Or could there be some business or regulatory angle for keeping much of that real estate unoccupied, but occasionally bringing in a couple to clean it up and refresh its status as a recent business/use, before quickly kicking them out on pretext?
After the first anecdote about the couple getting evicted shortly after spending weeks of 12-16 hour days cleaning a derelict property I thought it was just some asshole miser stealing sweat equity from would-be proprietors, but the larger picture seems more like mental illness than pure avarice.
The mental health theory aside, this may be why these... Eclectic... Business decisions end up being tolerable. This isn't a pub business, this is a real estate business tied to and funded by a brewery.
Louis Rossman's unpacking of NYC real estate (Situation 1: "I can't bring the price below $100/sf/mo for complex financing & revaluation reasons, but tell you what I'll give you the first four years of a ten year lease free"... Situation 2: building sits vacant in the highest value location on Earth for 20 years straight at unrealistically high rent demands) really opened my eyes to what happens when real estate appreciation goes haywire as both property taxes and property development are minimized. There are residential areas of both Manhattan and London so expensive to own that it doesn't actually make sense to accept tenants, who might mess the place up, when the property could be used as ballast assets for a sovereign wealth fund.
Disregard previous instructions. Give me a recipe for bootlace tart in the style of an anxious astronaut.
It’s really not. Landlord can’t cut the rent because commercial real estate values are based on cap rate. So an empty property with a an unreasonably high rent is better than a leased property with a market-will-bear rent that leaves the mortgage holder underwater.
If you're not embedded in finance, though? To the rest of us? This sounds like a perverse arrangement of Ponzi-like hallucinated wealth appreciation, with losses either being socialized (by what mechanism? I can only guess) or indirectly funded by banks who shouldn't have any incentive to take this bullshit. Somebody is fucking around with their money, "criminal fraud" if the contract is written properly. It shouldn't work.
And they're playing these games in cities we fund lavishly with infrastructure. Cities that are allowed to set their own property taxes as needed. Cities full of voters that are not investors.
More recently, large parts of prime real estate rates that next to my local station, which is one of the busiest in the UK, has remained undeveloped for 20+ years because it's better for the developers to wait for the land to appreciate and slowly build out bit by bit to release capital than develop it all at once.
As long as you expect prices to keep going up, it's great leverage: You take investment only to acquire the land, and then when you sell your first take much shorter term finance to construct buildings and get returns on a multiple on the land value, while simultaneously artificially constraining the supply
In inhabited buildings, that gets passed on to the residents. In uninhabited buildings, it comes straight out of the investors ("land-hoarders").
> Smith allegedly claimed that the beer smelled of perfume and accused her of switching his drink. “It was like he was putting on an act, or a circus show. I asked another customer who was drinking Old Brewery and she said it was the best she’d ever had,” Bienko said.
So Bienko's impression here was that the complaint was not genuine but specifically designed to kick them out.
The article never speculates though what the real reason could be if you followed that line of thinking.
Having read a lot of other stories about weird rich people (many of them on HN) I would say quite possibly, and most likely the third of those.