No Stupid Questions

As a guy who rented out one house for a very fair price i can tell you I'm the devil.

Any landlord that uses a residential family home as an investment is a parasite.

If you want to invest in real estate, purchase commercial, retail, and industrial properties. Nobody needs those things to live. The reason why this is harder is that the companies who tenant these properties generally have the leverage and means to not get exploited (though some small businesses still do get exploited)

Typically small landlords (I was one) are not the problem, But they aren't making things any easier. They still take up houses that they don't need that should be on the market, and they charge about twice what thier mortgage rate is to renters, which then artifically inflates housing prices, while also restricting home inventory. People with a handful of properteries aren't really the main driver of the issues though. One corporate landlord with 500 properties would do much more damage, but they all harm the market to an extent.

No.

I of course can't speak for anyone except myself, but for me, what your aunt is doing is what essentially capitalism is all about.

Its when those landlords get replaced by venture capital corporations and reits that it becomes a problem.

In your aunts case, the rent money stays local, contributes back to the local economy, etc...

In the case of venture capital and corporate ownership, the only goal is to increase a stock price for a corporation. None of that money gets returned to the local economy except for possibly hiring a local property management firm to handle things on the ground for them.

When capitalism remains about people, all of good. When corporations take the reins of ownership so their profit becomes the sole motive is when things go bad.

People who are renting out their basement or spare room are fine. They are living on their property and making space for someone else to live there as well.

Someone who owns property they do not live on, and are profiting off their renters just because their name is on the deed is the definition of parasitic behavior. There's a reason "rent seeking behavior" is a derogatory term.

Does your Aunt get paid rent from the people living in those houses? Is that rent more than it costs to own and maintain the properties? Yeah, thought so. Yes, your aunt is a parasite. She is extracting profit from other people simply by virtue of being the one to own the property that she doesn't live in. She isn't providing value, she's restricting access.

She may be a lovely lady the rest of the time, I'm sure she lives a vibrant and full life elsewhere, but that doesn't change what she's doing. Nobody owns "a couple of houses as an investment" if they're not making money off of them, and they're only making money by extracting it from the people who have to rent.

Here's the thing: landlords make a profit, right? Where does that profit come from? There are better and worse landlords, but any time there's a profit there's money being taken away from people.

No one is coming after your aunt, but that's where it comes from. They're leaching money away from tenants. Some are worse than others, but it is by definition parasitic if you're making a profit and not providing a service.

3-5 small houses to rent are still 3-5 small houses people who actually need it could be living in. So, yes, your aunt is a parasite.

Especially those that own a couple houses as "investment". Housing should not be an investment. With the big companies you could argue at least that they are also building houses, which we need since the government wont build enough. Not saying they arent parasites either though.

When people said "slave owners are evil pieces of shit" do they also mean the people who only owned 1 or 2 to help out with the family, or only the large plantation owners?

Depends on the leftist, but generally I think hoarding land you're not personally using, especially during a housing crisis, is wrong.

I also think that charging rent from people to simply exist in a place you aren't using anyway is wrong. When she pays the mortgage she's buying equity, when they pay the rent they're buying jack shit. It's an enormous parasitic drain on the economy.

But I don't think she's, like, evil. Not the same way that major landlord companies are. And I understand the motivations. I still disagree with the methods, but until the great commie revolution/rapture (/s) comes we all have to engage with problematic capitalist systems to a greater or lesser extent.

Yes, but I don't blame the small ones for it.

If you can make a profit by hoarding properties and renting them out, then the system is broken.

The large ones are the ones lobbying for the systems to remain broken.

Renting allows those without the needed capital to access a resource.

Backing out from that, one should question why shelter is a resource that someone cannot access on a minimum wage salary.

So, fundamentally, landlording isn't inherently evil, but it's presentation in the system is inherently corrupting. As in, at any moment that someone retains an excess of shelter they do not need, and instead rent it out, they are constraining the market for their own gain, at the detriment of others who in need shelter.

Next consider degrees of influence: large corporations buy up tons of units and exert inordinate power on the system. They systemically unbalance the purchasing ability of normal folk, due to process or sheer wealth. Fine, that's the high water of corruption. From there it's only shades of difference down to the mom and pop landlord. It's up to you to decide where they land on the scale.

As an sp member in the UK I can give you the parties stance. We aren't going after small business. Your aunt while not giving to society and being a member of the owning class is more a symptom of capitalism and under a socialist programme she would not need to degrade others to live a fulfilling life. Dignity should be afforded to all but we also understand that material conditions govern us.

We go after bigger issues than your aunt.

As a leftist landlord, we mean all of them.

I rent out my upstairs. Should I kick them out? All of my tenants have loved me, I rarely raise rent, and include Internet and utilities. Nuance.

Making money from merely owning things that others need and have to pay you to use as they can't get them otherwise (because you and people like you took them first) - something know in Economics as rent seeking, though it doesn't apply only to housing - is pure parasitism because that person is producing no value whatsoever, merely extorting money from others because they removed free access to a resource from them.

I reckon if you're doing the work involved in managing a rental property yourself, you're doing work and providing a service.

If you expect an employee/contractor to do all that for you, but to still collect profits: what would you say you do here?

I can see the evil in what these large corporations are doing but I have rented in the past when I was neither prepared for the burden of home ownership nor planning to stay in that location for a long time. If I couldn't have rented what would I have done? I would have been essentially FORCED into owning a home or what, living in the streets? And what if you wish to move but no one wants to buy your house? More you are forced to stay out turn evil by buying two houses.

It's ok to love your aunt. She didn't make the rules she's just living by them. If there's a problem with the system, start at the top.

I'm sure your aunt doesn't mean any harm, but she is still part of the problem. Those 3-5 properties are 3-5 fewer homes available to own for new families and are a small part of perpetuating the housing crisis.

Lots of good answers here, so here’s a fact that might help you understand why people have these positions:

Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.

I'd say even your aunt is included in that. Don't worry though, my mom is on the same list. They're extracting wealth from someone else's labor.

Making money on the back of someone else with little to no work of yours is parasitic. Having enough money at one point in life to become a parasite doesn't change anything.

Individual landlords can be the worst ones. Here’s what that often looks like:

1. individual inherits a home
2. they rent it out and quit their job
3. the rent is their only income so they are really cheap about maintenance and repairs
4. they make any repair the tenant’s “fault” and force them to pay for it
5. they raise the rent at every opportunity to the maximum the market will bear, because that is the only way their own income ever rises
6. they do repairs and maintenance themselves, even though they are unskilled, because that’s cheaper, and the quality of all the work is poor, using the cheapest materials possible (I once had a landlord paint our house puke orange because she got a deal on that awful paint).

The only landlords I see that add any positive value to the world are those who run and maintain apartment complexes. If you own multiple single family homes to rent them out or hoard parcels of land just to try and sell for a higher price: you're a parasite.

The worst thing about investment properties is that it raises for bar for entry into owning a home for others. Lets say someone started renting, got some capital together got a house paid it off through hard work. Kudos, thats cool. Then they buy a second house and use the rental income to pay the mortage or whatever. Over time buying more and more. Eventually it's not feasible for people starting out to do the same thing. The owners all own and have multiple streams of income, allowing them to own more and pay more. Pushing up prices and edging out new home owners. Go back 20-30 years and see the difference. It used to be possible for single income households to buy a house but not anymore. Shit, its getting to the point where dual income households are starting to struggle.

Then theres the airbnb effect. Some houses on airbnb and similar are close to the areas weekly rental price for a night. Even if its hald the weekly rental cost for a night, thats still less than 3 months they need to 'lease' out the house to break even with a tradional rental. Some places have absolutly shit rental access due to the abundance of short-term stays. This too, causes rental prices to increase.

Look at the homeless problem that is going on in most western natiions, this isn't the traditional homeless issue caused by drugs or debt or what ever bad outcomes there are. It's a supply issue, caused by too many houses in too few hands. You have working families living in cars or tents all because there is nowhere to live. Which again, leads to higher rental prices due to lack of supply.

Nobody should own more than one house, and if they do, the rent should not cost more, or even equal to a mortage on the house. Rentals should be stepping stones for people after they first move out of home, or seperate from a partner or move locations. They shouldn't be a thing that people have to live in all their lives.

Also, leftist.... ffs. grow up.

A couple of a house as an investment is already a lot, and way more than the average person can afford. If you go from a leftist perspective, the fact that they make money without workings sucks. These people who own a couple of house for investment are also the one complaining about "public retirement system is too expensive, so we should cut-down retirement benefit for everyone"

More seriously, I understand that you want to play by the rule in today's capitalist world. The problem is that in many places the rule are skewed. In some countries income from rent are less taxed than income from work, and the power-balance between tenant and landlord is favouring the landlord (and people see implementing stuff like rent-control and shorter notice for tenant as leftists policies). While it's fun to say eat the rich including the landlord, you need to build a reasonable political program if you want to stand a chance.

Another big issue, is the lack of affordable rental properties managed by the government/municipality. It's basically massively promoting either homelessness or bad housing

There are no good landlords. Every small landlord contributes to the housing crisis by hoarding housing that should be on the market for new buyers.

My biggest gripe is the system. I am deemed not financially able to own a mortgage but I am deemed able to pay nearly double to pay off someone else's mortgage.

Yes I am bitter and I don't see why someone should be able to make money off me like this.

I think if you rent out your attic, whatever, i don't think anybody cares. If you have a spare airbnb property or an investment property or you own an apartment complex, then yes, they're part of the problem.

Depends on the person. There are people that mean every landlord. Their reasoning isn't as bad as you might think either. The main issues are that they still exert control over property, a form of private governance; they're denying the same financial stability through housing equity to another family; and they can artificially raise the price of housing.

That happens at every level of being a landlord. Of course the systemic problems only get worse as the number of owned or managed units goes up.

Most people are thinking about the giant corporations holding thousands of units.

both are parasites.

What's with this black and white mentality? They're absolutely leaches, but that doesn't fully define then. They are probably other things as well, that are hopefully good.

I would say your aunt sounds like she found a way to try and make a living. You can certainly take issue with the system but she didn't make it. She sounds decent and not unlike my parents who bought some apartments in the early 2000s. What apparently people somehow don't realize, is that when you're not a corporation or running rental property like a huge dickhead, it's actually a lot of work to either pay others to do or to do yourself. The situation my parents were in was the bluest of collar jobs.

My mom cleaning toilets and filthy refrigerators, my dad dropping everything or getting out of bed to go fix someone's heat. This image that apparently 80% of commenters here have that they're just laying back collecting easy money couldn't have been further from the truth. They were working their ass off to make any money because they couldn't afford to hire most tasks.

They rented to people for under the market rate, they let old people stay over a year without paying. They drove significant drives to pick up rent checks from weirdos who couldn't handle mailing payments for some reason. The horror stories of how people abused their kindness and trashed their apartments are endless. SO many difficult tenants, and hundreds of thousands of back breaking hours later, they sold the apartments and made a little money. I will easily retire with more money than they made by writing software from the comfort of my home. Next to my parents' struggle with this, my life is incredibly easy.

But somehow, to a lot of lemmings, my work is honest and my parents are exploitative leeches who are morally bankrupt for their choice to take all that shit on (btw we have said nothing about the risk of enormous unexpected expenses or things like being sued by a tenant faking an injury and arguing in court it was your fault).

Is your aunt a parasite? sounds like she absolutely isn't. I'd say anyone willing to read what you wrote here and say she is, is probably an out of touch asshole whose opinion shouldn't be valued. But that may just be because I have the 20 years of watching my parents struggle to do that job and it wasn't easy for them except those few elusive weeks a year that somehow no apartments had anything break and no one moved. That entire 20 years they were afraid to even go on vacation because someone might have a water heater stop working or something.

Of course many would say "why wouldn't they just hire those maintenance items taken care of?!" I mean yeah of course, and I wasn't privy to their financial details all those years but it always sounded like they were only able to make money because they did most everything themselves. My parents were the ones exploited. By tenants being shitty and taking advantage sometimes, by the sellers, but most of all, by capitalism. They had to trade their lives for money, and nothing about it was easy. Anyone looking at the situation and unable to see that it was hard just honestly has no empathy at all.

This thread was a disappointing read. I have seen the spectrum, and corporate fuckhead landlords are complete scum. Honest, hardworking people who treat their tenants well are NOT, and anyone who tries to erase that nuance just wants to feel superior and probably should seek therapy (even more so than your average person -- we all need it).

Let’s say the city proposes a bill to build public housing apartments next to your aunt’s houses. This will guarantee reducing the rent and potential tenants your aunt collects. Now, because your aunt took so much loan from the bank and can’t pay it back, they will have to foreclose on the houses. Do they vote against the bill? You bet your ass they will.