As a former landlord even in the very red business friendly Georgia, there are plenty of protections for tenants that make it almost impossible to evict anyone in less than three months.
To me this seems absurdly low. Losing a dwelling is much more difficult than losing a job. It can be absolutely traumatic, and set people back financially, or worse for people who are already on the brink. In Quebec, where I live, thankfully it's one year. But it should be longer unless you can demonstrate some sort of valid legal reason like your tenant is damaging the building. Just cause you can extract a higher rent shouldn't mean you upend where someone lives.
If I know that there is more risk involved in being a landlord, why wouldn’t I increase the rent to compensate?
If you could increase the rent and still find tenants you'd do it right now. No reason to wait for any legislation
If the regulations change, all landlords that have any business acumen are going to address that by raising rent. The entire market is going to change.
People don't want a landlord, they want a home. For many people the landlord is currently a necessary evil they'd rather get rid of.
It’s going to increase prices and/or reduce supply as not as much capital flows in.
People may not want landlords. But everyone doesn’t want to own a home. By definition, they want to rent from someone else - ie have a landlord.
If you can really do it then why don't you simply increase rent right now?
Maybe we can agree that the price-to-rent ratio will decrease?
The current setup hasn't exactly been great at generating new housing. Juicing speculation increases nimbyism just as much as it increases developer interest.
There is also plenty of affordable land in the US in flyover country.
Huh? Save for a small number of cities most of the nation is sprawling suburbia. 70% of Americans live in single family homes.
Most of what you pay for here is the land. And this is becoming ever more important because of agglomeration effects in the modern world.
> Build up
Ok you're switching gears a bit here but I'll entertain anyway. If you want to build up the right solution is a Land Value Tax. Landlords of course hate this idea.
That is not true.
https://www.statista.com/topics/5144/single-family-homes-in-...
> Most of what you pay for here is the land. And this is becoming ever more important because of agglomeration effects in the modern world
This is also not true. With an investment property you can depreciate the value of the building. But not land. It would reduce the tax incentives greatly if that were true.
I’ve owned five properties in my life and the house “improvements” is always more valuable.
Out of those five, two were new builds I had built from the ground up as primary residence. You can see the value of the unimproved land and compare it to the values of the houses built on top of it.
The other three were investment properties where I could only depreciate “the improvements” - the amount attributed to the house
In “sprawling suburbia”, builders can buy land cheaply and build hundreds of homes.
> Ok you're switching gears a bit here but I'll entertain anyway. If you want to build up the right solution is a Land Value Tax. Landlords of course hate this idea.
You realize any increase in cost is passed on to the tenants. How does that help affordable housing?
> You realize any increase in cost is passed on to the tenants. How does that help affordable housing?
This is 100% totally wrong. The concept you're reaching for is called tax incidence. In the case of Land Value Tax it's fully the burden of the landowner.
Here is a mountain of data backing me up: https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenan...
Landlords often retreat at this point and just say "well we are charging what the market rate is" and leave behind any pretense that this is a fair economic transaction. In that case, landlords can get fucked, in my opinion. A system that buys up a scarce and necessary resource and then sells it back at prices disconnected from the actual value provided by landlords is unethical.
My point is that complaining about rare cases where landlords lose money because they cannot evict a tenant who isn't paying at the drop of a hat is simply ridiculous. It is like complaining that an insurance company occasionally has to pay out for their policies.
The truth is that the price of rent is utterly disconnected from the value of a landlord's labor plus the various premiums you'd pay for risk smoothing, lower transaction overhead, and opportunity cost. Landlords simply charge whatever they can get away with and we should all laugh at attempts by landlords to justify their rent through any argument other than "fuck you, pay me." After all, I've never heard of a landlord reducing the rent when they finish paying off their mortgage.
Once we at least have this shared understanding we can start having a real conversation about the merits and costs of the system we have today, rather than this fake conversation about how landlords are so nice for paying for that new roof.
Is your pay based on market rate for your services? Do you voluntarily make less money than you can?
I don't believe that rents would actually go down meaningfully if states adopted laws enabling evictions within two weeks. As you say, rent is actually based on market rate and is entirely disconnected from the expenses landlords pay. All of these discussions about landlord expenses are non sequiturs that just hide the real discussion.
> Is your pay based on market rate for your services? Do you voluntarily make less money than you can?
I am performing labor rather than gating access to a scarce and necessary resource. The social damage of charging for labor is not the same as the social damage of charging for housing.
Your pay is also more than likely built on the back of the less privileged.
How much “social damage” is being caused by a company investing money to build new housing as is the case with JPM?
What’s the alternative?
That's true. The founders of my employer are mega-billionaires though. I'm not worried about them.
> Your pay is also more than likely built on the back of the less privileged.
That's also true. Capitalism is fundamentally unjust. I donate a huge amount of money to anti-poverty charities annually to help mitigate this.
> What’s the alternative?
I am not certain. But we can't even have this conversation until people stop talking about landlords like they are engaged in some essential charity for renters.
It's not to allow a subset of renters to explicitly screw the owners by deciding they don't need to pay rent.
"I'll totally be able to get my landlord to pay for mold treatment" is a good joke, though.
I've rented from several different single-person landlords. None of them have ever done any preventative maintenance on the property and every single one dragged their feet terribly when it came to urgent and necessary maintenance. Two summers ago my AC broke and my landlord was uncontactable (I tried for days). I arranged for a HVAC company to come and repair it on my own and my landlord refused to pay for the bill because I didn't use their normal company (I was never informed of their normal company). Even though in my state it is a legal requirement that rented homes have working air conditioning, it was a huge fucking ordeal to get my landlord to take the cost off my rent.
Now imagine I'm a non-native english speaker who didn't have spare time to dig through state regulations and this happens to me. I'd just get fucked. That's what happens to a huge number of tenants.
According to the law in GA, you have the right to put your rent toward necessary repairs.
But, all of your anecdotes argue for professionally managed properties - like ones being built by JPM.
My experience with corporate landlords has also been shitty, but in different ways. They've done fun things like have terribly sealed granite countertops with stains that they charge each tenant for "ruining" but then don't actually change out between tenants. I was dinged for $2,100 for stains that were present when I moved in (I foolishly didn't have photos). The new tenant was in a few days later without new countertops.
But we have plenty of evidence from especially around 2008-2011 that people were both not worried about squatting and not paying their rent and owners doing “strategic defaults” credit be damned.
Yes, I could have avoided their abusive nonsense by protecting myself more carefully. But that's fucking awful. People shouldn't need to enter adversarial relationships with their landlords on day one.
Do you do any large scale transaction without doing due diligence?
I also made a cross-country move during covid and had to choose a place to rent based on old photos because the current tenants understandably did not want their landlord to come into their home to do a virtual walkthrough for me.
"Oh, if you don't work hard to protect yourself of course you get fucked over" is not a good world. It may be the real world but this should not be used as a defense of the virtue of landlords.
I did something similar. My lease was up and instead of rushing to buy a home. We moved our stuff into storage. We found an extended stay close by and we stayed there six months while our house was getting built.
I had a friend who relocated from Seattle to Atlanta and did something similar.
I do no think they're sufficient and go far enough.
I say this as someone living in the UK.
https://www.lettingaproperty.com/landlord/blog/renters-refor...
I'd like to see some proposals on how much rent can be raised with respect to local rates. Some European cities have attempted this, but not without issues.
And some enforcable time limits on how soon repairs can take - for example a broken boiler.
It wouldn't be linked to inflation, as the housing and renting market has historically been above inflation. So limiting to market rate would still be beyond inflation.
It would be balancing between having housing as a necessity vs a comodity.
You might want to argue that monopoly is efficient, but it's only a temporary thing until they have built their moat.
To be a little less glib, it's easy to imagine other non-profit funding structures such as co-ops and government help (dirty phrase in the U.S. I know).
I imagine a lot of the costs of actually building would decrease a lot when remove the incentive for NIMBYish building codes.
There would be challenges as you point out, but the overall situation would be much better for all of society.
A simple supply/demand model is useful but limited when the demand is everyone.
Builders of individual homes are building larger houses that are unaffordable to the people who need them the most. The answer is multi unit housing - like those being built by the evil profit seeking capitalists.
Single person occupancy growth in the last 20 years has pushed up pressure on stock as has the addition of many millions of persons beyond the national fertility rate. Incredible levels of regulation of which I wager you know nothing make building nearly impossible. I've built many properties, managed many, sold many, bought many. These flippant simplifications don't make sense. Costs to building quality housing to a modern standard are considerable. This the explosion in generic poor quality housing with aesthetics that are vile. If there were real cost pressures we'd see trailer parks everywhere in the UK. But we don't.
In California owners have a minimum of 5 years for example.