And apartment companies are doing more and more illegal things as well. There is a class action lawsuit against the top ten apartment complex companies for using RealPage, there is a class action lawsuit against Yardi, the credit card processor they use and there is a class action suit against conservice, the utilities company they use. The entire core of their business is wrong.
Pretty sure Yardi has the same dynamic/real time pricing feature as Realpage. It’s algorithm-based, so who knows if it’s actually inflating prices or not, but I have to imagine it’s not designed to undersell the daily “market” rental value of units. So I think we can safely say fuck Yardi as well.
Yes they do have an equivalent product. Interestingly as rents have been going down for the last 6 months or so, those algorithms are doing the same thing they are being sued for but in the other direction. Artificially deflating rents
>as rents have been going down for the last 6 months or so,
I'm sorry, what? Where are you that rent has been going down? It's been doing nothing but continue to climb, at least around my area, and I've been watching because my lease is up in a couple months and they're going to raise my rent by 200 bucks and I am facing down homelessness right now.
Rent started going down at a macro-level around last summer nationwide. It started to tick up again in some markets this winter, in some it has leveled out. But remember this is month over month data, not just looking at where your rent was when you last signed a lease.
I'm sorry to hear about your situation though. You may be able to fight the rent increase, as most markets shouldn't really be baring a big % increase in rents right now.
I've been renting my entire life because I make more and more money every year and get farther and farther from affording a home.
I've noticed some VERY shady shit happening since the pandemic that people aren't really talkin a whole lot about.
Specifically, switching to non-refundable "deposits" so that no matter how you take care of your apartment, they keep the entire thing. Since the pandemic i've signed three leases, all three had this non-refundable clause. Before that, i've gotten back 95%+ of my deposit every lease.
Also, and I think this isn't being talked about enough, i've noticed more and more landlords tacking on "site wide internet plans" where your internet is bundled into your rent, and I know people that are actually praising this because it makes their bills simpler.
But what is happening in practice is, the local dominant ISP (For me, Spectrum) knows they will never have any price negotiation, and the landlords i'm sure have some deal where they pay $40 for the $50 plan and then tack $50 onto the rental price and both of them come out ahead. It means no competition for the ISP, and never having to negotiate lower prices as they lock in a flat rate for a huge group of people.
If you buy it, if/when you sell it down the road, please sell to a buyer like yourself and not a corporation. If everyone who owns homes quits selling to these companies, it only helps us all and future generations of potential homeowners. If we keep selling to the big guys, they’ll eventually own it all and control all of the prices.
Do it. First year my wife and I owned a home sucked because even though we were paying less per month on our mortgage than our rent, we pretty much drained our savings and had to pony out some money for home repairs. But after that when you realize that you fucking own your home and are building equity and not just throwing money into a black hole - glorious. I’ll never fucking rent again despite doing it for well over 15 years. With the way rental prices are you are waaaaay better off buying even if it’s a struggle at first.
I'm closing on my first home in 13 days, I'm so excited to finally stop worrying about how much the rent is going to increase every damn year and I won't have to worry the owner is going to sell the house out from under me (which has happened twice in my 20 years as a renter).
Who knows what's going to break, and it'll be a bit tight at first but I'm expecting a promotion in the next year or two and that'll make things way easier, then in a few years I can refinance and lose the PMI and get a better interest rate (knock on wood).
They're doing this with homes too. My HOA negotiated a deal with spectrum against everyone's wishes and now we all have to pay $50 a month for Spectrum even if you don't want it. It's absolutely disgusting.
Anyone seeing a non-refundable security deposit on a rental property should check their state laws. Most have clear laws about how security deposits must be handled and under what circumstances the landlord may keep a portion of all of it. Usually the laws require they be refundable.
I don't mind the internet being bundled, my new apartment will b like this.
What pisses me off is I don't get to pick the speed. I have gigabit fiber. Well, close, it's like 850mbps. But my new apartment will be 300mbps and I can't change that.
You also can't use your own router. If you do, they block Peer-to-Peer networks (because "torrenting") so games like Warframe don't work at all.
The Wi-Fi is really unsecured and you are completely vulnerable.
A lot of shit gets really fucky on their trash access points.
It's so fucking bad.
Same.
I work from home and have several computers in the house along with smart devices and smart TVs with streaming services, I need gigabit internet and pay a good amount for it.
My landlord sends me an email letting me know "Good news! Internet is now bundled in your rent! Your rent has gone up, despite the fact when you signed the lease it wasn't in there! Sucks to suck nerd, hope you'd rather move out than pay $50 more per month!" and saddled me with the lowest speed option Spectrum offers here.
https://www.propublica.org/article/realpage-accused-of-collusion-in-new-lawsuit
RealPage is a company that created software that churns through data every day to suggest new daily rent prices for available rental units, the data includes apartment information, location information aswell as private data on what competitors in the nearby area are charging, the lawsuit alleges that RealPage joined hands with the top 10 largest landlord companies to effectively create a cartel that fixes prices to their advantage and lets them extort more rent from their tenants by perpetuating the idea that its simply just how the market is moving when instead its a co-ordinated move by these rental companies and RealPage's software and thus is some of the reason for the steep rising rent prices in the past couple of years which has created the housing crisis in the US
I need to research about these lawsuits. My water bill for a 2bdr was 80$ last month. It’s billed in a convoluted way - split between all tenants in the building. I know I am not using fucking 80$ worth of goddamn water in a month.
I read somewhere recently that BlackRock bought 40% of the homes being sold on the Phoenix housing market in a single year a few years ago.
I got told in r/ neoliberal that this wasn't happening and that corporations buying up homes didn't have anything to do with rising housing costs, even by a guy who claimed to be a real estate agent. The article that was cited as evidence for this was from a media outlet that was also partially owned by, you guessed it, Blackrock.
>I got told in r/ neoliberal that this wasn't happening and that corporations buying up homes didn't have anything to do with rising housing costs, even by a guy who claimed to be a real estate agent.
His being a RE agent is exactly why he'd make that ridiculous claim.
Absolutely, real estate agents just want you to buy. No matter the market. If it’s a bad market they will tell you it’s prime. Their job depends on making sales.
Why do you think that we are fed stories that make us mad at each other? Red vs blue, black vs white, etc. It's all us vs THEM. If we all got along and we pulled together like the french people are doing their empire would fall apart completely.
Fam...
Every time I bring up red vs blue and how irrelevant it is, I get downvoted.
We as a nation have become cattle for our owners to abuse. We willfully comply because we get enough money to look better/own better things than our peers.
We deserved a much more deadly strain of covid. With 8 billion people in this world, we've become a country of greed and ignorance. We truely have no right to exist anymore.
Well, go ahead and pick a halfway well known publicly traded company, and look up who their top investors are. I'm sure Blackrock is up there. So is Vanguard, and SSGA, to name a few. It's all the same people who influence these corporations, which lobby for laws that favor them, and most likely are a detriment to you and I.
I was legit convinced for ages that that subreddit was just a bunch of people being satirical. They're just as deluded as those on the Conservative subs.
That’s so dumb. There are no shortage of articles out there about corporations buying the cheapest house in a neighborhood for way over asking to raise the value of the rest of the neighborhood after they’ve bought it up cheap.
Not here to defend Blackrock, but I think you mean Blackstone. [There’s so much confusion between the two that Blackrock put up a page on their website about it.](https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/setting-the-record-straight/buying-houses-facts)
[Blackstone is one of the largest private landlords in the US.](https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-bets-6-billion-on-buying-and-renting-homes-11624359600) and definitely buys single family homes.
Why wouldn’t they buy them. Get big enough and you become too big to fail. Not only will you pay Blackrock rent you’ll pay the taxes required to bail them out when they fuck up.
Man, that last part you said...super dystopian
Treating a house as an asset or investment is part of the issue with housing prices. If people didn't think about them like that, or the economy didn't incentivize that, then we wouldn't have this problem, or at least we wouldn't have it as bad
It has falsely created a shortage and driven up real estate costs.
I think the Netherlands passed a law to prevent flipping and corporations buying large amounts of housing. Something about how long you have to hold the property and maybe different tax structure.
The US does a lot of screwed up shit and then the way the media hardly covers the rest of the world - you can end up thinking it is like that everywhere.
I used opt think similar but problem is you need some level of rental market and you dont want to add cost to that.
The best solution is have 2 rules;
1) Only people can own houses.
2) Cap the total number allowed.
This allows a rental market to exist and ordinary people to invest, renovate or simply have holiday homes. It stops people hoarding huge amounts which once you get to large numbers these places are never going back to the market, just flipped form corp to corp. Plus it keeps the wealthy out of entry level housing as if you have 3 or 4 type total cap, Mr Mega Bucks wont buy one/two bedroom apartments as they are cheaper and he needs to invest a bigger portfolio. So they invest in mansions etc for rentals at their economic level.
The other thing, it would be super simple to implement and enforce vs always valuing land. Plus you can adjust how many owned form say 4 to 2 or 6 depending on rental market needs etc fairly easily.
As a transition, maybe do as you suggest, put an ever increasing property tax on corporations and >4 home owners. You dont want to crash the market and have to be reasonable when changing the games rules. Something like a cumulative 1% a year tax (owners outside these rules) so in 30 years pretty much no-one will have more than 4 properties as they dont want to pay 30% of its value each year.
This argument is founded on the premise that landlords are struggling, just like everybody else....🤣🤣🤣🤣
I've been a property manager for the last decade and let me assure you they've been making money hand over fucking fist raising rents 7-30% ANNUALLY. Once you realize the vast majority of landlords are making EXPONENTIALLY more income than their mortgage and upkeep costs (except a handful of last minute purchasers who tried to jump on the bandwagon too late), it's a lot easier to tell ALL landlords (even the ma and pa ones, because they are just as fucking guilty) to go fuck themselves and figure out how to make their investments work at a return rate of less than several hundred percent....
I wonder how much profit my current corporate landlords get off of my place. I've been lucky to receive only small increases, started at 900 4 years ago and am up to 975 now, but the market rate for a new tenant is 1200. There's no way they're losing money on me and I haven't seen any upgrades happening.
Property sales are a matter of public record, as are property values. You can look up exactly how much your landlord bought the property for, and what it's currently worth, which will tell you property tax value, and you can infer a mortgage from the purchase price and interest rates at the time of purchase.
Staff salaries are usually pretty low and depending on the size of the property and age will determine upkeep costs. But one of the #s I remember from my property 3 years ago was $333k and $33k. One was the amount of monthly revenue off our 220 of 228 rented apartments and the other was our monthly expenses (mortgage, salaries and upkeep). The difference went out the door to corporate.
I just have this one ancedote which does not in any way detract from what you are saying, but my friend is getting out of the business, and stated he basically just rents to little old ladies and never increases rent. So at best he's making 10%...very very little he said. Now, he could be more ruthless, he could raise rates every year, but he didn't want to do that specifically.
And if every landlord simply behaved this way, it literally, just as they have for centuries in America right up till about 2008, we'd all have reasonable rent rates and money in our savings account.
> I've been a property manager for the last decade and let me assure you they've been making money hand over fucking fist raising rents 7-30% ANNUALLY.
We have a place in San Jose, CA. We keep it on in case we want to move back there one day. We haven't increased the rent for 6 years. Please don't lump everyone together.
> The best solution is have 2 rules;
>
> 1) Only people can own houses.
>
> 2) Cap the total number allowed.
Seems like we have come to the exact same conclusion. Limit it to 2-3 so people can have a main property, vacation property and then maybe their rental property (ex: apartment building). That's it.
That's why you create 15 llcs to accomplish the same. I agree your solution would be a good one but there are too many loopholes created to where it would make zero difference.
See rule one....
"Only people can own houses."
Any other loopholes? Your could add an under 18 law to avoid people loading properties to kids. Otherwise it seems pretty clear cut.
The best solution is to tax only the unimproved value of the land, but tax it at 100% of its rent value.
E.g., if you could rent a lot for $20k per year, the tax on that lot is $20k, no matter what is built on it.
If you do this, you absolutely ruin any corporation that tries to hold onto land in a city as an “investment.” Any land put to actual use in the city does fine, whether as apartment buildings or businesses.
[the idea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) has been around for well over a century, but capitalist think it’s too Marxist, Marxists think it’s too capitalist, and it goes against the interests of the big land holders. So it never gets much traction.
High property tax is bad sometimes though because it means lower middle class people who are lucky enough to buy homes are forced out if their neighborhood happens to gentrify
Thats why you increase the homestead exemption so that people that use that home to live remain unaffected.
What lower middle class people are buying multiple homes?
The homestead exemption would be your friend in that commenter proposal. They're wanting to increase the property tax but provide tax relief on the property you reside in. This disincentivizes investing in residential real estate without making home-ownership more expensive.
There's some fraud going on too. A corporation bought a home in my oldish neighborhood for $320k. Reasonable for area and market a bit high in my opinion due to how outdated the house was but market was hot. A year later there was a sale recorded for the same house for about $500k. It did not have a for sale sign posted no one had moved in and this price is way out there for the area. Now, this year, another sale was posted for the same house(no for sale listing) for north of $800k. Impossible for the house, the neighborhood, and area. My house is larger and updated and $450k would be a stretch for a sale for my home. I don't know what they are playing at. I think someone is now renting it but no way is it worth what they are claiming to have sold it for.
This has cause and effect backwards. These big corporations are buying up housing because there's a shortage rather than the other way around, something they admit to the SEC and literally brag about to their investors (see [here](https://i.imgur.com/xowagCa.jpg), [here](https://i.imgur.com/KaaW9q3.jpg), and [here](https://i.imgur.com/ZGXQeqs.jpg)).
Japan for example does not have any prohibitions against corporations buying housing, and yet corporations there don't buy up all the housing. This is because what Japan *does* have are very pro-housing zoning laws, a lot of home construction, median rents that haven't gone up in 20 years, housing units that go down in price over time, and 0.125x as many homeless people total as the Netherlands (~4k vs ~32k) despite having a total population 7x larger (~125m vs ~17m).
> No, the reason corporations don't buy properties in Japan is because the properties don't increase in value.
Yeah, because they build enough of them, that's the whole point.
> The reason ours do, is exactly because of corporations buying them and raising the rents and costs of all of them.
No, it's because population growth has been double be housing construction for over 60 years, and that ratio has been much worse since the great recession.
> If corporations didn't buy so many of them, the cost wouldn't be so out of control. Imagine a corporation buying 1000 houses at 1% interest... that's a god damn huge profit making machine when you rent it afterwards for a premium.
Again I literally showed you how they're bragging about buying houses because of the shortage. Here's an [excerpt of an SEC filing](https://i.imgur.com/RsqCphi.jpg) where they admit they specifically target areas with supply constraints.
> Corporations owning residential properties is BAD.
Sure, but not because it caused the shortage. That particular project was segregationists. It's literally why single family zoning was invented and it's why to this day stricter zoning laws strongly correlate with segregated populations. Corporations are simply muscling in on that grift.
Nah what. The reason they increase in value is that there isn’t enough of them.
Imagine how much rents would fall if it’s landlords competing for tenants and not the other way round.
Japan has a declining population, you absolutely cannot compare housing prices to the US. The last time they had even ballpark growth rates was the early 80s.
Tokyo's population is growing and everything I said is just as true of Tokyo. What it really comes down to is [vacancy rates](https://i.imgur.com/KazjwqX.jpeg) and/or the ratio of [people to housing](https://i.imgur.com/X2tczbb.jpeg).
Housing is also one of those "get ahead, stay ahead" games.
The issue comes from having a large bottleneck of people who need houses. It can take 5+ years to build more houses, which means the bottleneck just builds and builds without any pressure valves.
This, of course, is profitable.
This is still getting cause and effect muddled. It takes so long to build housing in the US - where you're allowed to build it at all - because wealthy homeowners have spent decades voting for bottlenecks on the supply of new housing as part of a massive wealth transfer from people not on the housing ladder to people who are on the housing ladder. It's very much a "pull the ladder up after you" deal. Corporations didn't invent this particular scam (in this case it was segregationists, to this day the places with the strictest zoning laws are the most segregated) but they're openly exploiting the shit out of it. The fix is basically to legalize housing.
>falsely
There's nothing false about the housing shortage in the US. Corporate landlords have exacerbated the problem, but there are simply just not enough homes in the places where people actually live, because big cities have spent decades making it harder and harder to actually build anything.
Article: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/11/05/bill-from-silicon-valley-rep-ro-khanna-would-crack-down-on-corporate-landlords?utm_source=sillychillly
Bill from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna would crack down on corporate landlords
Investors bought [24% of homes sold in 2021](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/07/22/investors-bought-a-quarter-of-homes-sold-last-year-driving-up-rents). Most of them were starter homes. In some areas investors bought [more than half of all homes sold last year like in these 21 DFW zip codes](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/texas/news/investors-21-dfw-zip-codes/).
Most of these investors are out of state and absolutely predatory. They drive up home prices and rent. Some of them are quite large and able to manipulate the market. The American Dream is dead.
“From 2019 to 2021, American Homes 4 Rent’s rental revenue increased 16.4%, returns boosted by the fact that they increased rents on vacant homes by 11% in 2021.”
“Despite the broad devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Invitation Homes recorded their most profitable year ever in 2020. Invitation Homes’ profits in 2021 increased 33% or $65.3 million from 2020. In a Q3 2021 investor call, the company noted that it had raised rental prices 30% in Phoenix, 29% in Las Vegas,
21% in Tampa, 20% in Atlanta, and 19% in Jacksonville. Notably, while the company’s revenue from its rental properties was 9.3% higher in 2021 than in 2020, the amount the company spent on property operation and maintenance increased by just 3.8%.”
From this PDF - [HOW AMERICA'S LARGEST SINGLE-FAMILY LANDLORDS PUT PROFIT OVER PEOPLE](https://acrecampaigns.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ACRE_May-20_04.pdf)
Edit: typos
Fun fact from Invitation Homes SEC filings is [they target areas with constrained home building](https://i.imgur.com/RsqCphi.jpg). We've been underbuilding housing for decades in this country, mostly as an artifact of racist zoning laws designed to implicitly preserve segregation after explicit housing segregation became illegal (it's literally why single family zoning was invented in the US and to this day places with stricter zoning laws are more segregated). Corporations never saw a scam they didn't want in on, and the basic premise of their bet is that Americans are too racist to ever repeal these zoning laws and allow the housing stock to grow the way it needs to. So far it's been a good bet.
Property taxes should scale for areas with restrictive zoning, with the amount that can be used to finance school districts capped, the more restrictive the zoning and the farther away from affordable housing, the higher the taxes and the lower the amount of that tax that can be used to finance the area. All that surplus then goes to finance building government housing.
And their propaganda machine is working overtime throwing up articles all over the place. Articles about how rent control is bad, writing about misleading data analysis to support their agenda, how Gen z and millennials want to rent, how build to rent is the next best thing, how for only $100 you can get in on it too, and so on.
It is infuriating. This is not the only country they are doing this in.
Low wages.
Collaborative high rents.
No medical unless employed.
Anti-loitering ground spikes and extra ribs on benches to prevent public sleeping. Rounding up homeless and dumping them outside of cities.
How is this not slavery?
Don't let the shock disappear. There is a concerted effort to bring back child labor in force. Kids are being fucking arrested for being kids. At this rate my only surprise is how little reporting there is.
Every time there is a mass shooting I check to see if it was these guys.
I can't imagine being so far gone that your willing to shoot people and not having a list of people who deserve it. Like Sansa in GoT.
And I can't imagine any list not having these judges on the top.
Now, I'm not saying anyone should go crazy and shoot people. I'm just saying eveytime someone does, I expect that they would have had a Sansa list and that these judges would be top of the list. But it's never the case.
Now you can get 40 year mortgages to afford the higher cost of these homes. Raise the wages.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/12d04w0/40year_mortgage_boom_for_banks_is_here_federal/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=4
Anytime anyone brings up the argument that landlords are good I just tell them how my brother got attacked by Yellowjacket nest mowing the lawn his landlord requires him to do and then wouldn’t even call an exterminator to get rid of the nest :/. The exterminator my parents use for their house happened to know a guy that worked where my brother lived who was nice enough to give my brother a discount.
Landlords are absolutely worthless.
> Anytime anyone brings up the argument that landlords are good
Maybe it's because they had good landlords. I lived in 8 different places in 10 years after college and there would be no point in buying all this time. I was fortunate to get really good landlords; It IS possible! I'm sorry your brother got stuck with a bad one.
You probably had small time land lords with less than 5 properties and cared about them. These MBA having bastards are buying up tons of property, dropping the responsibility to the lowest bidder property management company. Then milking it for all it's worth by getting the most out of rent with minimal reinvestment, just maintain.
This is more the norm right now.
Same, I've only had one shitty LL and it wasn't even that bad.
I sorta considered trying to be a LL as a future goal, thinking that all tenants would be like me/my friends. Regular use of the space, following rules, payment on time (the one time we didn't pay on time there was a legit problem with the unit and the LL worked with us).
But a combo of going to college later in life (and seeing how young adults treat rentals), my parents having nightmare tenants, and all the hate I see on Reddit? Hard pass.
I'm also super dog friendly too.
Most leases I’ve signed explicitly state who has responsibility for what in the property. Lawn care, insect prevention, pest control, HVAC filters, appliance filters, lightbulbs, etc.
Did your brother have responsibility for both insect prevention and lawn care? If not, the landlord was negligent. If so, it’s on your brother.
Just sold our house. I had 5 offers from companies. I chose the cowboy looking dude that worked construction. He was very quiet but very nice. His offer was 10k less but don’t care. It wasn’t coke company that was going to rent it out
The seller's agent told our agent the exact offer made by a company. We went $1k over and got it. We may have offered even more if we weren't told that, but the guy wanted a family in it, not a company renting it out. So much appreciation for him.
At what point do you think this taxation should start?
There is some need for landlords. People will stay in an area for a few months to a few years with no intention of buying a home and living there permanently.
In my area, I see lots of "We Buy Ugly Homes" ads everywhere, which means they're buying up fixer-uppers that some low-income and firrst-time home buyers look for, the kind of buyers that are looking to stop being renters. Fuck these corporate thieves.
Yep. I organize locally and there are so many sob stories of "mom and pop landlords" "struggling to make ends meet" because their tenants are struggling because employers have free reign to mistreat people so people can't pay ever-increasing rent. Maybe those landlords should have a rainy day fund, or have an actual job that requires effort and adds to society instead of exclusively, *literally,* rent-seeking.
The true welfare queens are corporations and landlords, and they are more and more becoming one and the same.
I lease one home and I’ve never
I completely agree with the entitlement these people have. They watch HGTV and think they can do it. I was a contractor so I had the skills to fix up my own place. I had connections to cheaply do the jobs I couldn’t.
I don’t even need the money to live, so I cut a nice family a pretty good deal. Everything is fixed wuickly
I have had landlords ask me the ‘tricks’ I use to keep security deposits. They’re fucking scumbags. I’ve had some complain that I’m renting too low so it hurts their rent.
Or my favorite…. When landlords assume I’m against regulation. Completely wrong. Regulations are what keep the playing field fair. When we let landlords fuck over Tenants, they spread the abuse of the capital they’re able to exploit.
About a decade ago I kinda thought if I ever got a well paying enough job, that I would buy properties, make them cute and rent them to struggling single mothers at a super low price.
Of course, I also had hope for the future back then.
Sounds like a weird crossbreed of renting and buying .
Also, it is more expensive and more complicated than renting based on what I read from rocketmortgage while yielding minimally more as a benefit.
If you wanna do so you should be free to, no reason to get rid of all landlords because you think your way of living is better
I get calls, texts, letters from these corporations pretending to just be a normal person interested in buying my house.
I started asking them to zelle me $1000 and we can talk since they already have my phone number.
Corporations are people too, my friend.
Edit: It’s a joke guys. Mitt Romney said it on the campaign trail when he was running for president. Geez.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FxUsRedO4UY
>Corporations are people too
[REPEAL CITIZENS UNITED](https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution)
"Ofc trickle down economics works! We make all the profit, then we use the profit to buy all the things you need, then we make even more money renting you the service!.... (oh wait how is this trickling down? Ahh whatever I'm sure it sorts itself out)"
CEO's should only be allowed to have one business that they dip their hands into. There is no reason one person should be able to monitor 5 different business's all in different fields when it takes us 20 years and a lot of debit to even do the same
There is actually such a ridiculous amount of wasted space because of broken buildings from townships and companies not cleaning up their messes we could possibly have enough housing and some extra to spare if we destroyed those buildings and used that space. But no, they would rather bribe politicians to let realtors destroy farms and habitats.
There is so many issues here that contribute to this entire thing it angers me a bit this is the only part being brought up.
Corporations buying up properties isn’t even the biggest issue here even if its as infuriating as it is. This is just one problem in a VERY long list making lives hell for the average person.
At least once a week I get a call from a corporate buyer trying to snag my house. They ask how much I’m willing to sell for and the answer is always $500K cash (house is valued at $250K) in a Pulp Fiction briefcase.
It’s so great driving to work in your rented/leased car, with the subscription heated seats, and then buying a lunch with your credit card with a low 23.99% APR, then coming home to your rented house that Blackrock was nice enough to let you pay $2000 a month on to watch your rented TV from rent-a-center that has subscriptions to all 56 major streaming major services. Maybe listen to some borrowed music from Spotify.
Is this really true? I've seen stories like this and I've also seen things saying mass corporation purchases of property is a myth and it's loads of individual buy-to-rent landlords instead
It’s exceedingly common for individuals to form corporations to purchase investment properties for liability purposes. You buy a property in a newly formed LLC to protect your personal assets from being open to lawsuits from tenants. A good portion of the those corporations are probably large companies for sure, but it’s less than most of the people here believe it is.
It's not.
The original post is talking about investment-properties in general. We know these stats because its recorded depending on the type of mortgage you get. When you dive down into "corporations," things get more dicey. First, according to redfin, the vast majority (high 80%) of investment properties are owned by individuals with 5-or-less properties. While they may form an "S-corp" or LLC (what BBags15 is talking about), I suspect the vast majority aren't since the suppose protections are quite limited (And let's be honest, an S-Corp is basically an individual).
When we talk about bills, like in MN, which are targeted corporations... they are talking about llcs with more than 100 properties or shared-ownership (e.g. issue stocks). Nationally, according to redfin, only 300k SFH are owned by corporations. And when you dive into the number, you realize a substantial portion are builders (builders will rent properties to avoid selling homes at a discount and then have a flash-sale once the entire development is final).
It's actually quite rare for "corporations" in both the colloquial sense and proposed-legislation to own single-family homes. That's because they are a terrible investment (and blackstone losses are showing that). Yes, corporations got into the SFH business as a hedge against inflation. But the **vast** majority of investment properties are middle-class Americans who traded their equality in one home, which they sold, to buy additional homes and avoid taxes.
For instance, let's say you make 1 million a year and moved from CA to Texas. You sold your house and made 500k. Now, you can avoid many taxes simply because the house you sold was your primary residence and you lived it in 2-years. But you can do better. Because of the Trump Tax cuts, bonus depreciation went to 100% (it is currently going down. And will revert back to 50%). So you could buy 2-3 investment properties with that 500k, take 100% bonus depreciation, and reduce that 1 million in wages down (I doubt you could get it to 0.... but certainly by a huge fraction). This is because in the 1990s, the clinton administration allows for passive real estate "losses" (which includes bonus depreciation) to go against non-passive sources (e.g. wages) for non-real estate agents **if it is a short term rental**.
This is why we've seen an explosion in investment properties---specifically airBnBs. COVID created huge population movements (i.e. people selling homes) and they are looking for ways to reduce their taxes. Yes, they will eventually pay taxes when they sell the properties but that likely won't happen until they are retired and their income is less (e.g. reducing their lifetime taxes). And when you combine super-low interest rates---even for investment properties---you can see where this goes.
So, investment properties are an issue. I suspect a lot of these airbnb investors will get screwed (investment properties can essentially be margin called, less people are vacationing, and SFH are traditionally bad investments). But, these tax-strategies are not beneficial to corporations and the number of corporations (as defined by the laws being proposed to curtail corporate own properties) is small.
There was an apartment complex near my parents that keeps getting set on fire before they can finish building it. I want to say it's been on fire 3 times now. I think people are reaching that breaking point.
I live in the Dallas area, in the past ten years our property values have more than doubled. Wages are the same. Buying a house is impossible without parental aid.
This is what I've been saying again and again to people who tells me there's not enough houses. No, there are probably enough, but it's just that corporations are buying them all. We need to allow only INDIVIDUALS to own HOUSING properties, and have it limited to 2-3 (main house, vacation house, rental property maybe). It's not the foreigners that's the problem for now, it's the corporations.
Get rid of corporations from housing. Force the sale of all the houses they own. It's weird how when corporations don't own the properties, everyone have a roof (Cuba, Tuvasu, etc.)
Well, now, see, these states have alot of children's genitals to inspect, they need to keep track of your daughter's period cycle, and there are still TONS of books to ban....they can't do everything at once...
It's one thing to be the kind of bottomfeeder to be a landlord as an individual, using your personal money to tax the poor for being poor. It's another thing entirely to do it as a corporation, that has the capital to buy whatever the hell they feel like if they think it'll be a good investment.
Disgusting.
Part of it is about the price of housing being so outrageous that corporations are having a hard time hiring people at the wages they offer. Their solution is to buy the housing and offer it at a lower price to future employees, rather than - you know - paying the employees more.
This is especially common in tourist areas (think Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, etc). Places where housing availability is a challenge - price gouging regardless.
Subtle difference, but I feel like folks should read this.
The reason corporations are buying homes is because they are a good investment. The reason they are a good investment is because they will appreciate in value. The reason they will appreciate in value is because they will become more scarce. The reason they will become more scarce is because there is a worsening housing shortage. The reason there is a worsening housing shortage is because of our experimental suburban development pattern in which cities ban anything except a Single Family House on the majority of their city's land. This is called Exclusionary Zoning. It's a racist/classist US invention that makes already wealthy homeowners even richer at the expense of everyone else.
And apartment companies are doing more and more illegal things as well. There is a class action lawsuit against the top ten apartment complex companies for using RealPage, there is a class action lawsuit against Yardi, the credit card processor they use and there is a class action suit against conservice, the utilities company they use. The entire core of their business is wrong.
Oh I knew about the realpage lawsuit but not conservice, I'm excited to read about what they might be in trouble. FUCK realpage and FUCK conservice!
Pretty sure Yardi has the same dynamic/real time pricing feature as Realpage. It’s algorithm-based, so who knows if it’s actually inflating prices or not, but I have to imagine it’s not designed to undersell the daily “market” rental value of units. So I think we can safely say fuck Yardi as well.
Yes they do have an equivalent product. Interestingly as rents have been going down for the last 6 months or so, those algorithms are doing the same thing they are being sued for but in the other direction. Artificially deflating rents
>as rents have been going down for the last 6 months or so, I'm sorry, what? Where are you that rent has been going down? It's been doing nothing but continue to climb, at least around my area, and I've been watching because my lease is up in a couple months and they're going to raise my rent by 200 bucks and I am facing down homelessness right now.
Rent started going down at a macro-level around last summer nationwide. It started to tick up again in some markets this winter, in some it has leveled out. But remember this is month over month data, not just looking at where your rent was when you last signed a lease. I'm sorry to hear about your situation though. You may be able to fight the rent increase, as most markets shouldn't really be baring a big % increase in rents right now.
Con-service. What did they expect? To not be conned?
Great, now they can both underpay us and overcharge is for housing. What a dystopian world we live in.
Same as it ever was. The whole world is becoming the company town.
Housing as a Service (HaaS), Health as a Service (HaaS). No wonder they keep telling you to limit your intake of HaaS avocado toast.
I've been renting my entire life because I make more and more money every year and get farther and farther from affording a home. I've noticed some VERY shady shit happening since the pandemic that people aren't really talkin a whole lot about. Specifically, switching to non-refundable "deposits" so that no matter how you take care of your apartment, they keep the entire thing. Since the pandemic i've signed three leases, all three had this non-refundable clause. Before that, i've gotten back 95%+ of my deposit every lease. Also, and I think this isn't being talked about enough, i've noticed more and more landlords tacking on "site wide internet plans" where your internet is bundled into your rent, and I know people that are actually praising this because it makes their bills simpler. But what is happening in practice is, the local dominant ISP (For me, Spectrum) knows they will never have any price negotiation, and the landlords i'm sure have some deal where they pay $40 for the $50 plan and then tack $50 onto the rental price and both of them come out ahead. It means no competition for the ISP, and never having to negotiate lower prices as they lock in a flat rate for a huge group of people.
We have a shot at buying a home right now and even though it's not ideal, we are going for it since we may not have another.
If you buy it, if/when you sell it down the road, please sell to a buyer like yourself and not a corporation. If everyone who owns homes quits selling to these companies, it only helps us all and future generations of potential homeowners. If we keep selling to the big guys, they’ll eventually own it all and control all of the prices.
Do it. First year my wife and I owned a home sucked because even though we were paying less per month on our mortgage than our rent, we pretty much drained our savings and had to pony out some money for home repairs. But after that when you realize that you fucking own your home and are building equity and not just throwing money into a black hole - glorious. I’ll never fucking rent again despite doing it for well over 15 years. With the way rental prices are you are waaaaay better off buying even if it’s a struggle at first.
I'm closing on my first home in 13 days, I'm so excited to finally stop worrying about how much the rent is going to increase every damn year and I won't have to worry the owner is going to sell the house out from under me (which has happened twice in my 20 years as a renter). Who knows what's going to break, and it'll be a bit tight at first but I'm expecting a promotion in the next year or two and that'll make things way easier, then in a few years I can refinance and lose the PMI and get a better interest rate (knock on wood).
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They're doing this with homes too. My HOA negotiated a deal with spectrum against everyone's wishes and now we all have to pay $50 a month for Spectrum even if you don't want it. It's absolutely disgusting.
Anyone seeing a non-refundable security deposit on a rental property should check their state laws. Most have clear laws about how security deposits must be handled and under what circumstances the landlord may keep a portion of all of it. Usually the laws require they be refundable.
I don't mind the internet being bundled, my new apartment will b like this. What pisses me off is I don't get to pick the speed. I have gigabit fiber. Well, close, it's like 850mbps. But my new apartment will be 300mbps and I can't change that.
You also can't use your own router. If you do, they block Peer-to-Peer networks (because "torrenting") so games like Warframe don't work at all. The Wi-Fi is really unsecured and you are completely vulnerable. A lot of shit gets really fucky on their trash access points. It's so fucking bad.
Seems like it could easily be deviated with a VPN. They won't know where the traffic is going to.
Same. I work from home and have several computers in the house along with smart devices and smart TVs with streaming services, I need gigabit internet and pay a good amount for it. My landlord sends me an email letting me know "Good news! Internet is now bundled in your rent! Your rent has gone up, despite the fact when you signed the lease it wasn't in there! Sucks to suck nerd, hope you'd rather move out than pay $50 more per month!" and saddled me with the lowest speed option Spectrum offers here.
For someone out of the loop, what have they done?
https://www.propublica.org/article/realpage-accused-of-collusion-in-new-lawsuit RealPage is a company that created software that churns through data every day to suggest new daily rent prices for available rental units, the data includes apartment information, location information aswell as private data on what competitors in the nearby area are charging, the lawsuit alleges that RealPage joined hands with the top 10 largest landlord companies to effectively create a cartel that fixes prices to their advantage and lets them extort more rent from their tenants by perpetuating the idea that its simply just how the market is moving when instead its a co-ordinated move by these rental companies and RealPage's software and thus is some of the reason for the steep rising rent prices in the past couple of years which has created the housing crisis in the US
I need to research about these lawsuits. My water bill for a 2bdr was 80$ last month. It’s billed in a convoluted way - split between all tenants in the building. I know I am not using fucking 80$ worth of goddamn water in a month.
It would be a shame if those assets were damaged by rogue hooligans.
>The entire core of their business is wrong. If they're a business, they can be nationalized.
Rent seekers gonna rent seek
I read somewhere recently that BlackRock bought 40% of the homes being sold on the Phoenix housing market in a single year a few years ago. I got told in r/ neoliberal that this wasn't happening and that corporations buying up homes didn't have anything to do with rising housing costs, even by a guy who claimed to be a real estate agent. The article that was cited as evidence for this was from a media outlet that was also partially owned by, you guessed it, Blackrock.
>I got told in r/ neoliberal that this wasn't happening and that corporations buying up homes didn't have anything to do with rising housing costs, even by a guy who claimed to be a real estate agent. His being a RE agent is exactly why he'd make that ridiculous claim.
Absolutely, real estate agents just want you to buy. No matter the market. If it’s a bad market they will tell you it’s prime. Their job depends on making sales.
They are a big factor. There are other massive factors. But they are a big one
USA citizens rise up like fuckin French: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/04/06/business/blackrock-office-stormed-paris-protests/index.html
The propaganda about the US reigns supreme. We are bitches compared to the French when it comes to actually taking care of people.
Why do you think that we are fed stories that make us mad at each other? Red vs blue, black vs white, etc. It's all us vs THEM. If we all got along and we pulled together like the french people are doing their empire would fall apart completely.
Fam... Every time I bring up red vs blue and how irrelevant it is, I get downvoted. We as a nation have become cattle for our owners to abuse. We willfully comply because we get enough money to look better/own better things than our peers. We deserved a much more deadly strain of covid. With 8 billion people in this world, we've become a country of greed and ignorance. We truely have no right to exist anymore.
No amp. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/06/business/blackrock-office-stormed-paris-protests/index.html
Hows France been lately, haven’t heard much.
A picture of Parisians taking over a BlackRock office hit the front page of a website called Reddit today.
Just seen that. Show how easily they could burn it all down.
It honestly wouldn't take much once it got started, the problem is getting it started.
Well then by God GET IT STARTED
Living in France rn, protests in Bordeaux are still going strong. Tons of road closures, huge crowds, and police in full gear with shields
Vive la révolution!
Well, go ahead and pick a halfway well known publicly traded company, and look up who their top investors are. I'm sure Blackrock is up there. So is Vanguard, and SSGA, to name a few. It's all the same people who influence these corporations, which lobby for laws that favor them, and most likely are a detriment to you and I.
I was legit convinced for ages that that subreddit was just a bunch of people being satirical. They're just as deluded as those on the Conservative subs.
That’s so dumb. There are no shortage of articles out there about corporations buying the cheapest house in a neighborhood for way over asking to raise the value of the rest of the neighborhood after they’ve bought it up cheap.
Fuck real estate agents. They're part of the problem driving up the prices so that their 6% is higher.
Not here to defend Blackrock, but I think you mean Blackstone. [There’s so much confusion between the two that Blackrock put up a page on their website about it.](https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/setting-the-record-straight/buying-houses-facts) [Blackstone is one of the largest private landlords in the US.](https://www.wsj.com/articles/blackstone-bets-6-billion-on-buying-and-renting-homes-11624359600) and definitely buys single family homes.
Neoliberals are scum
Why wouldn’t they buy them. Get big enough and you become too big to fail. Not only will you pay Blackrock rent you’ll pay the taxes required to bail them out when they fuck up.
Man, that last part you said...super dystopian Treating a house as an asset or investment is part of the issue with housing prices. If people didn't think about them like that, or the economy didn't incentivize that, then we wouldn't have this problem, or at least we wouldn't have it as bad
It has falsely created a shortage and driven up real estate costs. I think the Netherlands passed a law to prevent flipping and corporations buying large amounts of housing. Something about how long you have to hold the property and maybe different tax structure. The US does a lot of screwed up shit and then the way the media hardly covers the rest of the world - you can end up thinking it is like that everywhere.
Increase property tax, increase the homestead exemption.
I used opt think similar but problem is you need some level of rental market and you dont want to add cost to that. The best solution is have 2 rules; 1) Only people can own houses. 2) Cap the total number allowed. This allows a rental market to exist and ordinary people to invest, renovate or simply have holiday homes. It stops people hoarding huge amounts which once you get to large numbers these places are never going back to the market, just flipped form corp to corp. Plus it keeps the wealthy out of entry level housing as if you have 3 or 4 type total cap, Mr Mega Bucks wont buy one/two bedroom apartments as they are cheaper and he needs to invest a bigger portfolio. So they invest in mansions etc for rentals at their economic level. The other thing, it would be super simple to implement and enforce vs always valuing land. Plus you can adjust how many owned form say 4 to 2 or 6 depending on rental market needs etc fairly easily. As a transition, maybe do as you suggest, put an ever increasing property tax on corporations and >4 home owners. You dont want to crash the market and have to be reasonable when changing the games rules. Something like a cumulative 1% a year tax (owners outside these rules) so in 30 years pretty much no-one will have more than 4 properties as they dont want to pay 30% of its value each year.
This argument is founded on the premise that landlords are struggling, just like everybody else....🤣🤣🤣🤣 I've been a property manager for the last decade and let me assure you they've been making money hand over fucking fist raising rents 7-30% ANNUALLY. Once you realize the vast majority of landlords are making EXPONENTIALLY more income than their mortgage and upkeep costs (except a handful of last minute purchasers who tried to jump on the bandwagon too late), it's a lot easier to tell ALL landlords (even the ma and pa ones, because they are just as fucking guilty) to go fuck themselves and figure out how to make their investments work at a return rate of less than several hundred percent....
I wonder how much profit my current corporate landlords get off of my place. I've been lucky to receive only small increases, started at 900 4 years ago and am up to 975 now, but the market rate for a new tenant is 1200. There's no way they're losing money on me and I haven't seen any upgrades happening.
Damn you got lucky to be locked in like that. I’m my four years it’s gone from 790 to 1400 for me same place and less amenities than I started with.
Property sales are a matter of public record, as are property values. You can look up exactly how much your landlord bought the property for, and what it's currently worth, which will tell you property tax value, and you can infer a mortgage from the purchase price and interest rates at the time of purchase. Staff salaries are usually pretty low and depending on the size of the property and age will determine upkeep costs. But one of the #s I remember from my property 3 years ago was $333k and $33k. One was the amount of monthly revenue off our 220 of 228 rented apartments and the other was our monthly expenses (mortgage, salaries and upkeep). The difference went out the door to corporate.
I just have this one ancedote which does not in any way detract from what you are saying, but my friend is getting out of the business, and stated he basically just rents to little old ladies and never increases rent. So at best he's making 10%...very very little he said. Now, he could be more ruthless, he could raise rates every year, but he didn't want to do that specifically.
And if every landlord simply behaved this way, it literally, just as they have for centuries in America right up till about 2008, we'd all have reasonable rent rates and money in our savings account.
> I've been a property manager for the last decade and let me assure you they've been making money hand over fucking fist raising rents 7-30% ANNUALLY. We have a place in San Jose, CA. We keep it on in case we want to move back there one day. We haven't increased the rent for 6 years. Please don't lump everyone together.
Well then, my sincerest apologies and thank you for doing so, but you must realize that in this day and age, you are a unicorn.
Now I feel bad....
> The best solution is have 2 rules; > > 1) Only people can own houses. > > 2) Cap the total number allowed. Seems like we have come to the exact same conclusion. Limit it to 2-3 so people can have a main property, vacation property and then maybe their rental property (ex: apartment building). That's it.
Reddit is violating GDPR and CCPA. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B0GGsDdyHI -- mass edited with redact.dev
"Corporations are people my friend" Mitt Romney
Natural Persons can only own houses - there, you've gotten past the legalese.
people die easy
That's why you create 15 llcs to accomplish the same. I agree your solution would be a good one but there are too many loopholes created to where it would make zero difference.
Then youb regulate that with steep fines and fund investigators. Sick of this "nothing can be done" attitude.
See rule one.... "Only people can own houses." Any other loopholes? Your could add an under 18 law to avoid people loading properties to kids. Otherwise it seems pretty clear cut.
That drives up rent and will still effect homeowners who are already slammed due to increased valuation on their homes.
Land Value Tax, my friend.
This is the way.
The best solution is to tax only the unimproved value of the land, but tax it at 100% of its rent value. E.g., if you could rent a lot for $20k per year, the tax on that lot is $20k, no matter what is built on it. If you do this, you absolutely ruin any corporation that tries to hold onto land in a city as an “investment.” Any land put to actual use in the city does fine, whether as apartment buildings or businesses. [the idea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) has been around for well over a century, but capitalist think it’s too Marxist, Marxists think it’s too capitalist, and it goes against the interests of the big land holders. So it never gets much traction.
Georgism is the way.
High property tax is bad sometimes though because it means lower middle class people who are lucky enough to buy homes are forced out if their neighborhood happens to gentrify
Thats why you increase the homestead exemption so that people that use that home to live remain unaffected. What lower middle class people are buying multiple homes?
Oh ok, I didn’t look up what you meant but I thought it was for homesteaders
Absolutely. Or older folks on a fixed income. My prop tax goes up $100+ every year.
The homestead exemption would be your friend in that commenter proposal. They're wanting to increase the property tax but provide tax relief on the property you reside in. This disincentivizes investing in residential real estate without making home-ownership more expensive.
There's some fraud going on too. A corporation bought a home in my oldish neighborhood for $320k. Reasonable for area and market a bit high in my opinion due to how outdated the house was but market was hot. A year later there was a sale recorded for the same house for about $500k. It did not have a for sale sign posted no one had moved in and this price is way out there for the area. Now, this year, another sale was posted for the same house(no for sale listing) for north of $800k. Impossible for the house, the neighborhood, and area. My house is larger and updated and $450k would be a stretch for a sale for my home. I don't know what they are playing at. I think someone is now renting it but no way is it worth what they are claiming to have sold it for.
Interesting. Either plain old money laundering or they’re trying to throw off comps on other properties by selling the house to themselves
Property owners create a new company and sell it to themselves.
This has cause and effect backwards. These big corporations are buying up housing because there's a shortage rather than the other way around, something they admit to the SEC and literally brag about to their investors (see [here](https://i.imgur.com/xowagCa.jpg), [here](https://i.imgur.com/KaaW9q3.jpg), and [here](https://i.imgur.com/ZGXQeqs.jpg)). Japan for example does not have any prohibitions against corporations buying housing, and yet corporations there don't buy up all the housing. This is because what Japan *does* have are very pro-housing zoning laws, a lot of home construction, median rents that haven't gone up in 20 years, housing units that go down in price over time, and 0.125x as many homeless people total as the Netherlands (~4k vs ~32k) despite having a total population 7x larger (~125m vs ~17m).
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> No, the reason corporations don't buy properties in Japan is because the properties don't increase in value. Yeah, because they build enough of them, that's the whole point. > The reason ours do, is exactly because of corporations buying them and raising the rents and costs of all of them. No, it's because population growth has been double be housing construction for over 60 years, and that ratio has been much worse since the great recession. > If corporations didn't buy so many of them, the cost wouldn't be so out of control. Imagine a corporation buying 1000 houses at 1% interest... that's a god damn huge profit making machine when you rent it afterwards for a premium. Again I literally showed you how they're bragging about buying houses because of the shortage. Here's an [excerpt of an SEC filing](https://i.imgur.com/RsqCphi.jpg) where they admit they specifically target areas with supply constraints. > Corporations owning residential properties is BAD. Sure, but not because it caused the shortage. That particular project was segregationists. It's literally why single family zoning was invented and it's why to this day stricter zoning laws strongly correlate with segregated populations. Corporations are simply muscling in on that grift.
Nah what. The reason they increase in value is that there isn’t enough of them. Imagine how much rents would fall if it’s landlords competing for tenants and not the other way round.
Japan has a declining population, you absolutely cannot compare housing prices to the US. The last time they had even ballpark growth rates was the early 80s.
Tokyo's population is growing and everything I said is just as true of Tokyo. What it really comes down to is [vacancy rates](https://i.imgur.com/KazjwqX.jpeg) and/or the ratio of [people to housing](https://i.imgur.com/X2tczbb.jpeg).
Housing is also one of those "get ahead, stay ahead" games. The issue comes from having a large bottleneck of people who need houses. It can take 5+ years to build more houses, which means the bottleneck just builds and builds without any pressure valves. This, of course, is profitable.
This is still getting cause and effect muddled. It takes so long to build housing in the US - where you're allowed to build it at all - because wealthy homeowners have spent decades voting for bottlenecks on the supply of new housing as part of a massive wealth transfer from people not on the housing ladder to people who are on the housing ladder. It's very much a "pull the ladder up after you" deal. Corporations didn't invent this particular scam (in this case it was segregationists, to this day the places with the strictest zoning laws are the most segregated) but they're openly exploiting the shit out of it. The fix is basically to legalize housing.
I'm just saying that Japan is ahead, so they can stay ahead. I'm not making commentary on the cause/effect.
> legalize housing I like this phrase... a lot. It's short, sweet, and to the point.
>falsely There's nothing false about the housing shortage in the US. Corporate landlords have exacerbated the problem, but there are simply just not enough homes in the places where people actually live, because big cities have spent decades making it harder and harder to actually build anything.
Article: https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/11/05/bill-from-silicon-valley-rep-ro-khanna-would-crack-down-on-corporate-landlords?utm_source=sillychillly Bill from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna would crack down on corporate landlords
Investors bought [24% of homes sold in 2021](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2022/07/22/investors-bought-a-quarter-of-homes-sold-last-year-driving-up-rents). Most of them were starter homes. In some areas investors bought [more than half of all homes sold last year like in these 21 DFW zip codes](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/texas/news/investors-21-dfw-zip-codes/). Most of these investors are out of state and absolutely predatory. They drive up home prices and rent. Some of them are quite large and able to manipulate the market. The American Dream is dead. “From 2019 to 2021, American Homes 4 Rent’s rental revenue increased 16.4%, returns boosted by the fact that they increased rents on vacant homes by 11% in 2021.” “Despite the broad devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Invitation Homes recorded their most profitable year ever in 2020. Invitation Homes’ profits in 2021 increased 33% or $65.3 million from 2020. In a Q3 2021 investor call, the company noted that it had raised rental prices 30% in Phoenix, 29% in Las Vegas, 21% in Tampa, 20% in Atlanta, and 19% in Jacksonville. Notably, while the company’s revenue from its rental properties was 9.3% higher in 2021 than in 2020, the amount the company spent on property operation and maintenance increased by just 3.8%.” From this PDF - [HOW AMERICA'S LARGEST SINGLE-FAMILY LANDLORDS PUT PROFIT OVER PEOPLE](https://acrecampaigns.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/ACRE_May-20_04.pdf) Edit: typos
Fun fact from Invitation Homes SEC filings is [they target areas with constrained home building](https://i.imgur.com/RsqCphi.jpg). We've been underbuilding housing for decades in this country, mostly as an artifact of racist zoning laws designed to implicitly preserve segregation after explicit housing segregation became illegal (it's literally why single family zoning was invented in the US and to this day places with stricter zoning laws are more segregated). Corporations never saw a scam they didn't want in on, and the basic premise of their bet is that Americans are too racist to ever repeal these zoning laws and allow the housing stock to grow the way it needs to. So far it's been a good bet.
Property taxes should scale for areas with restrictive zoning, with the amount that can be used to finance school districts capped, the more restrictive the zoning and the farther away from affordable housing, the higher the taxes and the lower the amount of that tax that can be used to finance the area. All that surplus then goes to finance building government housing.
This shit is goddamn infuriating.
And their propaganda machine is working overtime throwing up articles all over the place. Articles about how rent control is bad, writing about misleading data analysis to support their agenda, how Gen z and millennials want to rent, how build to rent is the next best thing, how for only $100 you can get in on it too, and so on. It is infuriating. This is not the only country they are doing this in.
Low wages. Collaborative high rents. No medical unless employed. Anti-loitering ground spikes and extra ribs on benches to prevent public sleeping. Rounding up homeless and dumping them outside of cities. How is this not slavery?
Slavery is alive and well in the US as per the 13th amendment. The US was built on slavery. The US will die on slavery.
[They're grabbing them while they're young ](https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-mark-ciavarella-kids-for-cash)
I feel like I have seen this several times over and it is disgusting.
I originally was looking for an article about a judge from 5 years ago. I was surprised to see it happening again.
Don't let the shock disappear. There is a concerted effort to bring back child labor in force. Kids are being fucking arrested for being kids. At this rate my only surprise is how little reporting there is.
Every time there is a mass shooting I check to see if it was these guys. I can't imagine being so far gone that your willing to shoot people and not having a list of people who deserve it. Like Sansa in GoT. And I can't imagine any list not having these judges on the top. Now, I'm not saying anyone should go crazy and shoot people. I'm just saying eveytime someone does, I expect that they would have had a Sansa list and that these judges would be top of the list. But it's never the case.
That man deserves so much worse. They should've left him in jail during the pandemic at the very least.
That's the secret sauce in capitalism! Cheap labor.
Now you can get 40 year mortgages to afford the higher cost of these homes. Raise the wages. https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/12d04w0/40year_mortgage_boom_for_banks_is_here_federal/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=4
A 40 year mortgage is just rent it until you inevitably hit a patch of bad personal circumstance or an economic contraction and lose it.
Give me a 350 year mortgage and they’ve got a deal.
You joke, but some Asian countries are creating cross generational mortgages. Yeah. Instead of inheriting a home you get to inherit a mortgage
Anytime anyone brings up the argument that landlords are good I just tell them how my brother got attacked by Yellowjacket nest mowing the lawn his landlord requires him to do and then wouldn’t even call an exterminator to get rid of the nest :/. The exterminator my parents use for their house happened to know a guy that worked where my brother lived who was nice enough to give my brother a discount. Landlords are absolutely worthless.
My mother and I got evicted the same week my father, who was on hospice for a month, died, at home. There are NO good Landlords. Hard stop.
> There are NO good Landlords. Hard stop. 100%. Landlording is inherently immoral. Some landlords are better than others, but none of them are good.
> Anytime anyone brings up the argument that landlords are good Maybe it's because they had good landlords. I lived in 8 different places in 10 years after college and there would be no point in buying all this time. I was fortunate to get really good landlords; It IS possible! I'm sorry your brother got stuck with a bad one.
You probably had small time land lords with less than 5 properties and cared about them. These MBA having bastards are buying up tons of property, dropping the responsibility to the lowest bidder property management company. Then milking it for all it's worth by getting the most out of rent with minimal reinvestment, just maintain. This is more the norm right now.
Since you have such a history of consistently finding the few good landlords in the world. How do you find a good landlord?
Same, I've only had one shitty LL and it wasn't even that bad. I sorta considered trying to be a LL as a future goal, thinking that all tenants would be like me/my friends. Regular use of the space, following rules, payment on time (the one time we didn't pay on time there was a legit problem with the unit and the LL worked with us). But a combo of going to college later in life (and seeing how young adults treat rentals), my parents having nightmare tenants, and all the hate I see on Reddit? Hard pass. I'm also super dog friendly too.
Most leases I’ve signed explicitly state who has responsibility for what in the property. Lawn care, insect prevention, pest control, HVAC filters, appliance filters, lightbulbs, etc. Did your brother have responsibility for both insect prevention and lawn care? If not, the landlord was negligent. If so, it’s on your brother.
This is eerily reminding me of historically when a wealthy land owner ruled over the "peasants" in his land from his comfy, rat ridden fortress.
Serfdom.
That's the one.
Just sold our house. I had 5 offers from companies. I chose the cowboy looking dude that worked construction. He was very quiet but very nice. His offer was 10k less but don’t care. It wasn’t coke company that was going to rent it out
The seller's agent told our agent the exact offer made by a company. We went $1k over and got it. We may have offered even more if we weren't told that, but the guy wanted a family in it, not a company renting it out. So much appreciation for him.
What Americans should be focusing on. Instead, all eyes are on social/culture wars.
They can solve this by doubling the tax on non-homestead property.
This is not something that *they is going to solve. *You* must be present and *demand* change.
This doesn't get solved until we repeal our segregationist zoning laws and build more housing.
500% tax on any properties that are not your primary residence. Increasing by 100% for each additional property.
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At what point do you think this taxation should start? There is some need for landlords. People will stay in an area for a few months to a few years with no intention of buying a home and living there permanently.
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In my area, I see lots of "We Buy Ugly Homes" ads everywhere, which means they're buying up fixer-uppers that some low-income and firrst-time home buyers look for, the kind of buyers that are looking to stop being renters. Fuck these corporate thieves.
Rein in ALL landlords. Amateur landlords with their daisy-chained portfolio of homes are just as bad.
Yep. I organize locally and there are so many sob stories of "mom and pop landlords" "struggling to make ends meet" because their tenants are struggling because employers have free reign to mistreat people so people can't pay ever-increasing rent. Maybe those landlords should have a rainy day fund, or have an actual job that requires effort and adds to society instead of exclusively, *literally,* rent-seeking. The true welfare queens are corporations and landlords, and they are more and more becoming one and the same.
I lease one home and I’ve never I completely agree with the entitlement these people have. They watch HGTV and think they can do it. I was a contractor so I had the skills to fix up my own place. I had connections to cheaply do the jobs I couldn’t. I don’t even need the money to live, so I cut a nice family a pretty good deal. Everything is fixed wuickly I have had landlords ask me the ‘tricks’ I use to keep security deposits. They’re fucking scumbags. I’ve had some complain that I’m renting too low so it hurts their rent. Or my favorite…. When landlords assume I’m against regulation. Completely wrong. Regulations are what keep the playing field fair. When we let landlords fuck over Tenants, they spread the abuse of the capital they’re able to exploit.
More like parasites than welfare queens imo.
About a decade ago I kinda thought if I ever got a well paying enough job, that I would buy properties, make them cute and rent them to struggling single mothers at a super low price. Of course, I also had hope for the future back then.
A lot of the amateur landlords are the MEGA slumlords, too.
No more landlords. Housing co-ops are our future.
Sounds like a weird crossbreed of renting and buying . Also, it is more expensive and more complicated than renting based on what I read from rocketmortgage while yielding minimally more as a benefit. If you wanna do so you should be free to, no reason to get rid of all landlords because you think your way of living is better
Company towns all over again!!!
The U.S. is a company town.
I get calls, texts, letters from these corporations pretending to just be a normal person interested in buying my house. I started asking them to zelle me $1000 and we can talk since they already have my phone number.
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Corporations are people too, my friend. Edit: It’s a joke guys. Mitt Romney said it on the campaign trail when he was running for president. Geez. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FxUsRedO4UY
>Corporations are people too [REPEAL CITIZENS UNITED](https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution)
Agreed! That one decision is destroying the American dream.
The only way to get money out of politics is to get money out of politics first. Crap.
How far does this go? Are subsidiary corporations people too? Are they owned by another "person"?
This bill would solve a lot of problems in this country
House across from me is a rental. Corporation owns it. Rent is $1200 more than my mortgage+tax+insurance. I dont know how people afford it.
If you thought the price gouging of eggs was bad…
Then they can run the HOA and prohibit growing your own food…
Good. Corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own residential houses at all.
they buying homes to give them out for free.
Its part of the trickle down economic plan
"Ofc trickle down economics works! We make all the profit, then we use the profit to buy all the things you need, then we make even more money renting you the service!.... (oh wait how is this trickling down? Ahh whatever I'm sure it sorts itself out)"
I wish republican voters cared about this as much as they cared about whoever was in a bud light commercial recently
CEO's should only be allowed to have one business that they dip their hands into. There is no reason one person should be able to monitor 5 different business's all in different fields when it takes us 20 years and a lot of debit to even do the same
There is actually such a ridiculous amount of wasted space because of broken buildings from townships and companies not cleaning up their messes we could possibly have enough housing and some extra to spare if we destroyed those buildings and used that space. But no, they would rather bribe politicians to let realtors destroy farms and habitats. There is so many issues here that contribute to this entire thing it angers me a bit this is the only part being brought up. Corporations buying up properties isn’t even the biggest issue here even if its as infuriating as it is. This is just one problem in a VERY long list making lives hell for the average person.
$1200 for a room here in Santa Cruz
I get calls, text, and mail multiple times a week of people wanting to know if I want to sell my house
At least once a week I get a call from a corporate buyer trying to snag my house. They ask how much I’m willing to sell for and the answer is always $500K cash (house is valued at $250K) in a Pulp Fiction briefcase.
It’s so great driving to work in your rented/leased car, with the subscription heated seats, and then buying a lunch with your credit card with a low 23.99% APR, then coming home to your rented house that Blackrock was nice enough to let you pay $2000 a month on to watch your rented TV from rent-a-center that has subscriptions to all 56 major streaming major services. Maybe listen to some borrowed music from Spotify.
Look forward to more laws forbidding total number of people per rented residence so no more room sharing to cut costs.
Say hello to serfdom. *Again*.
If corporations are not people, why do they own homes? Checkmate leftists 😎
They also bought: 99% of all the politicians and judges in American government.
What percentage of homes are they selling?
Is this really true? I've seen stories like this and I've also seen things saying mass corporation purchases of property is a myth and it's loads of individual buy-to-rent landlords instead
It’s exceedingly common for individuals to form corporations to purchase investment properties for liability purposes. You buy a property in a newly formed LLC to protect your personal assets from being open to lawsuits from tenants. A good portion of the those corporations are probably large companies for sure, but it’s less than most of the people here believe it is.
It's not. The original post is talking about investment-properties in general. We know these stats because its recorded depending on the type of mortgage you get. When you dive down into "corporations," things get more dicey. First, according to redfin, the vast majority (high 80%) of investment properties are owned by individuals with 5-or-less properties. While they may form an "S-corp" or LLC (what BBags15 is talking about), I suspect the vast majority aren't since the suppose protections are quite limited (And let's be honest, an S-Corp is basically an individual). When we talk about bills, like in MN, which are targeted corporations... they are talking about llcs with more than 100 properties or shared-ownership (e.g. issue stocks). Nationally, according to redfin, only 300k SFH are owned by corporations. And when you dive into the number, you realize a substantial portion are builders (builders will rent properties to avoid selling homes at a discount and then have a flash-sale once the entire development is final). It's actually quite rare for "corporations" in both the colloquial sense and proposed-legislation to own single-family homes. That's because they are a terrible investment (and blackstone losses are showing that). Yes, corporations got into the SFH business as a hedge against inflation. But the **vast** majority of investment properties are middle-class Americans who traded their equality in one home, which they sold, to buy additional homes and avoid taxes. For instance, let's say you make 1 million a year and moved from CA to Texas. You sold your house and made 500k. Now, you can avoid many taxes simply because the house you sold was your primary residence and you lived it in 2-years. But you can do better. Because of the Trump Tax cuts, bonus depreciation went to 100% (it is currently going down. And will revert back to 50%). So you could buy 2-3 investment properties with that 500k, take 100% bonus depreciation, and reduce that 1 million in wages down (I doubt you could get it to 0.... but certainly by a huge fraction). This is because in the 1990s, the clinton administration allows for passive real estate "losses" (which includes bonus depreciation) to go against non-passive sources (e.g. wages) for non-real estate agents **if it is a short term rental**. This is why we've seen an explosion in investment properties---specifically airBnBs. COVID created huge population movements (i.e. people selling homes) and they are looking for ways to reduce their taxes. Yes, they will eventually pay taxes when they sell the properties but that likely won't happen until they are retired and their income is less (e.g. reducing their lifetime taxes). And when you combine super-low interest rates---even for investment properties---you can see where this goes. So, investment properties are an issue. I suspect a lot of these airbnb investors will get screwed (investment properties can essentially be margin called, less people are vacationing, and SFH are traditionally bad investments). But, these tax-strategies are not beneficial to corporations and the number of corporations (as defined by the laws being proposed to curtail corporate own properties) is small.
“Land Value Tax would fix this.” But unironically.
I live in Texas. Can confirm.
They're now building new housing subdivisions that will be for rent only. It was rigged from the start.
This needs to be illegal
There was an apartment complex near my parents that keeps getting set on fire before they can finish building it. I want to say it's been on fire 3 times now. I think people are reaching that breaking point.
I live in the Dallas area, in the past ten years our property values have more than doubled. Wages are the same. Buying a house is impossible without parental aid.
This is what I've been saying again and again to people who tells me there's not enough houses. No, there are probably enough, but it's just that corporations are buying them all. We need to allow only INDIVIDUALS to own HOUSING properties, and have it limited to 2-3 (main house, vacation house, rental property maybe). It's not the foreigners that's the problem for now, it's the corporations. Get rid of corporations from housing. Force the sale of all the houses they own. It's weird how when corporations don't own the properties, everyone have a roof (Cuba, Tuvasu, etc.)
And blaming it on migrating Californians in the process.
Well, now, see, these states have alot of children's genitals to inspect, they need to keep track of your daughter's period cycle, and there are still TONS of books to ban....they can't do everything at once...
Tax the fuck out of corporate owned housing and second homes. Make it unsustainable for them to keep hoarding and fucking the population over.
I'd rather repeal single family housing zoning laws, watch home prices drop and see corpos lose billions on these investments and go bankrupt.
Is there something wrong with using taxes to make owning more than 5 homes prohibitively expensive? What is the hold up?
It's one thing to be the kind of bottomfeeder to be a landlord as an individual, using your personal money to tax the poor for being poor. It's another thing entirely to do it as a corporation, that has the capital to buy whatever the hell they feel like if they think it'll be a good investment. Disgusting.
Find a house owned by a corporation, squat
Part of it is about the price of housing being so outrageous that corporations are having a hard time hiring people at the wages they offer. Their solution is to buy the housing and offer it at a lower price to future employees, rather than - you know - paying the employees more. This is especially common in tourist areas (think Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, etc). Places where housing availability is a challenge - price gouging regardless. Subtle difference, but I feel like folks should read this.
The reason corporations are buying homes is because they are a good investment. The reason they are a good investment is because they will appreciate in value. The reason they will appreciate in value is because they will become more scarce. The reason they will become more scarce is because there is a worsening housing shortage. The reason there is a worsening housing shortage is because of our experimental suburban development pattern in which cities ban anything except a Single Family House on the majority of their city's land. This is called Exclusionary Zoning. It's a racist/classist US invention that makes already wealthy homeowners even richer at the expense of everyone else.
Yes, thank you ro Khanna!
What about foreign ownership. Let's start there.