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.
Whoever came up with this has never owned a house and has no idea how fucked up tenants can be
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?
Agree in general.
If your kid throws a baseball through a big window, that's on you.
If the dryer is used normally and breaks, thata on them.
It still amazes me how people think these posts are solely referring to your specific uncle who owns two houses and not corporate landlords who own entire complexes.
It's even worse when those corporate landlords have stipulations in the lease about not being able to repair anything yourself or you'll be fined.
Meanwhile the property falls further and further into disrepair because even though I've put in 4 work orders about it they don't care because all they care about is green number go up. Or you'll get "Yeah we'll send someone over at the time you specifically told us you're gonna be at work. Also you need to be there when they show up or we can't do anything about it 🤷♂️"
If all landlords actually properly maintained all their properties we wouldn't be calling landlords leeches. But more often than not they put in the bare minimum and call it good.
I'm referring to both. 80% of rentals are owned by mom and pop landlords. They're a much bigger problem than corporate landlords.
That's fair.
In my personal experience it's been the opposite but I know that's just anecdotal/confirmation bias
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