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>Once you start eviction you are stuck paying someone else's mortgage.

This is actually the your (the landlord's) mortgage, not someone else's. That is one part of the risk of an investment vehicle that allows more tax write downs than most other investments.

Just like other investments, the pain is much less dramatic if you aren't over levered. If you are, profits are good until they aren't. Higher risk comes with that higher reward.

This is exactly it. The notion that they easily shift that ownership of the mortgage onto their renters saying "stuck paying someone else's mortgage" feels like mental gymnastics as it 100% is your name on that debt and not your renters.

A lot of landlords don't seem to really understand that their rental properties are a business and an investment, and thus inherently have risk. Fewer still really comprehend that the little landlords generally are carrying a lot more risk than the bigger property management companies. They just keep being shocked and offended when they seemingly discover this risk for the first time all over again.

I think you're right, a lot of people underestimate just how risky the real estate market is. Back in the 90s it was seen as a low-risk endeavor. Pretty much guaranteed money and tons of cheap leverage to max out returns. After all, everyone needs houses and the population just keeps going up faster than houses could be built. Especially with immigration.

However the cheap leverage and massive influx of foreign investment kinda fell off which made prices drop like a rock in 2008. I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen again in late 2020 and 2021 when a bunch of people see balloon payments from deferred mortgages.

Someone is enjoying the benefit of living in a house they didn't pay for, nor work hard maintaining. They are essentially taking for free what you have spent a lot of time, money, and effort on while literally shitting all over it. Also, you have no recourse to recover the costs they are incurring on you. The mental gymnastics occurs when someone tries to say it's YOUR fault that someone is taking advantage of you.

> more tax write downs than most other investments.

Just to be clear for other readers. The only special tax write downs for real estate is depreciation, which isn't a write-down, it's a deferral. (OK, yes you can escape the deferred tax by dying)

Having a mortgage is irrelevant to the tax situation. Mortgage interest is not treated any different than interest on any other business or investment financing. Even the margin interest in our brokerage accounts is deductible.

Sorry, how does someone who is renting have a mortgage?

Do you consider paying your own mortgage, in your own name, which causes you accumulate wealthy, the act of paying somebody else's mortgage?

I can't see how what you say makes any sense, unless I go to that interpretations (which still makes no sense), but which makes me dislike landlords even more.

Anybody who doesn't think the work of being a landlord is worth it should get our now and dump their equity into index funds or something.

I think a lot of folks are having feelings about this line

>stuck paying someone else's mortgage.

What he meant was that when someone is not paying the rent, and you are evicting them, you are paying for the living expenses for a stranger who may holding your property hostage, who may be actively abusing the property, who may be deliberately prolonging the experience.

This does not feel good to pay out of your own pocket to shelter someone else's family for any amount of time. There is no recourse to recover the money. Your best outcome it to just get the property back as soon as possible, even if that means rewarding the bad tenant with more money. And in most places in the US now, evictions are not even possible due to virus lockdowns.

Not paying rent is theft. It hurts financially and emotionally when people steal from you.

And for the soft-hearted landlords who didn't screen properly, or took a chance on a sob-story, it was already months of slow-pay or no-pay before you started the eviction. Can you imagine someone stealing 4-6mo of living expenses from you?

Oh please, landlords are not employees working at the behest of their bosses, they are businesses that are in the business of selling a basic necessity of life: housing.

Compare these supposed woes to any contractor and their clients, and this sort of bellyaching would be just be laughed at. "Theft"!!! Come on.

Any landlord who thinks in these moral terms deserves to lose their shirt. It is a business!!!

And on top of that, it's not web design or some other sort of service. They are literally providing somebody's home. I have zero sympathy for any landlord that gets into such a business and then bellyaches about evicting somebody.

This is a cost of doing business. 4-6 months of rent should be cash on hand to deal with these sorts of things, and many (most? all?) mortgages for rental properties demand that you show you have that much cash before you can even get the mortgage. So even the banking industry is requiring these amateur landlords to learn basic biz before they can enter the game.

There's huge asymmetry here, landlords have lots of wealth, lots of flexibility, lots of recourse and backup plans, but their tenants often do not and often have no safety net whatsoever. If landlords start advocating for a basic social safety net, I may start to have sympathy. And some of their tenants might be deadbeats. But I've come across a tooooon of really shitty landlords, a few people that hit hard times that are doing their best to pay rent with their extremely limited means, and basically zero of the supposed deadbeat that landlords say are their perpetual problem.

> Compare these supposed woes to any contractor and their clients, and this sort of bellyaching would be just be laughed at. "Theft"!!! Come on.

I don't follow. The contractor isn't forced to work for months without pay against his will if the client stops paying.

> This is a cost of doing business. 4-6 months of rent

Losing 4-6 months of rent erases multiple years of profits on that property

> There's huge asymmetry here, landlords have lots of wealth, lots of flexibility, lots of recourse and backup plans, but their tenants often do not

By your logic all business owners similarly are very wealthy and can absorb large losses. So all businesses have a duty to give way several years of profits to needy customers. Food is a necessity of life. Do restaurants have a duty to let customers eat for free?

The sentiment is: You are paying a mortgage for a house you don't get to use or rent out. You have a couple thousand dollars coming out of your pocket every month that is eating away at the small bit of money you made on that house. There is no guarantee that you will get that money back.

Pretty much the point is that being a landlord isn't a free ride. Often you need to put in a lot of work and you take a big risk investing in a house that can be destroyed or made worthless by factors completely outside your control.

You mean you had to work as if you had a regular job, and you ended up with a free house at the end of it.

Nope, the market crash wiped out all the value of the house. Barely broke even after selling. Pretty much worked for free cleaning piss and poop out of walls, carpets, fireplace, and yard.

> There is very little left over as positive income. Maybe 10% if you are lucky, which makes up a little for the huge headaches.

Let's not forget that you, when you are using the rent to pay off mortgage, you are building capital - even if 90% of the rent is allocated to costs already.

> Once you start eviction you are stuck paying someone else's mortgage.

Your mortgage. But go on...

> Some renters go from house to house just paying a deposit and first month's rent then sitting on the house for as long as possible. If you try to be nice to them and give them more time they will bankrupt you.

Some renters are people just trying to get by. They have kids who are traumatised by the constant lack of housing security. They, themselves, may be unable to gather the resources to secure their own future by finding a better job, growing more valuable skills, etc. But I notice you don't raise them as the special case that drives your decision making, only the (more unlikely) case that you lose out.

I thought background and credit checks were a thing. Unless you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for renters.

You're forgetting that you're increasing your equity. The positive income at the end is just candy.

Equity isn't great for cash flow while you are giving free shelter to your squatter and his family. But it can help you get you that cash-out refi you'll need to pay for the remodel after it got trashed

> You're forgetting that you're increasing your equity.

Only if the house's value doesn't go down. Like if the house needs to be torn down because it's been destroyed by a flood, the market crashes, or the major employers in the area leave.

No one is forcing anyone else to be a landlord.

The point is that you are contributing a LOT as a landlord. Not just "Rent seeking."

A successful (above water) landlord, by definition, must extract more value from their tenants than the landlord contributes.

>Once you start eviction...they are actively trashing the house, peeing on walls, keeping dogs in the fireplace like it's a kennel without cleaning it for months, putting holes in walls, flooding bathrooms, and spreading feces inside wall spaces.

How many times did this happen to you and your family? Do you mind sharing the court documents if they are public?

I'm sure understand why such a grand claim would require some evidence and diligence, right?

Oh I believe it, happened to my dad. Also to one of his friends. And the appartment over my gf's old place. After the tenant moved out they had to tear up the floor and take the unit down to the studs to get rid of 10 worth years of cat pee.

I can see both sides. But being a landlord is agreeing to run something closer to a public utility than not.

I believe it too. My dad's seen some crazy tenant behavior as well: serial scammers, grow-ops, massive humidity damage from the raising of illegal 3m-long African pythons... in Canada btw.

Happened twice, but we never went to court. The second time was the worst. First time it was mostly just ruined carpets and cleaning 4 feet of solid trash out of the 1/4 acre back yard.

It's 10 times easier to get someone to leave on their own accord by giving back a deposit. Tenants would rather have the cash in hand than squat. This was in California so eviction is a 6 month process that costs a lot in legal fees.