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Comment by dazc | Hacker News Reader

How does this differ from banks lending money for traditional mortgages, it's just another method of financing?

Yes, I know the cost of housing is insane and something should be done about it, but introducing some level of market efficiency isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I can't speak for the US but in the UK a huge majority of private landlords are individuals, many of who want to earn a living from renting out two or three homes max. I rent an office from such a person, his sense of entitlement is off the scales.

Some of these landlords had the homes fall into their laps via inheritance, some are simply playing an arbitrage game, very few are actually doing anything economically productive.

Anything that threatens this method of exploitation has to be positive.

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One major difference is that a mortgage is essentially “rent to own” - at the end of the repayment you own the property. Here ownership remains with JPMorgan?

But if you're renting you're paying the landlord's mortgage not your own and you own nothing either way.

Sure, but renting is going to be what a lot of people continue to do - save some miracle of market disruption.

Most BTL (buy-to-let) landlords will have interest only mortgages. You wont be paying down their capital as they have none. The revenue that they generate is the difference between your rent payment and the interest payment. The landlord will never own the property.

Indeed, as a UK renter dealing with one of these mega landlords (eg Greystar) is so much better than the usual exploitation game that private landlords play.

Fascinating. My experience in the US is the exact opposite. Corporate landlords are generally awful, where everything they rent out is full of shoddy repairs and minimum-cost ‘luxury facilities’ to drive up rent. Private landlords, particularly where the owners live in the same building, are almost always better. My experience has largely been in urban areas of the US, not sure about smaller towns; I suspect higher demand is what allows for it.

Individual experiences are anecdotal but here's a few of mine.

My Son lives in a "mega landlord" unit in Saskatoon (Canada) and it is well maintained and his rental fee is very reasonable.

My Son-in-law lives in a "mega landlord" unit in New Jersey (USA) and it is also in excellent condition.

I personally rented from a private individual in Connecticut for several years and it was a slumhouse.

Landlord was never around, no one to call when things didnt work. we actually had to fix the heating system in Jan because we were freezing cold and the owner was once again MIA.

I've had the same experience. Terrible treatment by large management companies. Moved as a result to a private landlord and they're fantastic.

In my experience, the main benefit of corporate landlords is predictability. Especially when they are large. They have a reputation, and you know in advance what you get.

Private landlords are a gamble. They are better on the average, but the variance is also higher. Because most private landlords only have a handful of properties, it's effectively impossible to know in advance what they will be like if something goes wrong.

My guess here is that in part to how common renting has traditionally been in the UK (pre WWI , something like 9/10 homes were rented, this greatly declined to ~7% until rising again since the nineties). More than a few big UK landlords have been around for centuries.

Probably in uk it's not so widespread yet, so they can't show their true face yet.

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