IF you want affordability? Tax land.
Doesn't matter who owns them. Your grandma or wall street.
This is literally not true.
A landlord owns the property. Property managers operate the property. Sometimes these are the same people (in mom and pop scenarios), but typically and at scale they certainly are not.
Property management is a job. Landlording is not. It is simply owning an asset.
+1 on taxing land though.
Yes that is correct if you occupy land while your community makes it more and more valuable, you should not get wealthier and wealthier for no reason. All of that should be taxed away.
I'm not sure what this applies to with regards to my original comment. Improvements, insurance, and taxes are capital expenditures which need to be managed. This was to counter that landlording "is simply owning an asset."
> Yes that is correct if you occupy land while your community makes it more and more valuable, you should not get wealthier and wealthier for no reason. All of that should be taxed away.
Why assume that the landlord isn't getting the brunt of the cost for making the community more valuable? I don't think there's a strong case for saying a property manager is a job while denying landlording being one. Assuming landlording is completely passive is as far-fetched as thinking that property management is completely passive (both may require irregularly tasks to be performed or require no involvement in the ideal case).
More like "was too rural or too poor in the 70s/80s/90s to indulge in the then trendy policy like zoning the crap out of themselves and passing a bunch of ordinances more akin to country club rules thereby making incremental growth and development actually possible in the 2010s and 2020s"
Because most development today seems to correlate with whether or not that particular policy bullet got dodged than culture or spirit or anything like that.
These costs aren’t that high though, compared to rent. 3 months of rent covers a year of property taxes where I live. Major repairs are about a couple months rent. There is still another half year of rent that’s pure profit. Then they raise your rent every year, demonize rent increase caps, and then vote for reduced housing builds. I find it very difficult to accept them. If I had the money and the capital I absolutely would own a dozen homes and rent it all out, you would make insane money. Not to mention the mortgage costs being so low during ZIRP days. At the rate of AI coming for SWE jobs, landlords seem untouchable.
You missed insurance and mortgage.
If it is, why not do it and become rich too?
It's not really a particularly good way to make money. I've run the numbers on hundreds of properties over the last two decades and I've yet to find a scenario where I could buy something and rent it out with enough profit to be worth the hassle. You'll be much better off investing in some index fund instead.
If I had the capital I absolutely would have. It’s a bit worse now but any property you bought pre-covid (at least in big cities) can be rented out for more than what mortgage costs. I remember looking at houses in the Bay Area and the monthly mortgage would be 3K while you can rent it out for 4-5K. Anyone who owned property in the 90s and early aughts are absolutely rolling in it. You can invest the profits in an index fund on top of it.
I bought a house in the Bay Area in the 90s and the mortgage was well over $3K (remember interest was over 7%) and an equal house back then was renting for $1300 (my rent at the time for a 3br house in south San Jose).
Try to run the numbers for any property you like. Remember to include taxes and insurance and maintenance. Just to break even is not easy and then you'll have to work for free on the maintenance. Or pay a rental management company, which is another 8-10% taken from the rent.
I agree that buying a home and immediately putting it up for rent would put you underwater these days but during ZIRP times rent and mortgage weren’t too far from each other.
BTW this is a common myth but not true. Property taxes are set by purchase price in year zero when you buy it. Every year after that, they go up 2% compounding.
That's not the full story because the city/county can also add any extra fees they like, and raise them, prop13 does not apply. My taxes go up by well over 2% every year.
> All said and done can’t you net like 35-40K or so per year on a single home?
If you can find yourself a free house somehow, that feels about right. But how do you get yourself a free house? If you have to buy it, now you have a mortgage, and the math no longer works.
The only people I know who profitably rent out homes are those who inherited a home with no debt. In that case, yes it works.
> during ZIRP times rent and mortgage weren’t too far from each other
Low interest helps, for sure, but the numbers still didn't work out.
Here's a graph of interest rates: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1KZYI
The rates only briefly dipped below 3% during the pandemic. Let's say you got the timing right and got a 3% mortgage for 1.2M. The payment is still a bit over $5K/mo. That's just the mortgage, add insurance + taxes + maintenance. On a home you can rent out for maybe 4K-4.5K/mo. Losing money every month.
I've been running these numbers every few months for the last two decades hoping to follow the common advice to buy rental property and become rich. But it has always been cash flow negative no matter what the rents and interest rates have been.
Only advice I have is go inherit a free house, that can be profitable.
Want to punish the right people? Cut taxes so that people can save cash faster, afford houses earlier and stop renting from their landlords.
Build more actually-affordable housing, too. Not these blocks of luxury apartments with swimming pools that nobody uses. (See HDB, Singapore -- that’s what the US needs more of)
The tax simply redirect the unearned income to the public coffer which are either spent on public investment that further increase land value or redistributed as citizen's dividend.
Meanwhile landlords are free to construct as many buildings as they can without being penalized by higher taxes.
Empty lot, parking lots, and self storage facilities would be penalized because they wouldn't generate enough income to cover taxes on land, leading to more efficient utilization of land, as improvements are no longer penalized.
Right, so the city would be nothing but luxury (to maximize income to pay those taxes) high rise apartments packed tight every block.
No parks, no playgrounds, no soccer fields, no sports courts, no bike trails, no dog parks... none of the things that make living in an area pleasant. Also, no low income housing. Because none of those maximize "efficiency" (measured only in dollars) of every square inch of land.
Life is not pleasant if maximizing value extraction is the one and only #1 criteria. This is what land value tax misses.
Also, "luxury" housing cause what economists called "filtering", in which new construction are occupied by the upper strata of income, which means they pay for the cost. As housing age, this naturally becomes more affordable to the lower strata. This of course, depend on sufficient housing stock. Otherwise the inverse will happen.
Also, you only need to cover the cost of paying the land value tax to keep it, not to generate the maximum amount of revenue for that plot of land.
We are not talking about value extraction here, but making sure that landowners work for their keep, while the unearned income/economic rent that would otherwise goes to them is returned to society, because the value of the land is largely determined by the agglomeration effect, the sum total of the community's effort and entrepreneurial spirit. Otherwise, your private effort as individuals would flow to landowners reaping the benefit of increased land value, hence appreciation in real estate price.
So if a LVT has the explicit goal of eliminating things like parking lots and self storage units because those don't generate enough income to pay for the taxes, then what hope do things like playgrounds and parks have to continue existing.. they generate far less income than a self storage facility.
Explain how.. In a dense urban area, with LVT, that lot that held a park will bring even larger tax revenue when the city sells it off to a developer. Having the tax be based on maximum potential usage will only increase the temptation to sell it off and remove yet another park from the people.
That creates a virtuous cycle for the local government who is administering those taxpayer paid amenities, same as other form of infrastructure and amenities.
People act as if this is due to 'private greed'. It's not. American public pension plans are underfunded and need more returns. Thus they turn to the private markets, who offer them that which they are seeking to purchase. The market is heavily distorted by these public players whose policy and aims are not constrained by the market but by public policy.
Let's ignore property management for now and focus on landlords (i.e. people who own homes and collect rent from the people who live in the homes). That is very much not the same as any other job. Most jobs do not consistent entirely of literally rent-seeking.
People assume that renting out property is rent-seeking literally only because they both have the word rent in them.
I would note that people don't use the word rent-seeker (or parasite) when it comes to banks renting out money. I assume this is partly because banks use the word `loan` and partly because referring to bankers as parasites would be a little too close to dog-whistle antisemitism.
It's not a coincidence that they have the same word in them. It's literally just the same word with the same definition and etymology in both cases. Rent is a payment demanded by property owners from people who want to make productive use of that property.
> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)
This definition doesn't overlap with renting.
Why are you thinking of it as a job? Is putting money into the stock market a job? Owning property to rent out isn't a job, and that's perfectly fine. People make money off non-jobs all the time.
First off you're using "rent seeking" wrong, it's a specific economic term that means something else.
But using your definition....
There's entire industries built around renting capital investments. Sometimes purely, like rental equipment. Sometimes the investmentents are so expensive they come with the labor to operate them (the way many buildings have a building manager and a desk person). Many industrial transactions are structured basically the same way as commercial rent.
It is a specific term, but it means: taking control of a limited resource (e.g. housing), most typically by ownership, that you do not have any direct use for, and then seeking revenue by then renting it to other people who actually want to use it (e.g. live in it).
Which, not suprisingly, is precisely what landlords are doing.
And also not surprisingly, those "entire industries" would be rent-seeking if the resources they rent out were limited. However, that does not apply to rental equipment, for example (though there are a few specific exceptions in the case of extremely expensive, very complex and/or very large equipment).
The bulk of the political will for this garbage doesn't come from landlords. Landlords want more, more, more. There literally aren't enough landlords in this country for that.
It comes from existing homeowners who are not landlords and don't want a bunch of high(er than them) turnover housing near them let alone cheaper housing because of the "neighborhood character" or whatever. Basically got mine fuck you.
And this is enabled with the remainder of the political will being provided by a select number of unconscionably ignorant non property owners who have insane takes about how the government should manage all this, be deeply involved in this, immensely scrutinize any sort of property development, etc, etc, all of which is to the benefit of megacorp landlords and developers and the detriment of the small time guys who own a number of properties you can count on one hand with a sum total of units you can count on two or thereabouts who make up the overwhelming majority of landlords on a unit basis and if even a small percent of them added a little bit of capacity would be a huge amount.
> However, that does not apply to rental equipment, for example (though there are a few specific exceptions in the case of extremely expensive, very complex and/or very large equipment).
They don't rent seek the literal equipment. They rent seek your ability to use it without a bunch of thugs showing up with a "stop or else" proposition. You can literally buy a car crusher on Alibaba but you can't open a junkyard in my state without a permit that they have a well known hospital-esque "we only allow X to exist overall" system for, assuming your town doesn't outlaw the business outright.
Once again, this is all to the benefit of big business for whom a few million bucks of donations to the right stuff and work directed at the right firms as needed to get a variance (i.e. pay the law away) for their billion dollar dildo manufacturing plant or whatever whereas the guy who wants to, IDK, take his HVAC bending business to the next level, open a second site and get into process equipment is shit outta luck because without greasing palms he can't afford to the government will hem and haw about every goddamn detail and prevent anything from happening. And the existing industrial plant that got in before the rules is laughing its way to the bank the whole time, well, right up until it gets regulated all the way to China but that's a different problem.
The government steals half of my money, half of my landlord's money, and I have to pay my landlord’s income and property tax in addition to my own income tax.
This is why I still cannot afford a home even though I work in a senior role in AI. After paying all those damn taxes and everyone else’s taxes there is almost nothing left.
The logical conclusion is that the residents of these desirable areas like the bay / San Diego / Seattle / DC actually want housing prices to stay high.
Repealing all the bullcrap from the last 50yr that makes that artificially expensive to the point of being a non starter if not outright illegal is the hard part.
Also doesn’t help there’s a lot of red tape as the other commenter mentioned.
I live in a former socialist country (well, part of a country, the country does not exist anymore), and when we needed more housing, we designated the land in the city to be for housing, ie. large socialist buildings. Then 1990s came, no more socialism, capitalism now, and no more large building projects, no new neighborhoods. So now, we have cows and cornfields in what would be prime realestate because the government won't change the zoning, all three neighbors there complain and apartments that used to be 120k eur maybe 20 years ago are now close to 500k eur.
If you want to live next to cows, move to a village, thousands want apartment buildings there, to live in a city.