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Comment by ElonMuskrat | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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...

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.

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.

i’m not

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