Hacker News Reader

Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, as part of the unfolding of the post 2008 recession, a lot of rentals shifted from individual or smaller landlords to larger corporate landlords whom take a much more impersonal approach to making it through the depression. To some degree, to the extent they can take out holdover loans and let rentals sit empty, they will do just that - irregardless of the social utility of compromise.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/singl...

View on HN

This is the pernicious dynamic. For Large landlords, certainly but also generally, you have a situation where property appreciation becomes more important than rental income, so evicting people and getting nothing becomes a better outcome than lowering rent.

Edit: Also note this appreciation driven dynamic is something of a product of QE - printing money. As the treasury dumps money into markets, anything of apparently reliable value, "money-like", becomes more valuable - commodities and land being examples but the "best" companies also. This appreciation process becomes more important than the ordinary use of the object in the case of land (empty mansions in London being the prime example but we may wind-up with many more if the approach continues).

If you raise taxes on non owner occupied housing you can achieve any reasonable target for real estate "investing" you desire.

If you just want to target holding but not renting property because it decreases housing supply you can do that even more aggressively.

I'll take 100% of appreciation for the months it sat unoccupied if it sat unoccupied for 3 or more months for 1000 Alex.

Was a renter in 2008 and you are spot on. Same situation in the Bay area as well as NY/CT. It was insane that rents started to go up during that time. People basically walked away from their houses and started to rent. It was weird. Also, the "corporatization" of housing scared me a bit. Consider the area in downtown Mountain View. Rent was under 2K around 2008. The corporate landlords did minor renovations (fancy gyms, granite counters, maybe a redo of flooring) - they then did fancy websites and sold a lifestyle. Totally focused on the high-paying tech jobs. I used to live in a complex with families and non-techies. All that evaporated as rent shot up to 3.5-4K for the exact same units.

As a renter I honestly do not mind the corporatization.

When I’ve looked for apartments in the past I’ve seen almost no difference in rents (as advertised on Craigslist, apartments.com, Zillow) between large corporate landlords and small time landlords, except for very high end luxury apartments I’m not in the market for.

Yet I’ve heard countless horror stories about unresponsive/malicious small time landlords and very few about large landlords. To the contrary, while renting from large corporations I’ve found that my service requests are addressed very quickly, there’s almost always someone in the property management team I can talk to about anything, and everything operates smoothly.

Perhaps the “mom and pop” landlords only advertise via word of mouth but every time I’ve looked for apartments I’ve come away thinking that renting from those same large, faux-luxury (as opposed to unrenovated since 1985 for the same price) corporate landlords are the best deal when renting in expensive areas.

There's more variance with small-time landlords. With a corporate overlord you know exactly what you're getting: they are going to be firm about sticking you to the exact terms of your lease and will raise your rent by the maximum possible each year, but you can also expect any maintenance issues to be taken care of quickly and they aren't going to feud with or retaliate against you. With a mom & pop you might get someone really nice who never raises your rent, understands if you're a couple days late, and takes pretty good care of the place; but you might also get someone who is completely unresponsive, violates a bunch of tenant laws figuring you don't have the resources to call them on it, and nickle & dimes you on your deposit.

I've rented apartments from giant corporations 4-5 times, and every single time I got screwed on the deposit on the way out. Presumably because they ran the numbers, and knew that they were better off nickel-and-diming people every time since most of their tenants wouldn't have the time or energy to drag them to small claims court.

There's also no way to negotiate with a person who has any actual power. You can talk to polite mooks all you want, but they can't actually change anything. You're guaranteed to get the maximum legally allowable rent increase every year and a huge pain in the ass battle for your deposit every time you move out.

True, though tenants in corporate owned single family housing all tell me it's closer towards the worst landlords. The corporations won't harass you, but they essentially don't want to do anything. You just get an expensive "as-is" house, which can be okay if it's in decent shape.

Specifically I was referring to large apartment buildings owned by corporations. Have never lived in a corporate owned SFH nor did I know that it was common. In my experience these large apartment buildings are quite proactive about getting anything fixed - likely because they have a team of people dedicated to doing that full time or at least contract it out, and just chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

Ah, makes sense. I didn’t factor in the possibility that a small landlord might not raise rents (though I assume it’s less of a factor in SF given rent control).

I move around a lot so rents getting raised aren’t as important to me.

Yeah, your experience is just very different from the average renter if you move around a lot, so you have different concerns.

Corporate landlords are rational and reasonable negotiators who will readily respond to market signals. Small landlords are a crapshoot; you might get one who just prefers an empty unit over lower rents. You can easily see this from craigslist data right now. Large buildings are lowering rent faster than small buildings and single-family houses.

This is true. I have known people who were more happy to have a house empty for months on end waiting for a tenants at a higher price rather then taking a tenant now for a lower price (~$200 price difference). They made the decision emotionally based on, "my house is worth so much" instead of looking at what would be in their best interest. Also some of the higher paying tenants I have seen not take good care of property.

I just accepted a lower price with a tenant because it helps them and was way better then them leaving and trying to find a tenant now.

This is really true. People talk about rents dropping in SF, but if you dig, it's really the large apartment complexes that are professionally managed. The same apartments that tends to be more expensive.

A good friend just moved to a 1-bed in SF last weekend. Small building (6 units). Rent was $2,200 per month, which is about the same as what it was last year. And they looked at a lot of units. They definitely noticed rents softening as they could knock $100 off most rents with little effort.

This is more about the specific financials of the property and the portfolio of the owner, for both small and large owners. Many small owners are, like, funding their grandkids trust funds and a few lost payments are not worth the trouble. Large owners may have occupancy covenants, or, conversely, may have appraisals that have to be maintained.

My personal experience is small owners are "reasonable" and open to building a relationship and large owners could give an eff, but mileage varies. Cheers.

Living in a place the landlord has a strong emotional connection to can also be difficult (e.g. their previous family home).

I wonder if that explains my current place. There was a recent ownership change and right before that the owners cut down the shade trees for the house. There's no air conditioning so back in April it was already getting too hot to stay indoors. The lease renewal is in June so when the new, corporate management company asked us if we wanted to stay and that they were generously not going to raise rent, we asked they either lower the rent or figure out a cooling situation. They balked so we walked and they didn't flinch at all. They were honestly surprised we weren't going to take such a deal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com