Fundamentally the service you are paying for is risk alleviation.
Buying a whole ass property and putting a 20 year mortgage on it is a pretty big risk, home prices fluctuate wildly, shit can go sideways, things can break, anyone who’s ever had to suddenly face a situation where “You now have to cough up 10s of thousands of dollars asap or your home becomes condemned” understands this. It happens.
Renting means the landlord assumes this risk for you, they now have to be the one who goes bankrupt if the boiler, washing machine, dishwasher, toilet, sink, whatever suddenly shits the bed and now you have a small pond in your living room or whatever.
Renters get to have a home to live in, with many renters rights, but they at any time can just walk away from the deal and go find somewhere else to live.
If you buy a home, do you think you can suddenly go “ah nevermind Im not feeling it anymore” to the bank and walk away from your mortgage? No, it’s an assumed risk you are now chained to for 20 years.
You either have to find some other person willing to buy that risk off of you (sell your house), which is a HUGE amount of effort and requires lawyers and realtors and etc, or live with it.
Renters get to swerve all that and THAT is primarily what you are paying for.
Once you own a home you begin to understand how enormous some random bullshit bad dice roll can quite suddenly empty your entire bank account.
A pipe explodes? a bird decides to fly through your window? Your shower suddenly cracks? Your washing machine shits the bed?
You are the only person around who is liable for all that now when you literally own it, which means you and only you are responsible for fixing it. Hope you had the money set aside.
If you are renting? You call the landlord and they fix it and you dont have to pay a single penny
Every single day you spend living in the home is wear and tear on the facilities. You use the machines, you open and close doors and drawers, that adds up to non zero costs.
Do you think Air conditioners never break down from use? Fridge blowers dont suddenly shit the bed? Furnaces dont require yearly maint?
That shit is expensive and if no one lived in the building, all of it could be shut off.
This is all stuff you are leveraging onto the landlord when you rent, so yes, obviously that is worth a monetary value.
Yes exactly, do tenants really think they could afford to pay for a new A/C suddenly? Could they use the 50% of their income they pay us now in rent to fix it? No, they’re too stupid to do that, they’d just spend it on beer and avocado toast if landlords weren’t around to take it from them.
yeah okay, just confirmed trolling, kk
It’s the truth, did you earn the money you’re using to fix things, or did the tenant?
The landlord is being paid for assuming the risk.
It’s no different than paying to rent anything else. You can’t afford to buy a whole as 50k car when you visit a country, but you’ll pay to rent a car for a week.
You can’t afford to buy a whole ass house, but you do wanna rent one short term.
Not just in terms of raw cash to buy it, but also affording all the financial risk if things go sideways.
The renter has decided “yeah I can’t afford if the engine shits the bed on a 50k car”, if their rented cars engine shits the bed, the company they rent from handles it.
In return you pay a fee to temporarily use the item, without taking on that risk.
This is fairly basic stuff, but people seem to have missed these lessons in school I guess.
They’re being paid because they own the property and along with other landlords constrain supply by both having rentals and warehousing empty units.
You’re not absorbing risk, you’re tenants collectively are along with supporting you and your entire family’s lifestyle.
The only way you’d be absorbing risk is of you gave tenants equity they built up whole paying your mortgage.
You clearly don’t understand how risk works then.
If the house floods in a disaster, do you think tenants are liable for that at all?
No. They can just walk away and go find a new home.
Do you think you can so easily do that of its a house you have 15 years of mortgage left on?
SMH
I agree with you on most points, landlords are inherently being paid for assuming risk. I believe what is unfair about the situation is that some of the risk they are supposed to assume is actually carried by government programs. The tenants are paying taxes that the landlord benefits from as a form of insurance (risk mitigation) while the tenant does not. This is a form of wealth redistribution in which the landlords benefit.
A prime example is flood, just like you said. FEMA has historically stepped in to mitigate that financial risk. The tenants’ taxes essentially pay for “federal flood insurance” for the landlord.
You clearly don’t understand how profits work. Renting is profitable so all this risk you speak of paid for by the tenant along with the outsized profits landlords enjoy.
THANK YOU. Tenants don’t understand how hard it is to collect rent so that you can buy other properties, so that you can collect more rent.
We alleviate the burden by using their rent to save up the money needed to buy real estate.
Your response sounds a lot like you didnt read a single thing written.
Its closer to “collect rent to pay for the constant deluge of random shit breaking down and failing”
Typically landlords dont actually make a lot of “take home” pay per hour, its a full time job. People seriously underestimate the enormous amount of bureaucracy involved in maintaining a rental space. Theres mountains of legal paperwork all the time. Every single thing that gets fixed has to be tracked and filed and entered in and accounted. Money has to be tracked very carefully so you dont get audited by the feds. etc etc.
Its not as simple as “call the plumber”, its…
“call up the insurance agency, tell them what happened, send a bunch of emails, get the approved in network plumber assigned to you, the plumber agency calls you, you confirm the time the plumber will arrive, they then fax you a bunch of paperwork to fill out, you fill that out and then file your own copies, you then send that back to the plumber agency, they send you back some more info, you have to copy and file THAT now, then you have to go find your notification of entry paperwork and make a copy of that, then you gotta go let the tenant know when the plumber is going to arrive and deliver them the notification of entry…” … “then on the day of you get further coordination, you have to drive over to the location and use your keys to let the plumber in, give them access to what’s needed, then make sure they fix it, then they give you even more paperwork to fill out, then you make copies of that, then you file all that, then you have to followup with the insurance agency and let them know everything is fixed…” … “Then later in the year when you are doing your taxes, you have to go find all that paperwork and make sure it’s included as part of your filing, of course”
All for 1 single plumber trip.
And realize every single time something, anything has to be done, the landlord should be tracking that shit, and you can pretty quickly see why it starts to become a full time job.
Lol give me a break, a tenant is not going to be filing insurance claims every month. That’s like a once or twice in a lifetime thing.
If it’s not you’re not going to have insurance for long.
Tell me you’ve never owned a property without telling me you’ve never owned a property, lololol.
God I wish it was “once or twice a lifetime” holy shit lololol.
Oh sweet naive child.
Tell me you move the goalposts without telling me you move the goalposts.
Homeowners don’t file insurance claims to hire plumbers. And sorry but filing work orders or insurance claims is never going to turn into a full time job for a individual homeowner.
If you’re talking about property management of multifamily complexes yes that’s a job but when you spread that work out among all the units it turns into minutes of work.
And like I said, all this “risk” would be easily affordable if the tenants weren’t paying rent.
You are so adorable, you really think landlords make billions because of how hard it is to pick up the phone and talk to an insurance agent.
Yes I did. You pay for everything with the rent you collect. You are not protecting anyone from any risk.
Not to mention homes appreciate, which is why you own them, so any of these “deluge of shit to fix” that you’re supposedly protecting them from can easily be paid for with credit backed by the equity of the home.
Or just buying a new home with a warranty or an old home with deferred maintenance priced in.
Homes very much don’t appreciate in value unless constantly maintained.
And you are lucky if you can afford to pay for the fixes with rent.
In reality, it’s not uncommon for 1 bad dice roll to evaporate your entire bank account in an instant.
It’s purely a gamble, through and through.
Renting is fundamentally paying money so someone else can gamble their entire life savings instead of yours.
And sure, lots if people do fine for 10-15 years without some shit happening.
Fundamentally, here’s how it works:
There’s this game of Russian roulette going on people play. It’s a 100 chamber gun though, very small chance you get shot and die.
If you dont die though, you make a little bit of money everytime you pull the trigger.
You have to play this game though, or, be homeless which is it’s own different game of Russian roulette.
However, someone offers you a deal.
They’ll pull the trigger for you on their own head! If they win money, they keep it, but if they die it’s their fault, not yours.
In return you don’t have to be homeless, but also you don’t gotta play the r6ssian roulette game.
All they ask is you pay them some money to cover the risk they are taking on, so you never have to pull the trigger.
That is what you are paying for.
Blah blah blah, the average upkeep on a home is 3% of the home’s price. On a 400k home that’s 12 grand. That’s 1k a month for a 3br home. Rents for something like that would top 3k.
That’s why we call it RENT and not a service. No one would pay over 3 times as much for something they could do themselves.
Homes appreciate on average 1% a year so you’re really talking about 8k out of pocket or $800 per month for maintenance.
You’re not taking taxes and interest on your mortgage into consideration and historically there’s a higher return on investment to just use the money to invest in the S&P.
If landlords don’t exist, what’s your solution for people who don’t want to own or aren’t financially or mentally able to have that level of responsibility? You can be able to rent a house without wanting to own it, doesn’t mean you want to live in a state owned apartment either…
Bruh, landlords write off the interest on their taxes. Plus there’s depreciation, a lot of landlords don’t pay any taxes at all. You are such a landlord shill.
Because you talked about the “risk” that landlords absorb like flood and fire.
And how much your mortgage is is predicated on how much of a down payment you put down. A down payment that tenants can’t save because of the parasitic draw of landlords.
The only reason why renting is cheaper than buying now is because of rampant speculation by DUN DUN DUN LANDLORDS. You want me to be great full for a solution to a problem YOU CAUSED.
Before COVID made AirBnBs 10x money machines, and RealPage allowed landlords to fix prices, buying was actually a little cheaper than renting in all but the most desirable cities.
Regardless the Real Estate rentals making 100’s billions of dollars. All the “risk” and equity that landlords are supposedly providing is all coming from tenants fully fucking stop.
As far a solution for the people that absolutely positively can not buy, that you couldn’t give a fuck less about considering how many people you’ve kicked our onto the streets already, who previously could afford rent, it’s called public housing, ie just give them a home. We already do it in Mississippi and it works great.
Whoever came up with this has never owned a house and has no idea how fucked up tenants can be
If you can’t handle it, sell your property. No one asked you to be a landlord. You’re not holding up the world, you’re just a parasite.
Ahh what I would give to be young and naive again
So you’re old and ignorant of Adam Smith and Marx.
I’m old enough to know how life works. I’m sure Smith and Marx will come in handy when your toilet clogs. Call a plumber LOL!
You don’t know how life or capitalism works if you’re never bothered reading the two seminal works on it.
Say what you will about landlords, but fuck this meme format.
If you have your landlord call the plumber and pay for the plumber and you expect that to happen faster than you could do it yourself(because you are working your own job), then it’s hard to argue that is not a value-added service.
If you break the toilet and now consider the property unlivable, due to a broken toilet, that isn’t the landlord’s fault nor the fault of the toilet. It’s your fault.
Accidents happen and your landlord should be cool about it, but it’s still your own accident.
None of this applies to natural causes like environmental damage, of course, but a lot of what happens to rental properties is caused by tenants.
If you don’t own it, it shouldn’t be your responsibility to repair it. The only circumstance in which you should spend money beyond the rent you already pay to fix something that doesn’t belong to you is if you broke it and your rental agreement doesn’t cover accidents. Homes require maintenance, lived in or not, and a homeowner can decide to neglect that at their own peril. If something goes wrong, it’s the landlord’s responsibility to fix it, not the person paying them for the service of having a roof. If they don’t they’ll likely lose a tenant and therefore income, so fixing their investment property is just required investment maintenance, the cost of doing business as a landlord.
I’m well aware many places have laws that touch on this subject, many of which have been heavily influenced by landlords.
I mean if something breaks due to normal wear and tare then that’s the landlords responsibility but if you flush a Barbie down the toilet or pour bacon grease down the drain it’s your fault. Washington state has laws mandating tenants to report certain damages or loss of power, heat, and water while the landlord has a period of time to get that repaired. If your loss water due to a damaged pipe it has to be repaired in 24 hours, who’s at fault and gets the bill can be hashed out later.
Really, do you think when you rent a car that you can drive it into a brick wall, and it’s Hurtz responsibility to repair it because you paid for convenience?
completely depends on the rental agreement. I encourage anyone reading this to find all the loopholes and exploit the ever living shit out of them.
If I paid for Hertz’s $7 a day insurance and it says I’m not liable for damages in any way, then fuck yes I expect to be able to drive into a brick wall and walk away. Landlords who are too stupid, lazy, or uninformed to protect their capital from the people they’re exploiting to grow it don’t get special treatment, their capital is fair game. It wouldn’t be my fault if Hertz sold me that coverage, and it wouldn’t be a renter’s fault if a lease agreement let them off the hook for flushing a barbie down the toilet.
What’s the last time you scrubbed the floor at a McDonald’s out of the kindness of your heart, just because some pee splashed on it?
This rent piggy has the right idea! You’re paying half your take home pay for the convenience!
There’s no reason to insult someone with a different viewpoint.
There is if you have no way to argue against their point. It’s like yelling at someone to “win” an argument. It often works.
Pay piggy is a term of endearment. Pigs are cute, and tenants are like pigs full of their hard earned cash and it’s all mine! Oink oink oink.
I get that you’re mad about not being able to own land, that doesn’t mean you need to be a piece of shit about it.
Why does being mad negate my argument?
I’ve read every one of your responses.
There are many things that negate your arguments, like the literal paragraphs you’ve used reductionist arguments against.
No I will not discuss this further with you, put the phone down and go get some air.
Huh? I’m agreeing with them though.