I don't think he could have absorbed 12 month + of non rent payment and pay all those expenses out of his pocket.
Rent seeking with someone else's money? Yeah, that's risky.
Was it empty though? There is a shortage in housing and it's pretty rare to have an empty rental in this market. You're injecting conditions that don't really exist to make your point.
This point is enough.
If it is empty then someone who is willing to pay can rent it.
These numbers might be off but you get the idea.
That's the difference.
Your second point sort of invalidates the first. You argue that the government isn’t the source of the harm, then justify the government action as a prudent balancing of harms.
I think the point most are making is that they were trying to solve a much larger problem, but didn’t think the problem through particularly well.
No it doesn't. The pandemic caused the harm, the government acted to mitigate the worst effects of it. You seem to be of the opinion that the "worst effects" are the landlords losing out on rent, but the worst effects are millions of people ending up homeless during a pandemic, which is what the government prevented. Even if it was clumsy, I tend to think landlords would have been worse off anyways if there had been mass homelessness and higher body counts. You can't collect rent if your renters are dead or your own head is in a basket.
I'd be personally ok with the government bailing out smaller landlords (just because), but the largest percentage of these defaults are going to affect private equity firms who have bought an outrageous amount of the housing stock. We need to stop socializing risk and privatizing profits, and this would be a good place to start.
Student loans are cheaper precisely because they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Rent is cheaper because of eviction. Now that we've seen the government unilaterally discharge rent through moratorium, you can expect to see that risk profile baked into an increased monthly payment.
If they can't pay the mortgage without a renter paying, they may have the property repossessed by the bank.
Oh, and they also got to forego mortgage payments during the pandemic and also potentially write off the less than market rent that they were unable to evict during. (for 30+% off of the missed rent)
Expensing upkeep...writing off rent...you act like thats free money that doesn't come out of their pocket. If you depreciate the improvements, you then have to pay the taxes on it when you sell the place.
Stop acting like it's free money and there is no risk...a significant portion of landlords do not make money month to month and do this for their long term financial health. I think if you had significant money and time tied up in any investment you would be just as pissed as they are if the government changed the rules in the middle of the game.
Now, if you want to say "well, the government should have also enacted a mortgage moratorium, and made the banks the ones who shoulder the financial burden, rather than landlords (whether individual or corporate)," I won't argue with that in the slightest. But given who "the government" was at the time, that would have been an extremely hard sell. (Even now it would be pretty difficult.)
> They end up with a 30 year old house that has been rented. There is a lot of cost in the upkeep of a rented house.
> you then have to pay the taxes on it when you sell the place.
Owners only pay taxes if the gain is greater than the depreciated loss; (and if owner doesn't 1031 exchange it for another property to lose money on) so, the premise that a rented house has lost value shouldn't really intersect with a capital gain.
Expensing missed rent and eviction costs isn't free money; it does require reserves, but it does help a 1 year impact spread out over many years.