True… 
“few hundred dollars” is really minimizing what you do. Maybe that’s the portion that is specifically defense contractors, but there are oil companies and palm oil plantations and hobby lobby and who knows what. You have, what? hundreds of thousands of dollars invested virtually blindly? There’s plenty of responsibility there.
I prefer “Hypocrisy! Or, why Inso0 is a piece of shit but I’m not because I’m voting for Biden!”
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I once walked on a street built with slave labor. It was all I could do not to cut off my feet.
Of course
So much this.
I should perhaps note that while I work for a company with extensive real estate holdings, I sold my extra house in Milwaukee at the earliest opportunity because I didn’t want the personal responsibility of dealing with the bullshit that goes along with being a landlord. My experiences at work were a big influence on that, because I knew how horribly wrong things could’ve gone, especially in the case of a single family residence where there aren’t any neighbors to tell on you. I was in a situation like @catfacemeowmers THINKS landlording is like, in that I had always managed to find someone to pay about 25% over market but that rent just barely covered the existing mortgage and taxes on it. I never raised the rent because I always wanted to avoid needing to find a new tenant. I only had to turn it 3 times over the 6 years. The loan was at 6.5% because it was too underwater to refinance without coming up with tens of thousands in cash at closing. Maintenance came right out of my pocket, and the only “earnings” I had for my personal time was whatever reduction in loan principal was happening, and obviously the housing price rebound. I sourced much of the labor for repairs and things like grass/snow from the company, so I was able to pay significantly under market value for those services. I considered just handing the keys back to the bank when the value was down 60%, but decided to turn it into a rental instead because I didn’t want the hit on my credit, and had those resources available to me at work. Not everyone does, which is why so many keys were handed in when the market crashed in 2008.
You will all note that the former landlords ITT aren’t on board with the sentiment of the OP, and have pushed back against assertions that this is just an evil capitalist construct to steal money from unsuspecting tenants. Most rental units in the US are owned by individuals, not megacorporations headed by Scrooge McDuck. It comes with real work, real responsibility, and real stress because regardless of what you think, it’s not a free money machine and the tenants manage themselves.
I sold the house in 2019 for the exact same price I paid in 2006. I walked away with a $29k check at closing after all expenses paid, but I’m sure I’ll owe taxes on all of that because of where the basis ended up. I should probably start working on my returns.
Anyway @anon10396289
Not asking you to take a part time job investigating the companies you invest in, but why not spend half an hour trying to pick some socially responsible investment fund?
Just something I found in the first google search: The Sustainable Investment Forum
Random thoughts: some economic relationships are more prone to exploitation than others, and I think the landlord-tenant relationship is near the top of that list, and it’s a real problem.
What’s not clear to me, though, is whether a system in which renting residential property is illegal would be better than just the current system + some combination of better regulation, more public housing, or just greater cash redistribution (UBI, etc.). For example, the relationship is perniciously exploitative in large part because poor tenants have no real options, because they have no resources. If they have better options, either because you just give people money, or else because the government provides more plentiful public housing in competition with privately owned buildings, then I think almost necessarily the amount of exploitation would decrease. There’s probably pros and cons to both something like UBI (or housing subsidies in general) vs greatly expanded public housing. It’s reminiscent of the tradeoffs between the idea of a public option in ACA vs. fully nationalized healthcare, I think. It’s also not entirely clear if/how you should distinguish between abolishing landlords for housing vs. commercial real estate, or if we’re talking abolishing all private property rights in real estate? Which seems like a non-starter to me.
But it is fun to try to imagine what microbet’s ideal world might look like in this regard. Are apartment buildings, or entire housing developments, cooperatives? How do you manage people either buying in or selling out of their part of the cooperative, i.e. because they are moving? It’s interesting to try to picture the necessary institutions, legal and otherwise. But the more I think about that the more it just sounds like we could accomplish most of the same benefits just by adding additional regulation (tenants rights, etc.) without such a radical change.
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Stupid suggestion.
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An end of abolishing Landlordism isn’t something exclusive to Communist theory, any more than suppressing religion wasn’t an exclusive to Communism, as practiced in Eastern Europe. Stupid!
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In the USA for sure, and the rest of the world in general, Communism today is about as relevant, and about as powerful, as the Temperance Movement, Stupid!
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I’m certainly as Anti-Communist as you. I’d be flabbergasted if there is even one Communist posting on Unstuck. Stupid!
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LOL @Red Baiting in the middle of a pandemic. It’s funny I guess, but really you should be ashamed of yourself.
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And… right now fool Landlordism has been turned off. No evictions. That form of capitalism has objectively failed flat out, and has been called off for the duration. Because we can’t afford those parasites right now, as we aren’t now healthy hosts. Tooting the horn for a system which is currently in a state of failure, and is currently resulting millions of avoidable deaths… that’s pretty stupid too!
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Not sure it’s my ideal, but that city in Spain has people building their own houses in cooperation with other people and then it’s their house. That’s pretty cool.
I think the best answer that serves people the best, including enticing private people to invest in real estate development as well as providing decent housing to everyone is some kind of all of the above.
What kind of property was this? I’d be curious to know what gross rents on this property were when you purchased it and what the purchase price was. Because in my experience for this to all be true you likely got taken for a ride on the original purchase.
150k 3br 1ba single family cape cod purchased in 2006. $1271 mortgage with WHEDA which meant I couldn’t drop the PMI. I rented it out for $1295 and comparables could be had for $900 to $1050 in the area, presumably from people who had paid them off long ago.
I bought it from the original owner, so I actually spent a bit less than the average at the time.
Sold in 2019 for $149900.
Edit: To clarify, we lived in it until my oldest hit high school. Then we moved a few blocks away to get into a better school district. I could afford private grade school for the kids, but private high school was out of the question, as was MPS. It wasn’t intended to be a rental, but things happen.
Because he does not consider the fact that someone else was paying the mortgage on the house that he owns and later sold to be profit.
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Because it’s not.
Dude got a zero down payment loan through a state program for low-mid income home buyers that had a requirement that the home be used as your primary residence. He turned around and rented it and had someone paying the full mortgage amount. Any reduction in principal is his profit. Any increase in equity in the home is his profit. Also once he had 20% equity in the home he could have turned around and refinanced to get rid of the 6.5% interest rate and PMI and had an even better deal.
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You’d be incorrect. I posted a loss for each year it acted as a rental, even with my access to cheap labor and materials.
The whole thing was pretty much a breakeven proposition, financially. It was a net loss because of all the time it takes to manage it without using a separate company. Most property managers charge 10% + a month’s rent to lease it and take the phone calls for maintenance issues. I did that on my own, and I don’t think you can really appreciate what a pain in the dick it is to be a leasing agent unless you’ve experienced it. Many many hours wasted.
Certainly one of the benefits of owning a home vs renting is that you get a chunk of money that you spent to live there back when you sell, and that’s pretty much where I was at.
You’re close, I only had to put 3% down and it was a program for first time buyers. I couldn’t drop the PMI because the market crashed and these types of homes were assessing well below the remaining principal balance. My choice was come up with $35k in cash to bring to closing, or deal with an interest rate twice as high as it should be and continue paying PMI. Normally, the PMI automatically drops off the mortgage once you pay it down to 78% of the original amount, but WHEDA had somehow sniffed out that I was no longer owner-occupying and were refusing to drop it. They were right about my residency, but not because I had come out and told them. My guess is they are in cahoots with other agencies and noticed my address change via the DMV. Rather than acknowledge their letters or try and fight it and demand they drop the PMI, I had to just live with it until home prices recovered.
You’re a smart guy and I think are just conveniently ignoring the reality of amortization schedules.
Yeah, just one of those many instances of fraud in government programs that doesn’t happen.
So this was a home you purchased to live in yourself with zero down and made the decision to try to turn it into a rental when you decided to buy a new home for yourself. Sorry, but the fact that you weren’t rolling in dough from this deal but still benefited greatly from it does more to show why the rental market is so profitable.
A rental property that rents for $1,295, you should be paying at most around 130k for. Say 20% down and a 5% mortgage means your monthly mortgage payment is $558. Add $300 for taxes and insurance and you’re making $400 per month while getting your mortgage paid for prior to maintenance costs. That’s a pretty sweet deal for a small time one property landlord. The professionals in this industry make their money by doing that deal over and over again and using all of their properties to create maintenance and rental sales efficiencies and spread out their risk.
FYP, welcome to Milwaukee. Insurance goes on top of this number.
Edit: and as I stated, I was getting $1295 just because I had the patience to sift through a million people to find someone willing to pay that. Comps were between $900-1050.