Landlords didn't get their job for their brains, also ALAB.
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.
We often just call them janitors here, I bet the vernacular changes from place to place. But cleaners are often separate, janitors do maintenance work and cleaners do cleaning work
Definition of janitor:
one who keeps the premises of a building (such as an apartment or office) clean, tends the heating system, and makes minor repairs
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/janitor
a person employed to take care of a large building, such as a school, and who deals with the cleaning, repairs, etc.
Or
a person whose job is to clean and take care of a building
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.
Landlord can be the person responsible for that (depends on the agreement) and often where I'm from they contract it from bigger company
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.
maintaining a property
Your mistake is in framing "owning a property" as "maintaining a property".
I sure as hell can’t keep up with my own home, let alone another.
This is exactly the problem. Many people will rent out their building, and not be up to the task to keep it habitable.
Yea, that's a problem. That's not the problem most people are talking about these days.
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 👍
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.
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?
Did you fix the refrigerator or call a repair co?
Does a landlord?
How many quotes did you get
Depends on the position. In one role I project managed the expansion to a new location - we got a lot of quotes on a lot of items, in another I had a soft-procurement role to get various supplies and we'd regularly review suppliers, in another still i worked in tandem with a 11 separate buying teams with separate buyers, merchandisers and supply chain managers.
Then you ask me a bunch of questions about terms. There were sometimes different contract terms, but mostly net30 invoices or similar that sometimes we honored and sometimes we pushed due to cash flow considerations.
Did you fix the plumbing? Manage leases?
Does a land lord?
Did you speak with property owners
i have spoken with quite a few people in my time
Did you create a budget?
Yeah, yeah, I created a budget on behalf of my landlord. He was very keen to share his personal finances with me, something that often happens in landlord/tenant relationships and is very normal and good
What kind of depreciation schedule did you use?
Doesn't everyone use P527? What else do you need, or do you provide a classic car to every tenant?
What did you do when the pipes froze?
Shaka when the falls well. Temba, his arms wide.
If I had someone paying off my mortgage and extra I would definitely have the time and money to maintain my house.
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.
Really wonder why its a multi billion dollar industry just operating off the kindness of landlords, you think they would have pulled out by now with their massive intelligence.
It's a "job" they themselves created for themselves. That our something they have to do because they own the property, and if they didn't own it they wouldn't have to do it. And chances are they won't even do anything, they'll just hire someone else to fix it.
You don't get paid to fix your own property, why should they get paid to fix their property?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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'm autistic and flub things up like that sometimes. I tell people that I have a photogenic memory. They'll often ask, "Don't you mean a photographic memory?" to which I reply "No, a photogenic memory. Yeah, I have a beautiful mind."
Photogenic: Looks good in photographs; attractive
Memory: A construct of one's mind that allows them to recall information
a photogenic memory = a beautiful mind.
It is humorous because the assumption is that I mean to say "photographic memory". One with a photographic memory can recall visual information to which they've been exposed with great accuracy.
But when I tell this joke to friends or colleagues, I say "No no, a photogenic memory...I have a beautiful mind". There was a film with actor Russell Crowe called A Beautiful Mind in which he plays a brilliant professor who we discover late in the film has schizophrenia which has caused him no small amount of embarrassment and challenges in his life. According to diagnostic testing I had done, I have a high intelligence quotient along with autism, and it, too, has caused me embarrassment and challenges in my life.
So when I say I have a "beautiful mind", people remember that film and it occurs to them that I am saying I am intelligent (something friends and colleagues already know about me) but that my autism (something they also know about me) makes me a little weird and is a burden to me sometimes. It's just a bit of self-deprecating humor.
Aaah, I get it now. Thanks for the explanation. I know what photogenic is, but I didn't know what it meant when I read it with mind. That one takes a while, I can see why people are confused, but it makes sense when you get it.
A photographic memory means you can recall a perfect visual image in your mind of a past event and examine it for details as if it were a picture. So, for example, if you are trying to remember a book quote, you'd bring up a visualization of the page of the book that you read and read the words on the page again.
Eh… ALAB..? Just like ACAB we’re hyper polarizing ourselves into ‘us vs them’ groups, just like the mainstream media and the capitalistic elite wants us to!
What was that early Jedi mantra, that they later dropped and bastardized but originally had a good point? Something about absolutism in thinking?
I say all this knowing you’re going to tear me up for it, but critical thinking and discussion is better than mindlessly following narratives that are being pushed on us by our puppeteers, too. Even if you think ‘hey, this is a new bad guy I can get behind’, remember, that’s also the distraction they’re putting in front of you.
POV: my house, that I am currently sitting in, is 4 hours away from my office, where I was recently promoted to and stay during the week. In the next year I might try to rent out a room, to… maintain someone here making sure it isn’t broken into or vandalized, and to offset some of the mortgage. When I transfer back, if I get the chance, in the next couple years I’ll return to my home being intact and I’ll invest in some upgrades I’ve wanted. In the meantime? I still fully expect to come out weekly to maintain it. Bad guy? Come on, there’s A Bad Guy, and that’s the capitalistic elite. ‘ACAB’ and ‘ALAB’..? Don’t lose sight of the true enemy here, there’s a myriad of variety for everything in between us and them.
we’re hyper polarizing ourselves into ‘us vs them’ groups, just like the mainstream media and the capitalistic elite wants us to!
Yeah man, the ruling class wants us to hate our landlords. Excellent take man, your head must be heavy with brain.
Do have any idea how massive the gap is between us and the true ruling class is? They aren't landlords, they own the investment group that owns the holding company that employ the landlords.
So yeah, very intelligent to use your energy to attack people who are at worst, their incredibly disposable footsoldiers.
Also, I hate to break it to you, but if you want the split to be black and white like this yet you have the time, energy, and opportunity to complain about this sort of shit online... you probably aren't one of the proletariat. You're petit bourgeois.
Well yeah. You do realize there are many, many levels of wealth right?
Orwell explains it well in 1984. The upper class only comes down when the middle and the lower team up.
If you’re upper class and want to prevent a revolution that takes you off the top level of society, the way to do that is to sew division between the lower and middle classes.
In a typical landlord/renter scenario, the landlord is middle class and the renter is low class.
That person is like an inch above you, and there are other people who are miles above that.
"We" are not polarizing ourselves. We are just describing a polarization that already exists to opress us. Be it ACAB, ALAB, whatever you find, the thing is, it just is.
It's okay, you see, I'm not originating this line of thinking, I'm just perpetuating it.
also
We are just describing a polarization that already exists to opress us
What do you think the word "polarization" means? Because it sure as hell doesn't mean "inequality"
Yeah, I feel like the right has such a black-and-white/zero nuance view of things. So then the left goes and does the same thing!
My sense is that these A*AB movements are really trying to say, "the institution of X is fundamentally flawed," and that's something I agree with definitely. But it's worded provocatively, which is just...assinine. Like, the little old lady who would be priced out of her home if not for renting out a room to a college kid, below market value? Yeah total bastard...
No, they aren't saying that. It's grouping people based on one characteristic, then becoming angry at the entire group because an individual did something unrelated you don't like.
Ah yes. You are a mind reader of everyone you disagree with
Are you that blind to the glaring hypocrisy in your own couple of comments?
ALAB because "renting" residential property is abhorrent behavior.
Owner Occupancy Credit against property taxes. If you live in a house you own, you get a credit. If you own the house and don't live in it, you pay the full rate. Enact an owner-occupancy credit against property taxes, then increase both the tax rate and the credit until these corporate bagmunchers are no longer a problem.
"But landlords will just raise their rent to cover the increase". They could try. But, if we raise it high enough, they will be able to make far more money issuing a private mortgage, or offering a land contract, or converting to condominiums, or otherwise getting their tenant's names on the deed and becoming eligible for the credit.
"But these landlords will be forced to take a risk on these sub prime borrowers.". They are already taking that risk by renting to them, and the remedy is basically the same: if they can't make their payments, evict them, take back the house, and offer it to someone else.
The only residential property that should be feasible to rent are the additional units in a duplex, triplex, or quadplex, where the owner of the building lives on site in one of the units. Outside of these small, multifamily homes, "rent" should be a practice found only in commercial or industrial real estate.
Exactly. My mom was sick a few years ago so I went back to my hometown for an extended visit. I certainly won't bunk with her and her new husband, and conveniently, people don't include hotels in their polarized war against landlords.
The best option for me was to just rent a room at a boarding house, which was both cost effective and close to my mother's place.
The issue is not landlords themselves, it is the capitalism, the unrestrained corporate greed and the lack of very steep taxes for the owners of multiple homes.
No, the issue is artificial friction added to the new construction process which keeps overall supply lower than demand, and pushes prices up continuously.
It’s good to have building codes, because we need safe buildings. But we should offset their existence by slightly subsidizing new construction. Basically we want to enable as closely as possible the natural balancing between supply and demand. Right now, the heavy regulation (both legitimate and overreach) of new construction, as well as the high paperwork and hassle cost, and the uncertainty of permitting or of permitting timeline, all those things are a big finger on the scale pushing supply down.
Maintaining a constant downward adjustment on the amount of new housing constructed each year is a recipe for exactly this situation we have now: disrespect of tenants by landlords, and exploding rent prices.
We don’t have a free market in housing. We have a tightly controlled market where new supply is constantly gatekept and thereby suppressed.
I mentioned building codes but there’s also nimbyist zoning laws. There are plenty of places where a 100-unit apartment building would be a more profitable use of space, but zoning prevents the construction of more than 10 single family homes.
We do this for lots of reasons, such as maintaining the architectural character of the town, protecting rich people’s views by prevnring tall buildings, avoiding health issues, managing transportation demand, etc etc.
But we need to be conscious of the fact that the price we pay for all those other benefits, is that we have a housing shortage.
funny how you gave two examples of visiting places to say landlords aren't the parasites that they are, rather than the need to have a permanent shelter.
oh no we're polarizing ourselves... yeah if someone murdered my friend I would get so absolutist and polarize people into my friend vs the guy who murdered my friend. when am I going to learn‽
Right. Because murder is a heinous crime that rips a person’s life away.
Renting out apartments isn’t in the same category as murder.
it's not that far off. shelter is a basic human right. landlords are parasites who profit off of that by providing nothing in return.
if i could buy an "air lot" the same way i can buy land and houses and charged a monthly fee from people who want to breathe air in that space it would be ridiculously parasitic. landlords do the same with land instead.
what's sad about this mindless "ALAB" blathering is that it actively detracts from ACAB. ACAB isn't just about "bad cops", it's about the entire police institution designed to support bad cops and cover up wrong doing.
There is no "landlord institution". Individual property owners are not related in any way. Separate agencies aren't related. Bad landlords don't force good landlords out of the market.
There's private equity firms which are evil, foreign investors who are evil, and so on, if you're looking for some big boys to wave your torches and pitchforks at. There's issues with capitalism.
Renting is fantastic. You want to build a house or buy a house, or renovate your house, but it takes a few months? You move to a new area, temporary job relocation for a project? You rent. From someone who owns a house. Called a landlord. They are providing the service of making this available for you in an area you want.
Now, yes, local and state governments should be building more properties to rent cheaply, and you know what that's called? Competition in the marketplace, which is what is needed.
"ALAB" is a bullshit concept. Until Landlord B walks over to Landlord A and starts forcing them to raise their rents, it's not an institutional problem.
I will say: most property agents are evil, lazy and stupid. Relators for rentals. They usually get paid a percentage of the rent, so they have a direct interest in raising rents. Landlords (the owners) are just people. Most never had the training to run rental properties which is why they listen to the supposed 'expertise' of the stupid, lazy, evil agents.
Here's a classic news clip from the 90s, where a guy says what we all agree on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lyex2tSUyA
(just a little misunderstanding which all works itself out)
I will say… that I heard rumor of price fixing in the rental market and the DOJ investigating it, link below from a quick google search. I haven’t really dived deep into that topic, but it’s there if you’re interested in a little read.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/20/rental-housing-market-doj-investigation-00147333
see, that's not a industry-wide thing. That is one corrupt company, affecting those below them. It's absolutely wrong, and comes back to the whole issue I mentioned about how they have a direct financial interest in raising rents.
Them being evil doesn't affect others. In fact, it makes it easier for those wanting to rent out at lower prices to fill their empty properties.
and remember - once again, that's not a landlord. Most agents are dicks, though.
As it applies to residence, the concept of "renting" is fundamentally broken and damaging. "Renting" is a commercial activity; "housing" is a human necessity. Combining the two is inherently exploitative, so "ALAB" is a reasonable and apt observation.
Renting is fantastic. You want to build a house or buy a house, or renovate your house, but it takes a few months? You move to a new area, temporary job relocation for a project? You rent. From someone who owns a house. Called a landlord. They are providing the service of making this available for you in an area you want.
A better option in these scenarios is a "land contract". This is, basically, a rent-to-own scenario. During the initial period, if the occupant withdraws or defaults on the contract, they forfeit any equity they have built, just like a rental.
Unlike a rental, however, there is no annual increase in the rent: the purchase price is fully amortized, and (so long as they maintain the agreement past the initial period), the tenant gains equity with every payment and every increase in market value.
That full amortization / fixed payment is the main reason why landlords don't currently like land contracts. They want to be able to command a 5-10% price hike every year.
To make land contracts the better option for landlords, we can establish an owner-occupant credit against property taxes. A landlord is a non-occupant owner, and is not entitled to the credit. Under a land contract, the occupant is considered the owner, and eligible for the credit. With a sufficiently high property tax rate on non-occupant investor-owners, a landlord stands to earn a significantly greater return on land contracts or private mortgages than they can earn on renting a given property.
