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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I find this really interesting because if I were a landlord and had a tennant who was now paying and otherwise had a good history, I would NOT want to be trying to fill a place at a time like this. I'd just forgive and forget.

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As a small-time landlord, it's more complicated than that because the dynamic changes based on neighborhood and city. Filling is not a challenge for me specifically because I'm in California in one of the major cities, the reality of the locale is that there's always /somebody/ seeking (I suspect this is the case in most big cities) and while I try to help my tenants by being a little laxer than some owners I still have to pay property tax if nothing else (this is more complicated currently but it's still a presence). I'm also not some mega complex with a war chest though, I'm eight units with a revenue of 120k. Thankfully so far none of my tenants have been totally shut out from their work, there's been a few months some needed extra time but they've all managed to spring back.

Is there no grace period while properties are vacant? In the UK the tenant is responsible for paying the equivalent of city taxes, the landlord only needs to pay if it's vacant for more than 6 months. The only other taxes you need to pay are income tax on the rent you receive.

California will charge you no matter what normally. The logistics vary by region a little and to some extent you can claim losses as a business expense but in the covid era the end result is still that the grace period for paying rent is more generous than the graces I get for paying property taxes. I do get some amount of relief but that relief isn't comprehensive to the point that I wouldn't be ahead if I evicted someone who had completely lost all work and was unlikely to find new work for half a year. Hopefully more aid will come but the state government is still in denial about the whole situation around covid (I strongly suspect our infection rate is radically higher than reported) so I'm not gambling it'll be soon.

Thanks, guess if you're in a position where you're oversubscribed then you have the option. Out of interest, how would you look upon a prospective tenant from somewhere else who was evicted over non-payment during corona? I guess I am asking if all evictions are equally bad or if you would care less about the last few months?

For Corona it's hard to say because it's unlikely someone would move to my neighborhood in such a situation (we're not ritzy but there's low-income areas that are 3/4 the price a 30 minute drive away). In general all evictions are the same because there's a ton of regulations in the state about what I can ask and what I can use as a reason to reject an applicant. If you're persuing a zero risk strategy then you get whatever is volunteered during a call to confirm their previous address and what's provided in a background check. The catch is that you can be persued legally for saying something that can be demonstrated to have resulted in an unfair rejection, so the safest strategy is to simply volunteer nothing while hoping the other party has a gabby manager. In parallel, California is really landlord hostile. That's not totally bad because we have the leverage but it means for example that even if I reject a tenant they could in theory sue me if I couldn't adequately demonstrate the rejection was part of a consistent policy (which is hard to do for a pandemic scenario). That's sort of a longshot situation but California judges also tend to side with tenants when they can so as a small landlord for whom court is expensive it's safer to have a policy towards evictions that is agnostic to the specifics.

Landlords are levereged to the tits. They are a few mortgage payments away from foreclosure. These are acts of desperation.

Good. Let them feel some pain for helping overinflate the real estate market.

wow. broadly ignorant statement. many landlords (like me) just kept a house they moved out of. i’m not s professional and was charging way under market because i liked the trnants. they stayed there 10 years. during that time i replaced the roof and ac unit among other things. not sure how i’m inflating thr market by charging 1200/month for a 2k sq ft house with 1/2 acre in a very hot area?

The parent comment clearly was not directed at property owners like you...

Because you're owning a home as an investment property while not living in it? it doesn't matter if you rent it cheaply, it's one less house available to purchase and there's a finite amount of land and houses.

landlords drive up housing costs? try the pyramid scheme we call our economy. your scrutiny is severely misguided. i could care less what anyone thinks of me choosing to keep and rent the house i moved out of. work 60 to 80 hours a week like everyone else or go buy a tiny house in the woods and find happiness

Sound like you care a lot

Landlords only respond to the market, they don't make the market. In fact, they actually provide a service by increase the housing supply when the demand is there (assuming that new construction is allowed).

So if the rental market became smaller. How would that help anyone? Would the tenants all go out and buy houses?

I guess what they hope for is that landlords would face foreclosures or dump property, causing prices to fall, enabling more people to buy their own housing. That all depends on how many of current tenants are just outside the ability to buy and that being the main reason they rent instead of own.

The last thing you want if you want to decrease unemployment is for people buying homes. Once you buy a house you limit your mobility and limit your optionality to go to where the jobs are.

In fact, you should be encouraging shorter leases.

I got rid of my house in 2012 after getting married so my (step)sons could stay in their much better school district. I was hesitant to buy a house in 2016 because I had no idea what direction my career might take when my youngest graduated in 2020.

I might have even gone the r/cscareerquestions route and “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” and move to the west coast. But my rent was increasing like crazy and I wanted to lock in my housing costs by buying.

Thank God I found a remote opening at $BigTech. If not, I would be selling my house in the next couple of years and trying to move - under normal non pandemic circumstances.

If the mobility was true to such an extent you wouldn't have the overinflation the real estate market to the degree we see in certain places. That all goes out the window if the employers in the area close down, of course. But then the landlords have the same problem anyways.

Over inflation is mostly on the west coast because of the inflated salaries of tech companies that until now, didn’t want people to work remotely. There is no reason that a software company couldn’t have all of its employees work from anywhere in the country.

As far as I know, the entire cloud consulting division of the three major cloud companies always had plenty of by default remote jobs. I know that AWS does (that’s where I work).

I probably would if everything dropped 25-50%, I imagine a lot of other people would too. Or if they were already going to buy a house or condo they’ll just get a bigger one.

So it would help pretty much anyone who is not over leveraged (barring second effect like a pension relying on MBS) and in the market for real estate which is pretty good in my book. We shouldn’t set up our economy so that we allow people to overleverage in investments assets and then bail them out when they run into issues because of that.

I could not care less if overleveraged landlords crash and burn. It’s money in my pocket because my rent may go down (when I switch places) and it makes it easier for me to afford a place to live in.

i used to rent. then i grew up, worked a lot and bought a place.

We were renting a house, and the land lord was playing games with mortgage. We kept getting notifications, It was insanely stressful.

One day the sheriff and bank came to “evict us” they were shocked to find the house was being rented out. Since we had lease, they couldn’t evict us. But still.

We ended up moving out a couple weeks later anyway. Bank paid us a good amount to leave. We were happy to get away from it all.

Shortly after 2008 I had a similar experience, land lord kept hounding me for rent (poor college student) and one day I get a Bank of America representative asking where my landlord was. He informed me the house was in foreclosure and told me to stop paying rent. This was thankfully after Obama signed the act to prevent evictions for renters.

Out of the wood work my landlord comes threatening eviction if I don't pay rent, he lived on the other side of the country so I wasn't really concerned. Got 3 more months of rent free living in a brand new house...

Not all. Many in CA had their father pay off their building decades ago and are still enjoying that 1970s property tax rate while collecting the same top of market rent as new construction.

So I'm a landlord, and desperate. Someone comes and says that they can't pay their rent. I'd evict them... if I had someone to take their place. (I'd make sure I have at least one unit empty, just in case.) But if I don't have takers (and, if 11 million households are suddenly homeless because they can't pay market rent, I'm not likely to have takers at market price), then I'm likely to let them stay if they can pay me something. Because, you know, if I evict them, I get nothing, and something > nothing.

i’m not

As with all things, it depends on the situation.

If you own a rental property outright, you'd be keen to keep good tenants -- people that took care of their homes, nominally paid their rents on time, all that. Covid or otherwise, you'd be smart to cut those folks some slack if they went through rough times.

On the other hand, if your rental property is mortgaged, you need that cashflow -- not only because it's your income, but also because you're shouldering the risk for the loan. If you go under, it's not like the bank is going to let those tenants just sort of live there after repossession.

There really isn't a universal rule that makes sense in all scenarios.

There’s just that pesky issue of having to pay a mortgage...

You're still going to have to pay the mortgage on a vacant unit.

Not if you sell it. The real estate market is extremely active right now, especially with interest rates dropping below 3%. if I’m stuck with a renter who can’t pay the rent, causing me to not be able to pay the mortgage, sorry, I have to evict so I can sell.

I wonder what the Expected Value is of selling today vs holding and waiting for the rental income to come back. Surely some smart person has figured out an algorithm to plug in numbers to figure out the EV?

Smart money is almost always to own land.

You don't really own the land when it's mortgaged. Selling property to reduce risk is a good strategy in times like this. No rental income on a property is a negative return, that can't be managed for long.

You are presuming the active real estate market is full of people looking to become or extend their landlord role which seems counter to this whole discussion.

Or that a current renter is looking to own their own home instead, which seems like the much smarter option. Especially when the economy is uncertain.

That's what banks are for, you make deals with them. They are prepared for such events, or should be.

When you're mortgage has been passed around a few times and is little more than a PO Box across the country, that's not an option.

That's where I'm coming from.

I am a landlord (part owner in a family run business) - 9 residential houses/condos/duplexes and 4 commercial buildings. We suspended rents (meaning no payment expected at all) at the start of the state COVID shutdown for some of the 9 residential properties where there was need. Since some have started paying voluntarily based on their capability. For months the commercial properties could not be open we suspended rents as well.

We have good tenants who usually pay on time and aren't problems. There is no way we'd kick them out. Quality tenants are gold. I cannot overstate this. Some tenants have rented from us for over 20 years. We've seen them lose and get jobs before, and we can all weather this one out as well, I'm sure, with cooperation.

just filled a rental. np. it depends on the area you are trying to fill in. i also charge just a little under market.

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