102
Do you know how hard it is call a plumber?
(lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/18963881
Get rid of landlords...
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.
Insurance exists for a reason, loans exist for a reason, and the difficulty in selling a home is artificial because it's treated like an investment that appreciates instead of a commodity that depreciates like it actually is.
Landlords buy bad appliances all the time, they are incentivized to, the cheaper the better because they don't have to live with the consequences except for repairing it when it breaks.
In exchange for not owning anything in the place you live and having a fundamentally worse experience for it you get to pay someone else their mortgage AND their repair fund. You don't take that into account. Renters pay for everything, we just pay it every month instead of in lump sum hits like an appliance dying.
Landlords do not provide a service, at best they provide living mobility which could be improved drastically if housing wasn't treated like a private investment but instead a public service - so what little service they do provide is artificial.
The home is not the investment, the land is. Land is scarce, especially in desirable places. The home itself does depreciate and frequently drags down the price of the property, with new owners often tearing the place to the ground after purchase.
Renters do not pay for everything. Ask any financial advisor and they will tell you it is cheaper to rent than to own. It’s a very common strategy to rent, then take the extra money you save and invest it into stocks and bonds for retirement. In the long run, if your investments match the S&P 500 (not hard to do with index funds) then you’ll have more money than you would have if you bought a home (at national average real estate growth rates anyway).
You might point to some place like San Francisco and claim the people who bought houses there back in the 1990s beat the market. Sure, but that’s the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. You could just as easily have bought a house in Detroit instead. I would also say you could play the same game about picking stocks after the fact, but that would be beating a dead horse.
So why do people buy houses if they’re a bad investment compared to stocks? Emotional value, mainly. Having a place to call your own is important to a lot of people.
Also, of course, the same reason one buys anything.
If you own it, you can do whatever you want with it (mostly). Wanna repaint an entire room? No problem. Wanna tear down a (non load bearing) wall and move it? Easy. Wanna tear up the lawn and add raised garden beds? Call before you dig but aside from that, go for it.
Most of that sorta stuff of course isn't kosher if you are renting :p
If you buy a house as an investment you need to work extremely hard to actually net positive. Simply buying a house and sitting on it is usually net negative (reminder that the price tag you buy the house at isnt how much money you pay, you have to account for all the extra interest you pay over 20 years, which is usually a solid +35% or more of the cost of the house)
So your house has to appreciate not only more than the interest you paid, but then even more to also beat basic blue chip stock rates.
Which is, at best, a gamble.
The main way you actually profit is if you renovate the house to boost its value. And that takes a fuck tonne of work. If you hire other people to do it, it wont be profitable, you have to do it yourself to have a hope in hell of netting positive.
So hope you are good at mudding and taping walls, cause you are gonna be doing a lot of it~
All that stuff is dirt cheap if you're not obsessed with buying new and not completely useless.
Ah yes, used rafters, used walls, and used drywall... definitely something Ill go to the store and just pickup...
Sometimes you can get lucky at re-use stores and they'll have leftover sheets of drywall from large projects, but those usually get scooped up really fast and you usually dont have the curtesy of time to wait around for when that happens when you actively have a giant hole in your floor or wall that needs to be fixed...
You could not intentionally miss the point or be so goddamned broke you think sheetrock is pricy
So you're advocating that because tenants pay the landlord to assume the risk - they shouldn't have to worry about anything related to the property?
So for example if the door buzzer doesn't work and the landlord knows this and hasn't fixed it because it doesn't affect them - it's okay to just keep the main door always open and let anyone squat and shit anywhere in the communal areas of the building because the tenants don't have to assume the risk of the properties losing value because any potential buyer dislikes the smell of feces? Cool, cool, but then as a tenant what do you propose I do so my building doesn't always smell like shit?
Imagine writing out something this unironically reductive and actually hitting the reply button.
SMH
No I mean that's a real case scenario for me - what do you propose I do so my building stops smelling like human shit all the time? is suing my landlord the only course of action?
Legally heavily depends on where you live, many places have a step before that where there are legal bodies you can report them to for such things. You'd have to consult your city's help line to get more info and figure out who you talk to about that.
Assuming that somehow doesnt get results then, yes, the next step is suing the landlord for your rent back, which can potentially go in your favor as legally in most places the landlord has a legal duty to maintain the building for the tenant and if they dont do that, you dont owe them rent and can get it back.
Ok, I refuse to read the whole thing because you're wrong right at the bloody start. You can in fact sell a house along with the mortgage. It's not a fucking risk. Finding another buyer isn't that big a problem as the demand is fucking huge, unless you're selling a literal dump, in which case you're a monster for wanting to rent it out.
As for taking care of the place, there are countless companies that'll rent it out for you, if you really don't wanna deal with your tenant's bullshit. Like what the actual fuck are you even taking about? If as a land lord you chose to go the extra mile to squeeze out every penny, you don't get to complain about it being hard when there's an easy way out.
Tell me you've never actually sold a house without telling me you've never actually sold a house.
There's a mountain of paperwork, legalwork, fees, hiring, back and forth, inspections, certifications... etc etc involved.
If you seriously think it's "easy" to sell a property, you're clearly way to naive to even be participating in this convo in a meaningful way, as you have demonstrated effectively zero knowledge on the topic of realty.
It's easy. Bought a house 2 years ago.
Buying a house is not the same as selling a house you have an outstanding mortgage on mate, lol
Again, there are companies to do it for you. All you HAVE to do is show up a dozen times and sign papers. Sure you might lose a bit of money in the process, but since we're talking "buying house money" the so called risk is negligible. We're talking the amount of money you could put on a savings account and the monthly yield on that alone would seriously affect how many hours you need to work.
Doesn't even have to be much paperwork. I know what I'm looking at. Purchasing this property as a private sale was simply a matter of hiring a lawyer to do the paperwork and to confirm no liens or liabilities
Purchasing a house is not even close to the same as selling a house you have an outstanding mortgage on.
Getting into a mortgage is very easy.
Getting out of one on the other hand is much more of a pain in the ass.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
The state doesn't pay if the flood comes from a pipe bursting
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.
I'm not a landlord but in 6 months my furnace needed to be replaced (9k) and my sewer line need to be completely trenched and replaced due to root intrusion. (17k)
This isn't beer money we are talking about
Get on Kijiji or craigslist and buy a perfectly fine used furnace for a grand or 500 like everyone else does. Hooking up a 110v connection and a gas line is literal child's play.