No one is sitting around waiting for property to appreciate when they could sit around and collect rents waiting for property to appreciate.
There's a solution for this, too: lower the rent to market prices.
> or the cost of repairs to make a place rentable isn't worth the rents it would generate
Well... as a landlord you're supposed to provide for continuous maintenance, and if you have cut corners on this out of greed (like it's common in Germany, just google for "Vonovia Skandal"), it's your fault. And there's always the possibility to tear down and rebuild.
> No one is sitting around waiting for property to appreciate when they could sit around and collect rents waiting for property to appreciate.
You haven't heard of London, I assume? Quote from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/04/london... :
> Key to this is tackling buy-to-leave investing, a growing and unwelcome practice. The model is simple, buy a property, leave it empty – in the knowledge that investors do not then need to comply with regulations covering the rented housing market – and sell it on for a profit.
And rents are enough to pay for maintenance, which you have to pay for whether you rent or not. Just try re-selling an uninhabitable investment home.
And you need to be a more critical reader. The guardian article is full of red flags. It "claims" 57k vacant homes in London, where there are 8.5M households. So less than 7%. How many do you think should be vacant, considering that homes are vacant when for sale, when waiting to find a renter, and when waiting for the owners to move back if they worked out of country for a few years?
Secondly the paragraph on "buy-to-leave" investing indicates that rental regulations are so absurdly onerous that it is keeping properties off the market. Reforming them is the real solution.
Dealing with renters in that equation dosent make any sense, because the returns will be tiny, even with sky high rents like $3000 a month on say an $800k property appreciating 20% every year (a real situation in many cities). The presence of renters will ensure you cant sell it when you want to, and instead have to deal with them, an insane hassle for a foreign investor.
Compounding this is the fact that much of this property investment is being driven by wealthy (and to a huge degree corrupt) chinese looking to funnel money out of china, before the CCP can take it from them. Real estate is one of the few foreign investments allowed by the CCP. Tie this in further to the investor class visas many countries have, where you get the equivilent of a green card if you invest X millions of dollars. In these circumstances people dont care much about returns, or even taking somewhat of a haircut on their investments, because its better to have some + a get out of jail free card as a resident of another nation, than be stuck in china in jail, with no assets at all.
Your continued incredulity that these properties arnt being rented out dosent change the reality of the situation, a massive percentage of them are not, and are built specificly to NEVER be rented.