Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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