Landlord Software Is Making Life Hell for Renters, Report Says | Hacker News Reader

Landlord Software Is Making Life Hell for Renters, Report Says

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66 pointskodah17 comments

People worry about "AI" but it's recourse-free automated management that's the problem, it's irrelevant what the actual mechanics are under the hood, whether it's gpt, a rules based algorithm, or just some designer's workflow for evicting tenants.

One of the biggest problems is almost no customer (renter here) wants something like this, and so it ends up being forced onto those weak or poor enough not to be able to push back and get treated like people.

Thinking about all the popular talk about AI, I wish regulators would focus more of how to make sure people are treated like people, instead of debating the fairest way to treat us like cattle.

BUILD

REAL ESTATE

Every time I drive through mid west, its mind boggling how you see miles of fences along the highway, with no cattle, crop, or a house in sight, and the total property area is almost as big as downtowns of cities.

There was a time when that would work, but more rental properties won't help if all the landlords are colluding^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Husing cloud software to manage their rental properties that use "data" to set prices. Have a listen to the Behind the Bastards podcast on the topic over at at https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236... to get a bit of an idea how we got to where the market is today.

Bulk real estate purchasers are furious and have infinite money and/or leverage. If the property is even remotely desirable or its location is, it's gone.

years ago I thought the same thing when flying across the country. You look down and the 30 minute commute to work passes in an instant, and then you continue flying for hours and hours and the empty land goes off to the horizon in all directions.

I think it's artificial scarcity.

Once had similar flash thought on taking off in an airplane over center of a major city - "no way every 2-3 windows in every tiny building are worth 500k EUR... I must be looking at hundreds of trillions worth of wealth here".

Hundreds of billions is plausible.

Toronto alone gets almost $20 billion USD in new construction real-estate, every year.

So are you going to move to a location where it's a two-hour drive to Minot or Limon? Not everyone's work can practically be done from home.

Found the developer.

This isn't a real estate problem.

It's absolutely a collusion and corrupt business practices problem followed by enforcement.

You see the same corruption in the pharmaceuticals where maximizing profits is antisocial. Wealth inequality allows profiting of a minority individual.

Since this is hacker news, let's explain it in APP profit terms: companies are incetivized to make their products addictive, easy to get and then once you have reached the largest audience, you jack up fees till you have the most whales at their spending limit.

In none of these examples is supply a limit or driver of prices.

The diamond industry doesn't look at the high cost of diamonds and say "Mine more rock!". They say, warehouse all of our current inventory and drip it out over decades so that we can make it even more inflated.

Funnily, the tenants pay for the creation and procurement of this software with ever increasing rents. Paying for the very stick later used to evict or bully you out.

Misleading article: proptech has made managing sfr at scale feasible. But the major drivers are low interest financing for bulk purchases of houses (much cheaper than mortgages), preferential tax treatment (no transfer taxes, no death taxes), and the fact that homeowners are increasingly incapable or not allowed to provide their own maintenance, making scale worth it.

I’ve said many times that facial recognition inherits the moral issues of policing. Maybe I should generalize. Technology inherits the morality of whatever it empowers.

I've always thought that technology, in general, is a tool that makes the user more productive, whether that be for good, or ill.

Why is it misleading? The article agrees with your contention that proptech has made sfr at scale feasible. But it highlights the downsides of that system for tenants.

And "Homeowners are increasingly incapable?" What does that even mean?

I think he meant that people are less likely to have home repair skills

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