Don't be fooled Billy, it's not really a job, more of a parasitic relationship

They should see it as a job, and maintain their damn properties.

I am a condo super and constantly have issues with these multi unit owners who rent out, as their tenants call me about every broken fixture and I have to remind them that their landlord is their super, not me. I only take care of the common areas.

Landlords don't realize that their job is to be the property manager, super, handy man and administrator for the property they rent out. They're not just supposed to sit on their ass and collect a check.

I looked after a house that my brother owned while he was out of the country for a few years. The first tenants were a group home that destroyed the place so much we had to gut the drywall and they never paid the rent until I hounded them endlessly every month. Every month.

The other tenants were just regular families and pretty good for the most part.

I would say I was dealing with something related to that house all the time. Every three weeks for stuff. Leaky faucet, roof shingle gone, branch fell on the lawn, sewer backed up. Big and small, all the time.

And they always called late at night or very early in the morning. This was before texting and email was common, etc.

My brother was paying me to do this, I would have done it for free but he insisted, but I was so glad when he sold that place.

I dealt with everything promptly. A family friend ran a property mgmt business and his crews did all the work promptly and billed us direct. People still always seemed annoyed and dissatisfied. Never again.
I'm somewhat "glad" I'm not renting a place owned by some rich chucklefuck, but one owned by a company. I know, sounds weird, but at least my rent money is going to something useful, since they employ their electricians, plumbers etc., hire a cleaning firm to clean the stairwell, and have a website where I can report problems, look at my energy consumption, stuff like that.
- You rent from a responsible company it sounds like. In my part of the country, there are a few massive companies that own a large amount of property and do fuck-all, have no online portal for anything, take weeks to deal with things like leaking pipes and such. I'm newish to the state so I'm not sure how they get it away with it legally but I've heard a lot of horror stories from these companies. I rent a place now from some rich dude for a very reasonable price, he owns a handful of properties and they do well on the maintenance and everything, it definitely depends.
Right, but do the faux revolutionaries in this thread know the difference between a good landlord and a bad one? They seem to enjoy basking in righteous anger and not to care for nuances.

Good landlords hate bad landlords too. There's a lot of common ground to be shared.

My landlord's two brothers who inherited a bunch of properties from Daddy. One of them lives in Scottsdale and the other in Hawaii. It really gets my goat knowing that 1 out of every 3 dollars I make goes to some overprivileged daddy's removed boy. I probably pay their golf membership or marina docking fees.

Thats the american dream isnt it? To be exploited until you do the exploiting? God I love America
- "Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters!"
What's the problem? If you don't buy a house you need to rent one, houses aren't free. Yeah those owners never worked for it, but isn't that the case with every rich kid? Why don't you buy a crappy house you can fix up yourself?
- lol just buy a house and stop complaining it’s so easy, said the completely out of touch boomer
- Most people living paycheck to paycheck don't qualify for a 20 year loan for land and a home even in the case of crappy manufactured homes. Plus, if they ever defaulted, they would lose the home and probably quite a bit of the equity as well, depending on local laws.
- Because I have 200 bucks to my name
- Pull yourself up by your ball sack

Landlords do a lot! They own the house. They move your money from your account to their account. And once in a while, they spend some of your money on fixing the sink that you pay them to use.

Better than the neighbors from where I grew up turning their land into two big trailer parks.

It used to be a nice little place, just out of town right off the main road. We never even really had to lock our doors. Later on, shitheads from the trailer parks would break in, steal anything not nailed down, made the whole area crap.

One of the landlords had their house broken into when she was staying with her husband at the hospital for a couple days. Complained that the trailer park people don't pay and just hitch and leave if you try to force anything.

Still has the trailer park going strong over a year later.
- People who use their property are distincly less of a blight on society than those that just own stuff.

Step 1: have an extra house

Step 1: Use the equity you've built up in your primary dwelling to put a down payment on a second house, which you can rent out. Congratulations, you now have a second job to fill your evenings and weekends.

Step 2: Hope like hell you get a decent tenant who pays the rent on time and doesn't destroy your property.

Step 3: Pay all of the taxes, mortgage payments, maintenance costs, repairs, legal fees, etc., which the rent will just barely cover. Of course, most of the mortgage payment goes to the bank as interest.

Step 4: Keep crossing your fingers that you don't rent to someone who will destroy your property, fail to pay rent, sue you, or cause any other major headaches.

Step 5: After 20 years of doing this, you have now paid off that second house. Yay!
- Cool, now try being the renter who paid off your mortgage for 20 years and has nothing to show for it.
- You forgot the step where wealthy investors & hedge funds crash an artificially inflated market, you go bankrupt and they swoop in to buy the property from their friends at the bank for half of what you paid for it.
- Using equity from current property to buy a new property? LOL
  
  My friend, you are begging for pain... but appreciate it. Live that grind til you get repo'd
That seems like a completely sustainable aspiration for everyone!

You have to have money to make money. It's just that first step that's the problem...

Save money
- You have to have money to save money. How does a person save money if every dollar earned is spent on necessities?
- Or just work for a living
- You don't really even have to save money if you're smart with the first time homebuyers credits and grants.

ITT: Poor, downtrodden ~~leeches~~ landlords talking about how hard it is to be a landlord, when the easiest way to end their suffering is to just sell their extra fucking house(s).

sadly if you try to be a good landlord and make a slim margin, you'll get dumped a huge repair bill/tax increase/other expense and now you're running the appartment at a loss. At that point you either sell it to a company willing to exploit it or you have to be less nice to your tenants and ignore repairs or charge more. Most people choose the first which is why we end up with terrible landlords.

aside: heard someone in that exact situation running low income housing, on a phone call with an expert talking to the government. The expert said "any prudent management would raise the rents the maximum allowed amount"
They have once a year paperwork to do and still removed and moan and they still call it work.

It's disgusting.

The one "person" I know also drags tenants to court over stupid shit (he always loses 🤣)
Where I live landlords (if they're renting directly at least) are in a big legal responsibility over all kinds of stuff. The easier way is to rent through some company that deals with the renter.

ITT leeches saying "actually consuming your blood is providing a vital service and takes a lot of work"

Or worse, theyre just aspiring to be leeches

ITT angry communist noises
- Holy fuck the "everything I remotely disagree with is communism" shit in this website is seriously annoying, did I time travel to 1950s America or something. Like I think lemmy might legitimately be the worst for it. it's putting me off coming here.
- Yes, successful land reform movements have historically been lead by angry communists, thank you for pointing that out for anyone who might be interested in a little land reform that their best bet is to look into communist strategies of land reform.

Now come on, this isn't fair to all the mom-and-pop landlords who speak to you politely while exploiting the fuck out of you and your family

I don't understand, is lemmy flooded by reddit kids now?

Comments here make it sound owning a house is free and doesn't cost money to not make it fall apart (houses tend to do so if left unmaintained).

I've rented for 20 years since I left my parents' house and finally bought my house last year, with great expenses and time waste. I'm still wondering today if renting was a better choice financially.
- This is one of the reason why I think the price of property should be regulated somehow by the government. The cost/ tax of a second house should be exponentially higher to discourage people doing this, so that a renting a second house should be a financial catastrophe. Capitalism, free market does not work, especially for basic human needs (food, shelter, health, energy, and if I may say education).
  
  I myself bought my house 2 years ago, and the price was already ridiculous. Let's say I paid almost 100k€ more than the estimated worth of the house (cause of market price). I'm pretty sure the price will collapse after some time. The price can increase 30-40 percent in 3-5 years. It's crazy. The money invested here is much higher than I did when I was renting an apartment tho.
- I'm actually a grown adult who works my ass off and is lucky enough to own my own home.
  
  None of this changes the fact that landlords are predatory capitalist leeches.
  
  Winning life's lottery doesn't make me lose all empathy and become an ignorant buffoon who abandons my ideals and the hope for a better world for the sake of all people.
  
  Mutual aid, autonomy, and horizontality -- these are all beliefs that I hold for a better world.
  
  Landlords are making the world worse by exploiting renters. They are at best class traitors, but in reality they are much, much worse. They are actively making the world a worse place for other people. They do not "provide housing," as some would say -- these are the true words of the foolish child. Instead, they create homelessness and exploit the misfortune of others for their gain.
  
  Landlords aren't alone in this, of course. Anyone who is an actual capitalist has to go. Either they will do so willingly and live, or they will be unwilling to abandon their position and perish.
- Renting was probably a better choice in this market.
But they’re entitled to the results of my labour!

Why?

Because!!!
- They're just trying to pay for their grandma in the nursing home!
  
  Oh, what about your grandma? Fuck her, pay your rent.
- Because they provide something that is so valuable to you that you give them a good amount of money for it. Thats why.
  
  You choose to give them money because their house seems to be a huge quality of life improvement, otherwise you could always find a cheaper house.
- Because they provided you with shelter?

Landlords actually do a lot of work. Maintenance and dealing with tenants can easily become a full time job if you have multiple properties. A lot of people buy rentals thinking it's "passive income" and then end up working twice as hard as before.

They're supposed to do all those things but most don't. I'm a condo super and the owners who own and rent multiple units are the worst. Their tenants are always calling me about every issue, and I have to remind them that I deal with the common areas, not the interior of their unit unless there's a flood. Those landlords tend to own multiple units and just assume I will deal with their issues, but I won't. When you own, you're the super, manager, admin, etc. But most landlords I've encountered just wanna collect the check
They also assume all the risk of the property too. Tenants can leave as they please but landlords are stuck with the property if the market turns.
- Eh, I wouldn't say the housing market on the whole is fickle in the same way as as the stock market. But for things like property damage, the risk is definitely on you
- Landlords also absorb all the risk if the tenants skip out on two months of rent and leave the unit with no appliances, dog piss stained floors, a body sized hole in the bedroom wall, a toilet that leaked noticably but never reported resulting in extensive water damage, etc.
  
  While its guaranteed that theres a lot of shitty landlords out there, and a ton of price-gouging corporate management companies (who are the real problem these days eith affordability).... I'm fully convinced every user who says "landlords are the devil" are they, themselves, the Tenants from Hell who do not pay the building they live in the tiniest modicum of respect; then wonder why every landlord hates them and hassles them.
- No one forced them to be a landlord. Tenants have very little choice. Why is there even a comparison here?
- Sounds like a good problem to have
- Which hasn't, ever.
- Oh wow boo hoo, they have so much risk 😔 they have an entire house that they can sell at any time, who someone else is paying the mortgage of. Oh, the horror! If the market should crash they'll lose the equity another person paid!
  
  Really the landlords are the victims here, not the tenants paying their mortgage for them plus a little extra for profits. Clearly the tenants have committed the crime of not having good enough credit for a loan, or the crime of not having enough for a down payment, so they aren't worthy of owning property.
  
  No no it's the landlord who has the real problems, because they could ein a shaky financial situation of "selling the second house iown" if the market dips!
The places I've stayed so far pay a company to deal with these issues in place of the owner.

I can't speak on what that costs, however.
- Management companies typically take a percentage of the monthly rent (can vary wildly from 8% up to 25%+). This also means they have a vested interest in increasing a building's rent by the maximum legally allowed amount every single year, because it means they make more without doing additional work.
- Even dealing with a property manager can be a full time job for owners.
*Some

Many do not do much of this at all, sadly
It's genuinely not easy, both my parents have owned rental properties at some point in their lives, as a retirement investment. I'd never consider a rental property as an investment myself as a result of what I've seen tenants do to a property.
If you have multiple properties you hire someone to do that work. 'Landlords' include property companies that own hundreds of units, which is the majority of ownership in the US. Do you think the owners of these companies are doing maintenance and dealing with tenants? The executives are in effect the landlords, and all the work they do is figure out how to make more money off of their company's investments, aka figure out how to better extract income from tenants.
- If you're talking about the owner of a property company, that's a company owner not a landlord. Still a tough job to run a company.
Sir this is a reddit clone please join the landlord hate circlejerk or GET OUT OF HERE
Yeah, these memes are made by kids who have never actually worked at all, much less at upkeep on a property they don't live at. They probably whine about taking out the trash every week and beg their mom for new games while thinking they're independent somehow.
- Apparently you think Adam Smith is an immature child.

I like that crab face, lol. Which cartoon is it from?

SpongeBob SquarePants duh.
- Nah mf, is Spongetron Squarelacks

Really? Nothing?

Yes, nothing. Except for repair and maintenance and servicing all those cost and insurance and worrying the tenant doesn't pay and all those headache people never forsee. Nothing.
- You mean all the stuff they can easily outsource and still make a profit? You make it sound like landlords are doing us a favor.
Yeah, honestly, small town landlords and building owners have to keep up repairs and constantly monitor the situation so that the tenants don't burn down or cause an infestation that tanks a 200k USD miminum (it goes a lot higher from there) investment that wouldn't have been payed off for 13 more years as per the contract for deed.

They also have to file all the receipts, run background checks and keep documents on their tenants, and keep their leases up to date. All of this has to be securely stored for like 6 years.

There is a lot of risk involved in getting shelter to people who need it the most in the USA. Not everything can be a charity, if you've got a problem with that system then you don't have an issue with landlords you have an issue with corporatocracy and real estate moguls on a much larger scale using a necessary resource as a semi-fungible currency. More than 1 in 20 homes in the USA are owned by Chinese investors. I'm sure there are some bad apples but the majority of non-affiliated landlords are just doing what they need to do to minimize financial risks and stay afloat.

Sometimes things like Lawyer Consultation Fees, Eviction Serving fees, Vacancies, and Water Damages forcing you to replace the flooring, the boards, some insulation and vents... It can run into the negative multiple months in a row. Sure they get some of it back after Tax Season, but they still had to pay in Quarterly Taxes up until that point so in order for it to work they need a lot in savings.
Repairing property you already own isn’t a job.
- Yes, it's not a job it's a business
- What?
- They seem to provide some kind of vakue to you, otherwise you could just buy a house.

Why are landlords getting so much more hate than other parasites? There isn't much difference between them and business owners. No one should be able to profit from ownership alone.

There is actually, being a landlord is more of a feudal relationship within the framework of capitalism.

Now, both lords and capitalists should be

talked to about their destructive behavior and have their private property repatriated by the working class through legitimate state mechanisms, but there is a difference.

ITT People who vote third party and expect things to change

Lol, I'm not sure what that has to do with this post, but imagine voting for the same two parties and expecting change.
- Depends on the voting system tbf. In FPTP, unless one party is extremely unpopular, it often supports your political opponents when you vote third party.

So apparently buying a house, furnishing it, maintaining it, complying with various codes and regulations, and making the house available for someone to live in for a period of time for a sum of money is "parasitic". Not sure why, or why the same logic wouldn't apply to anything of value someone makes available to others for a fee.

You wouldn't do this if it weren't profitable. The tenant will end up paying for the furnishings and maintenance many times over in rent, and you will get an appreciating asset that you are gradually paying off the debt for. You're not getting paid for management, you're profiting from holding capital in a system designed to benefit those that have capital, and seeking rent for the ownership of that capital.

I wouldn't hold it against someone in this system we have if they end up buying a property to safeguard their money, but let's not pretend that landlords are not a parasitic relationship that reduce the amount of housing stock available for people to buy and act as a middle man between a tenant and a property management company.
- Why on earth do you think anyone would rent out a house, or pay for all the ancillaries - furnishings, repairs, insurance, legal etc. if they didn't get a return on their investment, time and effort? Do you also accuse Marriott of being parasites for renting rooms? Or Hertz for renting cars? They do these things because they spent a lot of money to provide something of value that people can utilize for a period of time but they still expect to make money.
  
  Renting is a business. It's as "parasitic" as any other business were a person pays for something with money and receives something in return. If you are not prepared to rent then don't. There are other options to having a roof over your head. Buying a house would be one option but there are others.
It's a very US-centric view because their states seemingly doesn't enforce rules and regulations while also not having rent control. Creating a situation where landlords can demand pretty much whatever they want in a housing crisis while also not spending their revenue on actually maintaining the apartments they rent out.

The complaint is fair. For them.
Every landlord I've had doesn't do shit. In principle, sure yeah being a landlord can be a bit of work. In practice? They expect it to be a source of passive income
- I've had the exact opposite relationship with all but one landlord. The one bad landlord relationship I had I sued and won. But I've lived in about 6 or 7 places with amazing landlords that took care of the maintenance and everything else. Hell I fell down in a shower busting a big ass hole in the tub once and the landlord replaced it at his own cost.
The same logic applies to all rent seeking behaviours
Because of nasty landlords happy to evict people or raise rents, Reddit and now Lemmy are full of people saying all landlords are awful morlocks feeding off the pain of everyone. Like everything else nowadays there's no middle ground in the common arguments either way. Landlords evil, renters saints.
- This is a misunderstanding though. People aren't complaining about individuals who happen to be landlords being nasty. They're making a systemic complaint about rent-seeking.
  
  A landlord can be a perfectly polite and pleasant person. They're still engaging in rent-seeking. And that's the complaint.