What a benevolent lord!

Yeah, baffles me when people think that they're doing people a favor by being landlords. Like dude, you are trying to get rich, nothing more. You're not doing anybody anywhere any favors.
- I suppose we would need the government to step up with subsidized mortgages or rent to own programs or something to make things more fair?
  The landlord in the OP should have sold their apartment but since they could’ve only sold to someone who could afford the down payment they should’ve also lobbied their representatives to make housing purchases more affordable in the future. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
  Wonder what would happen if all landlords put their properties up for sale tomorrow. Should be a nice housing crash? And then the remaining renters who still cannot afford the newly reduced down payments, they need a solution prior to the houses closing, I suppose…
  
  ~~Well the situation she's describing kind of is that, no?~~
  Sorry I realise I misread the meme. The rest of this is still valid but not so relevant. I'll leave it anyway.
  If you own a house, and plan to go on a, say, 6 month trip in a few years. You are obviously not going to go through the 6 month+ process of selling the house, storing all of your furniture, etc... only to have to spend 6 months renting while you look for another house to buy.
  So either you store my personal stuff and rent it out as furnished on a fixed term rental contract, or it's empty until you get back.
  I really appreciate people's furore at ~~landlords~~ housing scalpers - but single homeowners renting out their house are not the problem. It is perfectly acceptable to own a house and rent it out, you are not hoarding housing and some people need/want to rent for non-financial reasons (they travel for work, they don't like the hassle of managing maintenance, etc).
- As mentioned above this person actually manages to be worse than typical parasitic landlords. She expects them to move whenever she decides she wants to live in the UK again for a bit...
  Money rots the brain and the morals...
  
  Money rots the brain and the morals...
  Seems too yeah.

I like the unspoken part where the people who have lived in this home must vacate when she decides she wants to spend a few years living in the UK again. They should have to find new accommodation when it suits her, but she is not subject to such requirements.
- Tbh that's the reason she bought and rents it out in the first place, so I'm sure she's aware
  
  yeah I don't think she's unaware. just emphasizing that the asymmetric nature of the relationship extends past just profiting off a basic need.
- I don't know how it is the UK, but usually there is a contract period and a minimum period to respect to break the contract.
  
  I don’t know how it its where you live/the UK but there is probably a special clause/law that allows the owner to end the contract if they want to use the property themselves.
  Edit: Downvote as much as you want but at least in Germany and France such clauses exist.
  
  well i guess it's fine, then. got myself all worked up over nothing
- When you added it all up I am pretty confident I spent about 8K USD on my last move. When she is done having fun her sefs will be out that money.
- I had a sociopathic narcissistic ex-boyfriend who did that. He owned a townhouse that people were renting out, and when his wife left him and their house was foreclosed and he got evicted, he kicked out his tenants and moved into his townhouse.
  HE KICKED OUT HIS TENANTS SO HE COULD MOVE IN 😟
  I do not approve of this master/slave dynamic that the housing industry has created. It's inhumane, unethical, sociopathic,
  
  I recently bought an apartment, and while I was searching I always made sure to ask if the apartments I was looking at were being rented (the listings never disclosed that information), and giving up on the ones that had tenants living in them. This always earned me weird looks from the agents - "you can just buy the apartment and kick them out". Yes, the law and the contract will allow it, but my conscience wouldn't.

Seems like there's a lack of understanding in this thread.
Someone who owns a duplex and rents half is not a problem. My barber, who moved to be closer to sick, aging parents, but did not sell their house in Asheville, because they want to retire there and won't be able to afford that if they sell now, is not a problem.
Corporations are the problem. They're buying up hundreds of thousands of properties, and why not? To a greedy corporation that only cares about money, it makes sense. If you sell a house, you make money once. If you rent a house, you have a subscription model and a revenue stream. Adobe did it with Photoshop. HP wants to do it with printers. Greedy Bastard Inc. wants to do it with housing.
Legislate big business out of housing. It's the only way to fix it.
- It’s not a lack of understanding, it’s just that you’re omitting another huge group that is the other half of the corporation problem and also involves private landlords.
  The person who owns a duplex and lives in one of the two units is not a problem. A business owner with a taxpayer above their storefront is not a problem.
  But the large group of private landlords that buy up single family homes with the sole intention of turning them into forever-rentals are a huge problem and a much larger group than the niche private landlords you mentioned. These people don’t get a pass for doing the exact same things the corporations are doing but on a smaller scale. These people live in their own single family homes, which are financed by denying other people the chance to buy their own by removing them from the housing market and turning them into price-gauging forever-rentals.
- I think you meant "HP did it with printers" but all told well put. There are worse and better cases, and some victimisers are also victims themselves
- To be fair people like Mr Barber often are very supportive of zoning that prevents enough housing to be built and any measure which makes their property appreciate much faster than inflation is sufficient to eventually completely destroy the useful housing market for anyone who doesn't own.
- You are absolutely right that corporations buying up all of the properties are the biggest problem, but I think the reason most people in this thread are irritated with the landlord from the OP is because they make it sound like they are doing the world a favor by leasing their own building.
  Even if they aren't directly profiting off of the rent they collect, like say for example they are simply breaking even each month, they are still indirectly profiting by having an affordable place to return to whenever they decide they want to move back to the UK again. "Where would people live if not for me?" is kind of a ridiculous claim, because either the tenant would take over ownership of the property or another investor would purchase the property and take over the existing lease if that weren't possible.

The utter god-complex some of these people have

The real question is- where are those people going to live when you get back and evict them?
- That's the fun part: you get to de-home them with the full support of the law.
  
  My landlord assured me I'd be able to rent this place for years.
  A few days ago he tells me he's selling it, and that I need to move by June 1st, when my lease is until September.
  I could fight it, but for what? A few extra months? No point in that headache.
  I was hoping to rent a few years till I could buy it, as it is in my home town and near both work and family.
  With the crazy rent prices today I'm going to have to move over an hour further just to find a smaller place at similar price.
  
  Who cares? They knew the deal moving in.
- In their 13th property they own outright from landlord profits
- Maybe at the same place they would go if he didn't rent out his appartement but still kept it for when he goes back?
  
  What if there is no other place they can afford to go?

I’m in this situation and I’m renting out my house while working overseas, where I am living in a rental property. Just because the market has been perverted by capital doesn’t mean there aren’t legit purposes for a rental market.
- Not for profit, there isn't. Profit as a concept in contemporary economics already doesn't pass the sniff test, but housing especially doesn't.
  
  The person in the tweet doesn't claim to be making a profit at all. She's basically saying she isn't going to sell the apartment, so if she didn't rent it out, then it would just sit empty.
  
  Profit is a byproduct of free exchange of labor. Most people wouldn't labor if it was net negative for them.
  
  Profit as a concept in contemporary economics already doesn't pass the sniff test
  I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mind explaining?
  
  Ofc, stuff that you can't really live without (or be considered poor without) cannot be market priced/for profit because the only thing stopping soaring prices would be a revolution/revolt ... and we were pretty pacified throughout our upbringing. Even silly/obvious things - like people automatically condemning (financially poor) looters of megacorps with unimaginable private profits.
- You are so brave to post this on lemmy
- The issue is (the normal and accepted practice of) charging people "market" rates for something that is a necessity.
  Like healthcare, housing market isn't free because the demand part of the market isn't free.
  People tend to mistake choice (the amount of available products that do the same - eg 100 colors of the same 100× overpriced cornflakes) with free market.
  You are not going to go live in another country to work there and be homeless. And, if you could buy the place instead of renting, ofc you would want to do that. Even if you dont have the full nominal amount of moneys, as long as your credit payments (eg bank financing) would be lower than rent (well, actually just if the interests payments are lower than rent), you are just losing money paying rent. Even in case of like a really long loan, if you decide to sell the real estate after a year, every penny that you paid to you borrowed nominal is now "yours again" since the loan diminished by that amount and the selling price is within that margin/about the same-ish.
  The profit incentive of current owners (ie the ones that just happened to have the opportunity to buy that real estate before you did, or were even born) is the main driver for hiking prices/rents.
  And all of the free actors on the market, which are owners that control the supply part of the market, have exactly aligned interest of charging higher rents (that consequently/additionally result in higher real estate prices bought as investments) ... guess where the market is headed. Not only at higher market prices, but also supporting other hurdles to buying real estate.
  
  I worked in another country for a few years, renting was defiantly the better choice at the time. I wasn't going to be there long enough to break even when I sold, and the headache of buying a property in a country that you don't have citizenship, trying to get financing, ect. just wasn't worth it.

The only value landlords have is that is easier to be transient and move around for work and stuff, and not be tied down.
It should be for those in that niche, not because home ownership is too hard to obtain.
If you live in the same town doing the same job, the only reason you should be renting is because you didn't like doing the extra work homeownership requires.
If anything beyond these niche is your market, fuck off.
- 3rd paragraph is me. I rented the vast majority of my life. I didn't want to mow the lawn, shovel snow, clean gutters, fix/replace major items, eg: hot water heater.
  Nope. Not interested.
  
  I rented a place that had a small yard. I was excited to have a yard to tend. After cutting the grass once, I was done.
  The landlord had the grass removed and a bunch of local plants put into a garden with a minimal watering system. Never needed to be tended. Was a well-loved upgrade.
  
  You can hire people to do those things and if home ownership were affordable, you would likely be able to afford to pay people to do those things and have it all even out to being around the same as renting.
- And not having to take a big loan or have a lot of money on hand to live somewhere.

lmao so retarded
"where would you live if I didn't own all the houses?"
IN MY OWN HOUSE, BITCH
thanks for trying to pass off you owning more houses than you can live in as a favour to me though, you fuckin fuck
- Similar logic to "job creators".
- Imagine thinking this is an actual rebuttal. They can't afford buy this house whether or not she owns it. If they could, they'd buy it or one like it. They can afford to lease it because apparently rent there is lower than mortgage, I've lived in places like that, 10,000 a month to buy over 22 years but 1300 a month rent. You nitwits want to blame people doing ok for themselves when maybe look in the mirror.
  
  Buying the house would be a lot cheaper if landlord weren't hoarding properties, then you might have a 1300 a month mortgage instead of a 1300 a month rent
  
  Rent payments are not less than a mortgage payment, that's the problem. Normal people are struggling to reach the 20% down payment in this economy. Otherwise they would buy. Just because you personally found something with rent lower than a 20-year mortgage doesn't mean other people can.

Tbh this type of landlord isn't really the problem. It is the people who intentionally buy up masses amounts of housing just to rent out. Middle class people who have a heart using it for their own security is the ideal landlord situation.
- This was my mom. It was the house she grew up in, not worth much. She ended up renting to a bunch of people over the years, way below market, and eventually let a family living there save up enough for a down payment to afford a loan to buy it from her. They're still friends with them and the new owners take good care of the place. My parents are much happier knowing it's being used well vs being landlords.

Landlords are the most delusional class.

If I was a landlord, I'd make the serfs work the fields for even more profit. I mean, If I'm gonna be evil, I'm going all-in.
- Isn't that just charging rent in turnips instead of money?
  
  Sounds like slavery with extra turnips
  
  You can eat turnips. You can't eat rent money.
  
  "instead"?

My family owns a few rental properties. It was the mechanism that allowed my grandfather who grew up in 1930s Mississippi working the same land his slave grandparents did to escape poverty and retire pretty well off. He moved to Chicago, worked as a garbage man, bought a 3 flat and lived in one unit and rented the other two. Eventually he invested his money in more properties and and had his lawyer buy his house in the racist suburb of Oak Park so my mother could grow up in relative comfort.
The company was never ment to extract unlimited profit, we actually had many unprofitable years due to demographics changes, recessions, maintenance, and poor tenants causing damage ( who flushes weave down the drain?). But in aggregate it's made enough to give stability, because being a landlord is always our side job.
During the pandemic my mother worked with all the tenants who lost their jobs or had limited or no income. Since none of our properties have a mortgage, she reduced rent to just enough to cover the insane Illinois property taxes and the shared utilities for the people that could pay. When the boiler went out she picked up a few extra nursing shifts with covid pay to cover it. When things returned to the new normal or when tenants found new work, she just had them resume normal rent without needing to pay any back rent in their lease.
You'd think we would be rewarded for doing the right thing and treating people with basic human decency, but no. When we applied for covid assistance, the money was gone. We then started to receive building violations for one of our properties is an up and coming area. The funny thing about these violations was that they were for items repairs 10 years earlier, and also for things we received city and used city grants and contracts to fix. Now we are currently in a legal battle with the city where they want us to take a $900k loan to fully renovated the building or have the city seize the property because it's a "crime den" in their words. Like how, we screen everyone, rent mostly to old people and single mothers, and have camera in public areas and around the buildings. We even routinely provide footage to the police when they request it, even though that means we have to buy a new DVR since we have yet to have one returned.
But ever since covid and this inspection bull, we get daily calls letters, emails from corporations expressing their interest in buying our not for sale property.
- Like how, we screen everyone, rent mostly to old people and single mothers, and have camera in public areas and around the buildings.
  ever since covid and this inspection bull, we get daily calls letters, emails from corporations expressing their interest in buying our not for sale property.
  That's why. Someone's asking a "friend" to lean on you and make you sell so that a corporate landlord can consolidate more of the rental market.
  
  Exactly
- I'll be honest, that building sounds like a piece of crap. Inspections are easy to satisfy if you keep the building up. First of all, not many building inspectors take bribes (even in Chicago). Second of all, the updates they ask for aren't crazy. Third of all, if you think the building inspector was bribed, discretely ask them about it as if you also want to bribe them. You can find out.
  It sounds like you have some issues that they let you slide on before. Maybe the old building inspector retired during Covid and now you have somebody who'll actually enforce the rules. You have an old ass building with a bunch of old ladies in it. That's exactly what a run down building is like.
  
  The funny thing is that we have to be present during inspections because we have to allow them into utility areas and different units along with giving tenants notice that people will enter into their homes. We passed 2019's inspection and was working on getting leed grant to help finish some improvement needed to qualify to accept section 8 renters since we just replaced all the windows and installed central air conditioning in each unit. The violations were for things corrected across almost 20 years of inspections. There was no inspection that led to our violations.

If it wasn't for hoarders I'd be able to afford a house. Shit my parents bought in 2003 and paid 233k, the fucking place is about a million now. They only make like $4 more an hour than they did in 2003, but because they were able to get in before it got stupid they are set.
Like shit it's an entire house and they pay what I'd be paying to rent a two bedroom apartment.
- Oh, so you'll be able to inherit a house one day. Stop bragging
  
  Well due to the massive increase in end of life costs in the last decade his parents will have to sell to house in their last few year and the inheritance will vanish. Don’t worry we’ll all end up in the same place.
  
  Ah yes....

If it wasn't for scalpers, where would people buy concert tickets??

No, another landlord would own it and charge 3× as much. Lol.
- Ah, the "I am a smaller asshole, because others are bigger assholes (but I am still an asshole)" argument
  
  Where the fuck are you seeing this argument take place? How do you know this isn't a fair landlord? Why are they not allowed some profit for a service they provide?
  
  That's like living in america and not owning a gun. Your past virtue signal won't lift you out of poverty.

If you heard a construction worker say something like that standing infront of the building they worked on you would still think he is a bit full of himself.
- I mean, at least from a construction worker it sounds more like a badass boast.
  "I MADE THESE WALLS WITH MY DAMN BARE HANDS!"

To play Devil's Advocate, the people would only still live there without risk of inescapable debt if they had the qualifications to obtain a loan and pay down payment, as well as means to continue making payments until the property sells again or is paid off. Getting evicted by a landlord sucks but it's still way better than owing the bank money because they can and will come after you for it.
On the flip side, though, you can still get equity from paying a mortgage, so it's possible to sell the property and if it sells fast enough you could pay off the loan without excess interest during hard times.
Buying property comes with risks that renting properties do not have.
- I am so tired of the argument that "renters can't afford to buy the property."
  Is the landlord making a profit? If Rent - Costs = Profit then the people who can afford the rent can afford the costs, and the money that would have been profit for the landlord can instead be savings for emergencies (that the landlord would have paid out of the same funds while still making a profit.)
  
  If renters can continuously pay rent without ever missing a payment for years then yes clearly they could afford a home, but most US Citizens cannot even cover the down payment. Also, most renters end up missing payments pretty frequently. The system needs to change in a way that guarantees homes, but landlords also aren't inherently in the wrong.
- stop!
  
  You've Violated The Law!
- If I'm understanding you correctly, I disagree. Homeowners aren't providing a service to renters by allowing them to live "risk free". The "risk" that a homeowner is incurring is the risk of becoming a renter, same as the risk that an owner of a company incurs is just the risk of having to become a worker.
  
  If the place you're renting gets struck by lightning and burns down, or you go to prison and it falls into disrepair, or the properties get raided and seized for some reason: you can just start over at a new place. The person who bought that building, on the other hand, loses maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, likely plunging them deep into debt which is still accruing interest.

Some of them might've not been able to (or wanted to) pay for the home ownership. But if this assumes someone not making profit was renting it out then yeah
- The reason they're not able to pay for home ownership is because people buy homes to rent for profit. If poor people only had to compete on price with other poor people instead of with investors, house prices would go back to 20th century levels where you could buy one for 3x your salary.
  
  They tried banning landlords in specific neighborhoods in Rotterdam.
  It lead to gentrification.
  The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.
  There's a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it's less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.
  
  They had renting back then too and way before that, and it was really large scale too. It's not really a new phenomenon. And obviously buying a house is still a lot (and I mean a lot) more expensive than renting. Not everyone can save off from their paycheck so that they'd be able to pay for even these cheaper houses.
  But in this case I'm not sure if we are talking about situation where the original post's house was on sale (which would just make it a regular house you have to buy) or a situation where there isn't any renting at all (or profiting from it), in which case it'd still be more expensive but less so than renting.
  
  This is literally not how renting works. Get a clue.
- As a poor, I'd be happy renting at an affordable rate from the state if the "rental income" was used to fund maintenance and development of state owned housing or plugged back into other social services like my tax dollars are.
  I don't like private owners and private investors profiting of my need for shelter.
  
  renting at an affordable rate from the state
  Kind of like our reality of Section 8 housing which I personally think should be the universal norm, rather than a rare exception for which people have to wait on a waiting list for 15 years before they're granted the exception of subsidized housing. ALL housing should be based upon how much we're able to pay for it. It only makes sense because
  A roof over every human's head is a basic human need like air to breathe & food to eat.
  The first thing primitive humans do is seek out caves to live in, and they learn how to build huts. They don't have to work 40 hours a week and pay 50% of that to the sky gods for the privilege of shelter from storms.
  
  Municipality owned rental housing is fairly common where I live. Students often live in apartments owned by a student foundation. As landlords, they seem alright. Private sector is much more mixed and varied, obviously.
  I think having different sort of rental property ownership works well enough. Balances each other out. Cheap municipal apartments help keep the prices down in the private sector too while allowing the competition and profit incentive for the private sector to invest in building apartments.
  
  Don't be poor, problem solved!
- Yeah, the whole "what about people who want / need to rent because of their current circumstances" problem really is easy to solve.
  Create a crown corporation (for those not familiar, a not-for-profit entity owned at arms length by the government) to handle all rentals, with a mandate to offer rents at a (very low) rate established by a formula that accounts for factors of property value (footage, amenities, location), population density and rental demand in a given area.
  Then you make it so that only this crown corp is allowed to charge residential tenants rent. Anyone else who wants to make money off of their second properties and the like will have to sell them to the crown corp. Anyone like in the OP who wants to rent for some months of the year will enter an arrangement with the crown corp where the corp rents the property on their behalf at the rates established by the formula.
  
  Municipalities having their own rental apartments is very common where I live. Though here it works in tandem with private sector.
- Who would rather pay monthly payments to a third party if they could pay the exact same amount but get to keep most of the money for themselves (ie in real estate ownership)?
  
  Someone not wanting to commit to house ownership for whatever reason. Could be students, temporarily working somewhere, someone not sure if they want to live somewhere long-term etc. Or someone worried if they can get their house sold when or if they want to move. It can be a commitment and some just don't want to do that.
  And this is all assuming you could get a loan and buy the house in the first place, have enough for the down payment and so on.

How can you be so heartless to someone that is diversifying their income stream?

Can we stop shitting on landlords and start shitting on politicians that write the laws? Yeah landlords suck, but if it's all legal they are not really to blame. If parking in a handicapped spot was legal for everyone the spots would be used all the time.
- Who do you think pressures local politicians to not allow more housing be built or more dense housing be built?
  
  In the end people still vote for these people, some states have much more protection for renters than other states. I live in a country that has a lot of laws to protect renters.
  There's a reason why the USA still doesn't have affordable healthcare but almost all other first world countries do have it.
- If parking in handicapped spots was legal, that wouldn’t make you less of an asshole for taking the spot, for the same reason it doesn’t excuse landlords. I have no idea how you’ve come to equate laws with morality but breaking the law doesn’t make you an asshole. Being an asshole does.

Eh, fuck off guys. It's his own place that he invested in and provides. People are allowed to make some profit for services they provide. No one said he's priced it unfairly or takes advantage. Jesus Christ you people are unreal.
- It's about the audacity to even state that last question.
  I'm in a similar boat as that guy, I rent out my apartment while living on the other side of the pond. My only reason for not selling but renting it instead is that I was born into that apartment and plan on living there when senescence starts taking a grip on my body. I basically rent it out long term for utilities+upkeep cost and haven't raised rent in five years despite some crazy inflation going on in the country.
  But never even thought of asking this shit ass stupid question. Sure, not everyone is meant to own property, especially seeing the sorry state the cleanliness of my apartment is in between the renters the last eight years. But I'm not delusional to think that there was no privilege involved in me owning that apartment. Unlike what that piece of shit posits.
  
  Ok, he does come off as an entitled twat. But so does the reply, and atleast he's got the benefit of being right.
- Bro even Adam Smith calls out this behavior as negative.
  
  Isn't he dead? Did they even have apartments back then?

Probably not. They would be renting somewhere else. Because if they could afford to buy a piece of property in the first place, they would.
Yeah, landlords make a profit. But, they're also offering a service. Sure most are fucking shit, but that doesn't mean landlords in general should not be extracting a profit. If you want to maintain your own piece of property yourself, then go buy one.
- If you want to maintain your own piece of property yourself, then go buy one.
  I'm trying man, I'm trying. It'd be nice to not have to maintain someone else's for once in my life.
- Most people would buy if they could. But too many are forced to rent because of those landlords cutting the queue and paying through their nose because to them it is an investment and not a home.
  
  But that's not what's happening in this circumstance- it's literally just her old apartment. If she sold it and did want to move back, then she'd be competing with the landlords to buy another one. Or better yet- if she sold it, it could also be bought by a DIFFERENT landlord who might charge more.
- I mostly agree with this. I guess the argument against this is that if all rent-seekers just sold their properties instead of treating them as an income stream, then theoretically there would be more properties on the market and properties would be more affordable for those who want to buy.
  To me, individuals choosing to sell instead of rent-seek would have such a small impact on the market, and those properties would just be bought by corporations that will rent-seek.
  It seems clear to me that if we really want to fix things, we should ban corporations from buying single family homes instead of attacking working class people who are trying to build a passive income stream.
  
  passive income steam
  This part is my problem. Some people don't want, or aren't cut out to maintain a property of their own, so renting is theoretically a good deal for them. And the person doing the work of maintaining a property deserves to be compensated for that work.
  But wtf is a passive income steam? It sounds like the landlord is hiring someone else to actually do the work, and then charging the renter enough to cover the property manager and profit the landlord. In which case, the landlord is doing exactly nothing to earn that money.
- Not to mention we often have such an imbalance between renters and landlords, in either direction.
  Either you have state law that heavily favors the landlords with no protections for renters against exorbitant rent increases, no enforcement of the land lord’s duty to the property on the lease, and no recourse for renters.
  Or you have state law that heavily favors the renters, with no easy way to evict problem tenants, caps on rent increases that don’t allow the landlord properly account for risk, and no recourse against tenants who don’t pay or cause damage to the property.
  Either situation leads to higher rents.