this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
3 points (71.4% liked)
Microblog Memes
5030 readers
350 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Your mistake is in framing landlord as a job.
Owning a property is not a job but maintaining one can be. If you don't own the property then that'd just be called being a janitor.
Janitors are cleaners. Typically the people who maintain apartments are called maintenance workers, handymen, or (old fashioned) superintendent. Sometimes property manager, if they also handle renting it out.
Definition of janitor:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/janitor
Or
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/janitor
Janitors are only employed in large, expensive apartment buildings. Single family homes don't use them, nor do cheaper apartments. So that's not really descriptive of a landlords job at all.
I only disagreed with your definition of janitor.
Try your hand at maintaining a property other than your residence. I sure as hell can't keep up with my own home, let alone another.
I worked in a grocery store, a bar, a coffee shop, a restaurant and a big retail store, so yeah — I've "maintained" a property before.
Also, I have called maintenance many times in my life, ive literally never met a landlord. In fact the only time I ever interacted with a landlord was when I was hospitalized and lost my job, and was late paying my November rent because I was unconscious and my landlord text me that I had ruined his family's Christmas 👍
In what position? Did you fix the refrigerator when it broke down? Or did you call a repair company? Did you choose the repair company, or call a pre-approved company? How many quotes did you get before hiring the repair men? Was it prepay, or post pay billing or what? Did you handle licensing and permits and annual inspections? Did you fix the plumbing when it broke? Did you manage the building leases and speak with the property owners? Did you create a budget for repairing? What kind of depreciation schedule did you use? What did you do when the pipes froze?
The landlord doesn't do all repairs themselves, they pay someone to do repairs. Most regular maintenance of the property is the responsibility of the tenant. That's why people treat investment properties as passive income, because effectively they are.
It really depends on the landlord. I've had landlords who did some repairs.
Most people treat it as passive income they spend less than 14.4 hours per week on it, which means the IRS categorizes it as passive income.
That's the job of the handy man. If the landlord is too cheap to hire enough staff for his company, then he has multiple jobs.
Like a small business?
Yep, exactly. But unlike most small business, they provide a service that could literally be the life or death of someone if done wrong. So maybe consider it like a small medical provider.
And that's why they should be held accountable for doing a good job.
I am all for holding them accountable.
You'll be downvoted but you're correct. Being a (good) small time landlord for affordable housing is a full time job as well as basically being on call 24/7. Unfortunately when a corporation does it, it has the power to bleed everyone dry.
Pick one
Betty and Bob who are in their sixties, and Bob who still does all the maintenance on the apartment, aren’t the bad guy. They’re renting out a portion of their property because society failed them, because the capitalistic elite failed them, and they don’t have the safety net they should have already had to carry them through their retirement years.
It takes five seconds to realize that mindlessly saying ‘ALAB’ removes too much nuance here. Big corporations that are buying up the land and putting out overpriced apartments? Pricing out the community that lives there? Yeah, absolutely. Pass me a pitchfork and I’ll jump in behind you. But all of this ‘A*AB’ stuff gets nonsensical very quickly.
Betty and Bob are in an unfortunate situation, but they're taking a thing of value and charging money to cover all costs, and make a profit. The tenant is therefore paying the mortgage and all repair costs, and then even more to support what amounts to a leech.
It might be a good arrangement for Betty and Bob, but it makes living somewhere more expensive.
Which is the general point. I can be sympathetic to Betty and Bob, but landlords buying houses leaves less houses for everyone else for a 'job' that doesn't add any real value to society. It just props up someone with the economic means to buy multiple houses and make them a living while hanging the rest of us out to dry.
Ok, so we’re going to throw a negative generalization up to support our narrative of ‘ALAB’.
I purchased my home within the last 4 years. Before that my wife rented from the same owner for 10 years. Living in midtown Atlanta, a place that is now full of 1.5 million dollar homes on postal stamp sized lots. That landlord or owner may have had a few properties, we don’t know, but it was a personal rental that was a 2Bed/1bath for 2/3rds the local rate. And they did the maintenance at their expense.
They also have kept up with her afterward, and mentioned that they wish that they could have found another tenant like us. If I rented out a portion of my place while I was living out of town for work? I’d aspire to be as good as they were. Sadly, it’s just me now so maintenance and yard work would have to wait for the weekends.
Let’s just have a little more nuance. Big Corpo is bad, but not everyone who is trying to make a living is.
I'd say there's a difference between renting out a portion of a house the landlord also lives in and purchasing whole other homes and renting them out.
Besides, no matter how nice the multi-home-owning landlord is, the reality is they don't purchase homes and rent them out without making a profit on all expected costs, maintenance included. The better deal for the renter renting a whole home would be to own the home and maintain it, because then they're saving the profit the landlord charges.
A nice polite leech is still a leech.
Sure, everything you purchase in a capitalistic society has profit added to it, but normally there's also added value. You pay more in the brick and mortar store vs buying online because the added value is getting the item immediately. You pay more for the car part at the mechanics shop vs doing it yourself because having a professional install it adds value.
What value does Jim-bob owning 5 homes and renting them out to make a living add to the tenants?
Just a few thoughts.
So they should pay the same expenses, PLUS extra to support the landlord who could meet the bank's criteria for a loan?
They also don't have to worry about cashing in on the appreciated value of the house since they moved in...
Funny joke. My parents bought a house for $90,000 in 1993 that is worth ~$400,000+ today. What percentage of investments could offer such a yield in the same time-frame?
I still get those same scam calls despite not being a homeowner.
Got anything else?
Obviously there has to be an incentive for Jim-bob to tie up his retirement savings and credit worthiness in a house that he doesn't live in. You may not like the fact that people have to qualify for bank loans to buy property, but this is the world we live in. Especially if you happen to be an undocumented immigrant.
Oh, your anecdotal evidence about your parent's home surely beats my Nobel-prize winning economics study citation. Lucky for your parents they didn't have to sell it in 2010. Because I have anecdotal evidence for someone who bought a house for $400k in 2004 and then later sold it for $280k after the real estate crash.
Also the increasing property value you mention is due to regulatory capture by home owners who prevent the construction of new rental properties for fear it will "hurt their home value." Combined with a mass exodus out of the rural areas into urban areas that are not building homes or city infrastructure fast enough to keep up with the increase in residents in the short run, which results in increased prices for homes in the city until those issues are addressed.
None of these things are "working as intended."
No, you get different scam calls which you assume are the same but are definitely not, since these ones just go out to names on lists of property owners, not random residents.
You could just buy a house.
Well my landlord is some foreign company, they pay a local maintenance company which manages the apartment. Of course the costs come back to me as the renter. Now the landlord gets free money just because they had enough cash to buy the apartment in the first place. And when they are done printing money, they'll just sell the apartment for more than they bought it before.
Why don't you buy a condo?