in and have me sign it. I tell them that in Berkeley, they get interest on their deposit every year.
And when it comes time to raise the rent, I don't gouge them. I usually let them keep the rent from the year before if they choose to stay a second year. On the third year I only raise it slightly. I've found that undercharging from market rates gets me better tenants who take good care of the property.
And I know that there is no such thing as a rental unit that can't be filled, only one that is too expensive. When the market goes down, I lower the rent, because I'm smart enough to know that it will take me multiple years at the higher rent to make up for just one lost month of rent.
I'm curious what your solution to housing liquidity would be without landlords. How would people who have no need or desire to stay in one place more than year find a place to sleep?
Wouldn’t the school just expand their housing and own the homes - like many other schools globally? One could even argue your presence is a net negative for students. Had the housing near Berkeley not become a speculative asset, the school would likely own it and rent it at a much cheaper rate.
Other schools have to require underclassmen to live on campus to fill their housing -- which is often more expensive than living off campus.
1: Housing was provided based on seniority; older students got first pick, yet the housing was overwhelmingly occupied by freshmen.
Also, this would just make the school the landlord. And a landlord that is renting to a "company man" as it were... because if you cause a problem, you can lose both your job (school) and housing at the same time.
No because they may not want the risk and the expense. These factors are not well understood in my belief and experience.
I'd say a large number if not the majority of landlords really are parasitic, they do very little upkeep especially in cities or municipalities with poor tenancy laws, but reap the benefits especially when there is high demand.
My experience is most tenants are unaware of lots expenses and tax's and usually underestimate by at least 50%.
Houses dont grow on trees. They take many thousands of man-hours to build, and hundreds of thousands in materials, even in the absence of land scarcity.
Landlords front the cost of these things. without them, most of the housing stock would never be built, and there would be nowhere to stay for anyone who doesnt have good credit and a pile of money.
https://www.propublica.org/article/doj-backs-tenants-price-f...
Fewer houses would be built with fewer paying customers. They also incentivize building through their role as a capitalized buyer of used houses.
If it was much harder to resell a house for value, fewer owners would build them in the first place
So he'd probably be on board with the idea of setting up systems that get rid of the unearned part of rent, but even if the class of people he is talking about were gone there would still be people who own houses/apartments and rent them out to others. They'd be making a bit less profit since they'd earn whatever the market thinks administration is worth plus some sort of premium for tying up a lot of capital in a house.
2) Well, you can make something like 5% buying bonds. So if renting a house is making less than that people will sell the house then go buy bonds which are lower risk. The logic of alternative opportunities suggests the rate of profit for renting out a house won't change much.
I'd expect that profits would drop by a bit and then the supply of rentals would adjust if a bunch of landlords want to leave the market. But IMO most renters aren't in a position to buy houses so I don't think the supply would be able to contract by much. So I think the net effect is profits would drop a bit and then life continues.
Doesn't matter if I'm wrong on that point though. Whatever happens it'd still be an improvement.
Some aspects of being a landlord are economic rent and should go away, but other parts are ownership and maintenance of capital and shouldn't. I'd suggest that while Smith was against economic rents he'd have no particular issue with a capitalist renting out their capital - even if that capital is a house. Note that Chapter 11 is rent of land not of capital.
[0] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/... - hehe, marxists.
> You haven’t provided any evidence to the contrary
Neither have you. You've provided huge amounts of evidence that Smith doesn't like rents from land. I'm with Smith on that, rents from land are a moral and economic problem.
The issue your argument has is modern rental landlords aren't just doing that - they are also maintaining and renting out a significant amount of capital. That aspect of their role isn't going away; it would be silly to demand that everyone owns the house that they live in.
The word has drifted. We aren't talking about aristocrats who own vast tracks of farmland that they're leaching off. At the start of the chapter he lays it out with "In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave [the tenant] no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood.". That isn't what modern landlords are doing.
Wealth of Nations is available for free online and Chapter 11 isn't that long [0]. You should probably find a copy and read it - he is talking about a different type of rent. He explains himself in excruciating detail and outlines how "rent" is controlling access to natural factors of production like kelp, timber, cropland (especially cropland, this is a major focus of his [1]), coal, hunting opportunities, yadda yadda.
If you want to grep for "After food, clothing and lodging are the two great wants of mankind." you can see he breaks down lodging into the natural elements used to create a house and how they all present opportunities for the person who controls the natural resource to extract rent. He isn't talking about renting out capital which is a significant part of what modern landlords do for tenants. Houses (and apartments) aren't naturally occurring.
> This is the thrust of his argument, the landlord is an immoral parasite because he “reaps what he does not sow,”
Smith, you and I all agree on that. But we agree in the context Smith was using the word where that was all the landlord was doing. In the modern context, you can take all the parasitic aspects out of the landlord and there'll still be something left behind that you pay money to every month. The house doesn't appear by almost-magic like coal does - someone has to build it and the owner doesn't have to be the same as the beneficial user.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/... - let's use a better link than the Marxists
[1] We get this choice quote: "Food is, in this manner, not only the original source of rent, but every other part of the produce of land which afterward affords rent derives that part of its value from the improvement of the powers of labor in producing food by means of the improvement and cultivation of land."
https://iai.tv/video/the-value-of-everything-mariana-mazzuca...
She makes some good points, but now you have the problem that even though Smith has left us a large body of work to refer to, you can't support your claims by referring to it.
On the other hand, if you look to to Volume 3 Chapter 2 you'll notice that Smith actually dealt with this specific topic (see: "Taxes upon the Rent of Houses") and drew the conclusions that I suggested he would. He breaks the rent up into "ground rent" (aka economic rent, the part that is economically damaging) and "building rent" (the return on capital) and concludes that ground rent should be taxed out of existence but that building rent is necessary and not all that much of a problem (he anticipates it settling at a fair premium of maybe 2% above interest rates, which seems like a reasonable guess that is in line with the actual rent I tend to have paid).
He is advocating a demise of rent on land (hence the more classic and literal landlord). Rent on houses (modern urban landlords) is a topic that he has a reasonable and balanced view on that acknowledges the necessity of a return on capital after dealing with the component of the rent that is for land.
Spoken by someone who has never been a landlord. Being a landlord incurs risk and mental load at a minimum. Being a good landlord costs both labour and care.
The improvements that one might speculatively build on the land and then need to maintain or alter over time is actually a different, secondary business which can be seen as more labor-based, as you note.
Conversely being a landlord isn't even really a job. Once every 3 years you spend a few hours overseeing the skilled labor needed to do any repairs and updates and a few more hours interviewing 2-4 tenants and in between you mostly cash checks or fire off a few angry letters if the tenant gets behind. Spending less than 20 hours per year per unit.
An average mom and pop owns 1-3 units and works less in a year what a low wage worker works in a week.
And when the boiler went in the base of one of the place I rented, the landlord had to have it replaced. That type of thing, major expenses, is some of the risk that landlords take on in exchange for collecting rent. There is more risk in being a landlord than there is in owning a house, because you have to deal with all the risk of owning a house AND the risk of your tenant being a problem.
Boilers go out. That's expected. It's predictable.
The only risk involved is landlord-created risk, playing Russian roulette with the boiler, hoping it won't fail yet because that means earing more money now and not spending it on upkeep yet.
Owning say 1 home and trying to save money by doing all your own work is generally ill advised. You would do better to invest the proceeds in purchasing a second rather than trying to pinch pennies. Done properly there isn't much risk that isn't trivially insurable.
Nope. I co-own a late 19th century New England triple-decker: a purpose -built rental building endemic to the northeast, and easily one of the most common rental properties in the country. In my comparatively inexpensive market, it would yield about 8k month in revenue. In Boston, it would be closer to 15k. The building hardly requires more maintenance than my 2021 car. I lived in apartments where the landlord literally didn't step foot in our apartment in the 8 years I lived there except for the one time our two downstairs neighbors got bedbugs so we all got treated (and it was a 45 second walkthrough.) If you think being a landlord is "a lot of labor" for the amount of income you get out of it, you either don't realize how little most landlords put into their properties or you don't realize what "a lot of labor" means.
Maybe if there were infinite housing options? But housing supply is extremely low in the US in large part because larger corporations are buying up huge swaths of housing and turning it into rental housing... Because it's really really profitable. And since supply is low and prices are high, it's not possible for most renters to buy houses. Nobody rents because it's cheaper overall, they rent because you don't need tens of thousands of dollars upfront for a down payment, plus a great credit score. That is, unless you're in Boston or the like where you must pay first months rent, last months rent, a security deposit, and a realtor fee generally equal to one months rent, meaning for that relatively reasonable $3k 2br apartment, you need $12k upfront to move in. So why don't they just buy it? Because buying a 2 or 3br market rate flat in Boston or the surrounding municipalities would cost maybe from $700k to $2m. The further surrounding areas are only slightly cheaper and by the time you hit more affordable places, your looking at a 90 to 120 minute car commute each direction.
You either don't understand the math or you're not interested in understanding the math and just want to justify gouging people. Like I said, I own the exact type of building that most landlords own in the urban northeast. In fact, it was an absentee landlord rental building for decades and hasn't structurally changed since it was. I know EXACTLY how much it costs to operate this building, and how much labor it takes. That hand-wavy "but it's so expensive and takes so much work" garbage doesn't work on me. It's not labor-free and it costs money, especially if a roof needs to be repaired or the like, but that's true in all businesses and if you don't prepare for it well enough to not be a disaster when it happens, or you buy an instanely unreliable and maintenance-heavy building, that's not your customers fault. Even in our flat-roofed old timber-framed triple-decker, our very healthy and responsibly funded major repair savings and building expenses fund (roof repair, insurance, snow removal, water damage repair, etc) takes in a little over 5% of what our rental income would be in this fairly inexpensive market, and aside from the gardening and cleanup in the courtyard, we contribute nearly no labor outside of our own units.
There's a culture of entitlement among landlords, at least in the US, that completely skews their understanding of what they deserve for what they put in to something. You show real plausible expenses or labor that I don't have in my 19th century timber-framed building that most other landlords have, then I'll happily change my perspective. I've asked for that every time I've had this conversation but it just doesn't materialize.
You want to see what a lot of labor and expense for the amount of profit looks like? Look at the Eater article where the owner of Mei Mei in Boston details her P&L.
Indeed, And nobody is guaranteed housing.
Landlord profits are arbitrage between 1) long term and short term financial obligation, 2) High credit and low credit individuals, 3) high and low assets at stake.
Just like how a bank makes a % interest for taking risk and providing capital that owners wont, landlords do the same thing. Landlords get paid a profit to take on risk and long term liability (to the bank), and again provide capital.
In short, banks loan cash to landlords because they are more credit worthy and take on liability. They in tern loan a home to renters, who have worse credit and much less liability.
It is all about paying a premium for others to take on financial risk.
In parts of America anyway, although states like New York do in fact have a right to shelter. This is nonetheless not the clever jibe you think it is, so much as indicative of moral bankruptcy. That all are not guaranteed housing, that the few can pursue greed at the cost of others survival, is a social and moral failure.
Now, societies can choose to provide services which are not rights.
I don't think laws in Finland or New York defines reality in all places and times. If you want to talk about reality, this means that people get a cot in a bunkhouse with a roof over it. These laws dont entitle people to own houses or live in other peoples property.
You might solicit fewer snarky comments by avoiding asinine comparisons between slavery and eviction regulation, and then admonishing people for not having a realistic take.
>Maybe the most important structural change in Finland is that we've renovated our temporary accommodations in shelters and hostels into supported housing. For example, the last big shelter in Helsinki, run by the Salvation Army, had 250 beds. It was completely renovated in 2012. Now they have 81 independent, modern, apartments in that same building.
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5437402
Again, your model of reality is quite warped and off by being rooted in American cruelty.
You are right, we dont share the same model of reality, or even what we are debating.
I said it twice before, and this will be the last time. Im not debating what countries do and what services they choose to provide, but what their rights are. I pointed out early on that governments can and do choose to provide more housing.
Yes, Heliniski chooses to have independent units. Thats not proof that it is a human right in finland, and illegal to have combined units. They weren't violating rights before 2012 in your article. This is doubly true for new york, which you have conveniently dropped. Does every homeless person there also have their own unit? Is it an illegal human rights violation in NY to make homeless people share a roof?
shelters are temporary solutions with the intent to get people off the street and give them access to resources and support to find a permanent home. they are not intended to fulfill the right to housing.
i believe finland has implemented a model where homeless people are moved directly to a home where they can stay permanently, and that is why they rebuilt a shelter for temporary stay into a place where people can actually stay long term
Yes, and you steadfastly refuse to believe what those rights actually are, despite my telling and showing you multiple times, because somehow that would result in slavery or for some other incomprehensible reason.
Article 19 of the Finnish constitution:
>The public authorities shall promote the right of everyone to housing
https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/constitution-finland-...
B) Landlords always throw their hands up and say "but the expenses!" but they never have the receipts handy. Are there missed expenses? Of course. But the chance of there being enough missed expenses to change the nature of this conversation is pretty much nil. If there's no actual evidence– and there never is– assuming it exists would be ridiculous.
C) In the markets where this is the biggest concern, 2 and 3 bedroom apartments yield upwards of 5k per month. You could include a free leased Porsche for each tenant and not touch 50% expenses.
D) Paying your mortgage, beyond the interest, is not an expense. It's your money. You get the equity.
Don't be obtuse. They're obviously speaking about the US legal system, some of the comments listed signed with US locations, and if you look at the article two entries down in their blog that refers to "the housing market," they only cite US statistics.
> And I just say , lots people claiming its good money , quite profitable, so we can look forward to lots new investors that are attracted to this profitability.... but it does not seem to happen. Why?
What in the world are you talking about? Real estate is one of the most, if not the most popular long-term investments in the United States? If nobody invested in real estate when why is the market so tight? Do you even think about this critically for a moment before you type it out?
And once again, ZERO evidence of these so-called expenses. I'm not even talking about receipts, I'm just asking for examples for regular expenses large enough to change the nature of this debate. Of course, they don't exist. You are either willfully ignorant, genuinely ignorant, or lying.
It make sense , because more people will build rental accommodation. ( They will certainly not do it if it is not profitable. ) If more homes are built, the vacancy rate will slowly rise back to around 3% ( A 3 % vacancy rate is inferred to be a far number between tenants and landlords ) Rental rates have only been able to rise so much because there is a massive housing shortage - present vacancy rate is 0.9% in my area. At 09% Tenants have just about NO choice - I do not know about your area, there are lots of influences I do not know about.
Again, you're making a priori assumptions when there's gobs of empirical evidence that says you're wrong. In the places where this is the biggest problem, there's little room to build and many regulatory and local problems to overcome. At least in Boston-- the market worst I'm most familiar with-- contractors are regularly found bribing city officials with tens of thousands of dollars, free services, lavish vacations, and all of that sort of thing to get their projects approved. In progress construction sites are in every neighborhood. In my more reasonably priced city, and nearly every other US city, there are gobs of shitty 5 over 1 buildings being built but they're targeting the "luxury market" so they don't provide relief to market rate renters but you can get a place that costs 50k or 60k per year no problem! Rent maximizing platforms pressure landlords to let apartments sit empty rather than lowering the price specifically so they can keep the market high. The FTC just released a memo about it saying that price collusion is still collusion if it's done through an online platform.
You're just straight-up factually wrong.
> If more homes are built, the vacancy rate will slowly rise back to around 3% ( A 3 % vacancy rate is inferred to be a far number between tenants and landlords ) Rental rates have only been able to rise so much because there is a massive housing shortage - present vacancy rate is 0.9% in my area. At 09% Tenants have just about NO choice - I do not know about your area, there are lots of influences I do not know about.
What you're describing is price gouging. When people use the market leverage to charge vastly more money than it costs because people have no choice, that's price gouging. What you're talking about is not made ethical because that's the way the market functions. It's an unethical behavior that is only possible when the market functions like this. Maybe your market doesn't afford you this incredible opportunity to rip people off? If that's the case, we're not talking about that.
Lots of things are very cut-and-dried if you ignore context, evidence, ethics, the effects of your actions, and things like that.
Listen, there's a lot written out there about this if you're interested in really knowing rather than just reinforcing the conclusion you've already reached without that information. I'm not your research assistant. If you're even curious about the possibility you might be wrong, you could confirm it in a matter of seconds using google. In fact, you could have already done that but you haven't, so I'm going to assume you're not really interested in knowing what you're talking about and stop trying to convince you that it matters.
Surely if you feel that correct, you've got solid empirical evidence that opposes mine, right? Expenses and labor are cut-and dried and any responsibile business owner documents them, right? This should be an easy argument to prove me wrong in.
The number of tenant properties one would have to manage to reach even a 40-hour workweek average is quite large, and by that point, most landlords would hire a super.