Oh my God oh my God if the landlords have to sell, that would be… Check notes… That would be really good for people who want to buy houses.
this is what is known as “a feature, not a bug”
SIKE! sold houses are only bought by corporate holding companies, now you’ve lost even more rights!
In France there is a law that forces you to sell to your tenant if he has the highest bid
Why would you need a law to make someone sell to the highest bidder?
Because sometimes there’s a tie
Or the landlord might just want to spite the tenant, or he might want to sell to a “new” buyer who turns out to be business partner/cohort/shell LLC/etc.
More precisely, when you sell the tenant has the right to buy it first.
If the landlord is thinking of accepting an external offer under the initial price then he has to ask again to the tenant if he would buy it at this lower price.
This happened a lot during the Great Depression. But then I believe the owners found a way to withdraw the auctioned property if the minimum bid didn’t suit them. The French law might bring back the Penny Auction by saying, “You put it up for bid - a sale has to go through.”
They can still do that through proxy buyers. If you go to enough auctions, it’s easy enough to pick them out.
Umm, you can legally sell it to someone else and not the highest bidder?
Not in France. If the tenant wants it, the tenant gets it
It’s even better than that because it is illegal to make bids on a property you sell so the seller name a price and if someone want to buy it at that price it’s sold. Most of the time buyers tries to bargain on markets where the demand is low
Wouldn’t most people sell to the highest bid anyway?
Never any history of racial segregation in the housing market, nope. No Sir. Never.
Are people really accepting less money so they don’t sell to brown people? Like why would you care? You’re selling the property. You don’t have to deal with the new owners if you happen to be racist.
Granted, this article was from all the way back in… last week.
“An African-American woman’s quest to buy a pricey condo near the Virginia Beach Oceanfront – impeded by the white homeowner’s refusal because of her race – is just the latest example.”
“…landlords frequently use subtle methods or mask the real reasons why they don’t want people to move in.”
Gotta keep the community pure.
I’ll add, as a minority there are neighborhoods that are off limits because I know I would not be accepted, and, I have an “ethnic” name, so I assume some bias may be held towards people selling in neighborhoods like that.
The neighbors care. So unless you don’t live in that town it could make for some interesting neighborly interactions. Wouldn’t be surprised to find court cases of neighbors suing for loss of property value.
Yes but we had our fair share of assholes
There have been auctions in the past, mostly farm, that the community got together to drive off outsiders and then proceed to lowball every item on the auction. They would then return everything to the owner after the auction.
It was a fine ‘fuck you’ to the bank, until the bank closed or sold out because they no longer had the assets and cash reserves needed to stay open themselves. Which then screwed the rest of the community over.
Wouldn’t you sell to the highest bidder anyway?
I mean, my wife and I didn’t sell to the two highest bidders on our first house because the fuckers were obviously going to rent it out.
One was a bid entered by a piece of software often used by flippers and rental companies (had branding at the bottom of the pages etc) and the other was a cash in hand bid with an overt offer of more under the table, which is fairly illegal where we live.
We selected third place, someone who had messy handwriting, obviously has been written by two different people, and ended the bid with “777” which was cute and showed us not only were they human, they really wanted the place. And no wonder, with offers like the first two likely happening on nearly every sale in the area.
I did that myself with a home. I ignored the high bid in favor of selling at a steep discount to a young family.
This is doomerist myth. It’s a miniscule fraction, go look up the actual numbers. Landlords selling their properties would be very good for everyone.
I know your post is a joke, but doomerism just builds complacency and we should all be pushing for better.
Idk, something like 12% of all metro Atlanta area homes are leased out by about 3 rental property companies. That’s a huge amount.
I understand that statistic sounds scary, but let’s actually look into it. The percentage country wide is .2%, so why is your stat so different? Source
For one, it’s a specific city and not the whole U.S or even all U.S. cities. This makes it likely it was cherry-picked by your source in order to increase clicks. One city’s data isn’t a representative sample.
There’s a lot of confounding issues when you pick one specific city to look at. For one, property management companies tend to serve specific areas, and are not US-wide. So those Atlanta companies likely aren’t institutional investors, just large local companies.
Additionally, people in cities are often there temporarily for work, so many opt for apartments because the closing fees would cost more than the rent and interest when living there short term living. So many more buildings in cities are rented out as a result.
Comparing across the nation doesn’t really matter in things like real estate where prices, inflow vs outflow of people etc vary wildly, particularly when talking about the actual impact on the average person within the locality.
“Cherry picked by source to increase clicks” what sort of landlord boot licking is this lmao. Amherst Holdings (owns almost 40,000 homes nationally), Pretium Partners (owns around 80,000 homes nationally), and Invitation Homes (also around 80,000 nationally) own through subsidiaries 11% of all single family homes across metro Atlanta for rental purposes.
This isn’t opinion or spin, it is fact.
Most of their ownership (9.2% of that 11%) is from houses in the lower half of median home value, effectively ripping those inventories out of the market for first time home buyers and inflating the price of those tiers of homes for first time home buyers.
Maybe you’re confused about what “Metro Atlanta” means. It’s not just the City of Atlanta. Metro Atlanta is spread across 5 counties, from the heart of downtown to some real yeehaw rural areas of the outer counties.
You provided no evidence to dispute my source saying it’s .2%, and are now distracting from my initial point which was that the actual statistic is extremely low.
I think it’s safe to assume that I’ve proven my point and that you’re now just trying to save face or evangelize your political position with zero real evidence. Whatever floats your butt.
Also please cut it out with the insults, it’s hurtful. I’m human too, you know. You calling me names isn’t helping convince anyone outside of your doomerist echo chamber.
0.2% nationally != 0.2% locally.
Link to the research: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24694452.2023.2278690
Read it for yourself.
But worse for those looking for a rental.
Rent control is a bandaid on a real problem that makes things worse long term. What California needs is build more, which means end the NIMBY and unfreeze property taxes so those seating on underutilized land are forced to develop it or sell.
Would property taxes actually do much? They’re so little even in high property-tax states that I think you’d need to do a lot more than that to FORCE rich people to utilize their other properties. High taxes would potentially push more costs on renters. Maybe we should just outlaw having more than 1 or 2 homes… including for real estate companies and banks :)
I keep wondering how to make the law do that. Making a company is like $100, that’s nothing compared to the house price. They would just have shell companies all over each owning a single location. 123 Fake St., LLC; 124 Fake St., LLC; etc.
Law with two parts, only a specific type of company may own rental properties. And you may not own or be employed by more than one property; including holding stock. The same rules apply to property management companies that service land lords with few properties; possibly with larger limits on how many properties they can manage at a time.
With that basic structure we can decide how many buildings/units each company can own. For example the limit could be 100 single family homes, or 3 mid sized complexes, or 1 large tower. Then we should be able to have a system that keeps landlords from going big. Makes the system so decentralized market concepts must work and monopoly power is effectively destroyed.
You’d limit Ultimate Beneficial Ownership of the properties, not direct ownership.
I’d probably do something like: No individual or private entity may have Direct, Indirect or Ultimate Beneficial Ownership exceeding or of multiple of any of X(2-5?) Single Family properties, Y(2-3?) low density Multi-tenant properties, or Z(1-2?) high density Multi-tenant properties. Excluding the first wholely and solely owner occupied property. Excluding Ultimate Beneficial Ownership of less than A(.01-5?)% of a property. Excluding Ownership less than B(30-180?) days. Failure to comply results in forfeiture of newer ownership to REGULATOR-TBD until compliance is met. Multi-tenant properties have C (5-10?) residences
IANAL, probably some other loopholes that need closing. But the intent would be to limit consolidated ownership of many properties. But not impact several of the more reasonable ownership structures, nor impact churn of properties. The regulator would sell whatever extra it gets to fund housing programs.
How will that work for individuals who own .00001% of hundreds of homes (by owning shares of several real estate holding companies)?
Also, mega rich people don’t to legally own anything. It is owned by a trust with undisclosed beneficiaries. It is also routed via multiple offshore dummy corporations. It is set up this way so that tax agencies can never figure out incomes and inheritances.
You forgot the part about where the individual in question goes to jail when caught. That part is important.
High taxes would potentially push more costs on renters.
Potentially, but I think here not so much. Competition drives prices down. In a perfectly competitive market, prices are pretty much equal to the cost of production. In that case, any tax would be completely passed on to the customer. But you can’t produce land at a certain location. My guess is that rents are largely determined by willingness to pay.
LVT, not property tax. You want to tax the value of the land, not the value of the property built on it.
I don’t think you need to add any taxes. If the area is attractive enough to warrant a higher density redevelopment, just unlock it and it will get done.
I mean, if you are a developer and you know for certain there’s a lot of interest in a certain area and you know for certain that you could buy that big single family lot and make a 3-5 story building instead with 10-20 apartments, you’d be crazy not to offer double the market rate to get it and develop it as fast as possible.
Just need to change the law to allow redevelopment of single family areas into medium density.
Hmm build more. I’d be curious to see the stats on this. California has probably built 10 times more than the rest of the country combined over the last decade or so. People need to GO THE FUCK BACK HOME.
Good. Bye bitch.
They’d flood the market with properties shifting us along the supply curve to allow younger people to afford properties?
Darn, that’d be so… awful? No, I was looking for awesome.
It probably won’t flood the market as property/land is sort of like gold. Renting it is just extra money on top of land value rise. It only gets rarer. (In valuable locations)
Source: I have 4 houses from my parents I have no idea what to do with
First person I’ve seen who didn’t say it increases supply.
Nice.
Hey, I remember my macroeconomics!
Supply/demand is usually micro…
Is it really functionally any different? “increases supply” is a decent shorthand
Isn’t that exactly what they just said?
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Good riddance
Introduce additional legislation that limit property sales to corporations and I’ll donate to yer campaign
That’s-the-point.gif
3% was the top annual pay increase at the Fortune 500 company I used to work at. 3% max increase for those that “exceeded all expectations”. Probably less than 1/3 of employees.
So if it’s good enough for a Fortune 500 company, it’s good enough for every landlord. 3% max, and only to max 1/3 of their locations/rooms.
My old company’s “top” level required the VP to sign off on. So maybe 1-2 people in a department of 150 got it.
One of the issues is if material costs to maintain the property increase steeper than this cap.
Though the solution is pretty practical – cap it at inflation.
Don’t really care honestly, since the prices they’re charging now are nowhere near their operating costs as it is.
They can take a hit to their profit. Or sell an “unprofitable” property.
This is the truth. You need to create conditions that make renting unprofitable and unsustainable, and all of a sudden property prices will begin to fall as landlords sell. This happened in London after WW2, when renting was over-regulated and most of the residents ended up owning their own apartments as landlords sold off property. After deregulation, the reverse trend began again.
What happened to the number of new apartments being created?
And this is somehow not a problem for salary increases?
Landlords say this would push them to sell.
Yay? Maybe then it could be sold to people who are desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round.
As in, these homes will be owned by people who actually live in them; non-parasites who aren’t going to be sucking the lifeblood out of hard-working, working-class Americans.
And maybe instead of being landlords, these parasites could actually go out and get a job?
Sounds like we don’t only need to cap increases at 3%. We also need to give loan assistance programs so the people currently living there can capitalize on the sudden availability. Otherwise, you get into the situation of “I’m spending $2000 on rent now, the mortgage + escrow payment on the same property would be $1500, but the bank says I don’t qualify”.
If you can’t buy it while renting today, you won’t be able to buy it tomorrow when your landlord sells it. The house will be bought by a corporate investor and you’ll get fucked. Just like it’s happening in the UK right now. Prepare for mass homelessness.
Landlords will complain every time any government, local, regional or national, attempts to regulate their bullshit, and plenty of people will rush in to take their side because they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed ghouls. Tax them to hell and back.
they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed ghouls
Even beyond that, there’s little understanding of landlordism as a patronage system. “Oh, that person just saved up a bunch of money to buy a second property and then spends a lot of time and energy maintaining it, so they deserve a profit!” is just people regurgitating real estate propaganda.
You’re not describing the lion’s share of properties owned by hedge funds, wherein cheap access to low interest debt gives a handful of mega-banks and billionaires the ability to gobble up 40%+ of outstanding real estate. You’re not describing the process of slumming a neighborhood through deliberate public-sector disinvestment, before forcing people out through petty fines and over-policing until you can snatch up the real estate on the cheap at public auction or estate sale. You’re not discussing how red-lining and eminent domain can be used to shrink housing supplies by limiting who has access to which schools or public utilities. Or how tax incentives can be used to drain off public funds for profit-chasing private sector enterprises.
Even before you get into the delusional would-be landlord, you’ve got this enormous network of socio-economic back slapping and dick jerking that is fundamental to the creation of a landlord class that we simply don’t talk about.
Sounds like that’s by design. If they all wanna sell prices come down on that front as well. Sounds like it should be capped at 2 percent to me.
0%. Rent when established is the rent for the unit in perpetuity.
Decide to rent? You get to rent it out until it’s no longer worth it, then it becomes owner occupied forever or torn down for high density housing. Sounds great to me!
“This would never work!1111oneoneone” - my last apartment was $1425 when I moved in and $1500 after I moved out 10 years later. If they rent it out again as-is it would be all of $1800 at most… but they could still make money at $1425/mo, or even less, after water/insurance/property taxes and income tax.
Is there a downside further in the article or is it just all positive news?
The downside is they’ll just be bought up by corporations who will be even shittier landlords.
If the market is adequately regulated they wont be shittier landlords. There somehow is this romantic idea of smaller scale landlords to be like the good old guy that want to help a family find a good place and accept a modest profit. They exist, but the majority are just equally cutthroat like large corpos. Difference is that large corps have more means to be strategic about it and accept risks like 5% of tenants suing successfully while the rest just accepts the illegal treatment.
If the market is adequately regulated
Well there’s your first mistake lol
It is not an argument against regulation though. Regulation of markets like housing and healthcare, is reasonable and necessary. These cannot work as free markets because the one side has their life depending on it, wheras the other just can have another customer.
living isn’t a requirement, have you seen how many people willingly consume drugs and sugar despite knowing the risks. Let the free market collapse the upper class (almost certainly after the working class but still)
Let me tell you how it works in the real world right here right now in the UK. Large corpos set targets on how many rentals they want to acquire. For example, Lloyds announced a few years ago that they’re building a portfolio of 50k properties. Yes, fifty fucking thousand homes!
And so small landlords are forced to sell due to changes in the law. Corporate investors buy them in an instant at full asking price or even higher to ensure that property value doesn’t go down and so you, a mere mortal, can’t buy shit.
Next, they freeze the properties and don’t release anything on the market. That creates an insane housing shortage and rental prices go through the roof. A few years later they will start introducing their portfolio to the market slowly to avoid crashes at 2-5x price compared to just last year. People are desperate and pay through the nose.
Boom! Mega profits! What is your 3% yearly cap when they just jacked up the price five times? It will take many years to make a dent.
You know what would help against that? regulating how much property a company can acquire in an area. within a certain timeframe. Or regulating that the land tax and similiar things go up after having say more than a hundred or a thousand properties.
This is arguments for regulation not against it.
Land tax would be grand!
My current landlord has broken half a dozen laws, so yeah… At least corpos don’t do that.
Idk about that. Almost all renting horror stories are with small private landlords.
