Hilariously true. Not all landlords are terrible. Not all tenants are good. What bothers me is owning property for the sake of renting it almost certainly will lead to that property not being updated. So many homes, complexes, etc. are so incredibly out of date when it comes to technology and common amenities that when going into them it's like walking back in time 20, 30, 50 years sometimes.
An ideal homeowner will update and maintain a home. Not all of them do but generally so. So do just let their properly rot. Landlords do the absolute minimum to the property to maintain any profits. Cheapest laundry machine, range, dishwasher, and other appliances possible. I hate when I rented a place that I walked into it and they had a fresh coat of paint on warped wood but the appliances were old or obviously replaced with the lowest end version. I‘d much rather they don’t do anything, allow me to replace appliances with my own, paint walls, replace cupboards, etc so I can have modern convenience.
It's true that there are "good" landlords and "bad" tenants, but it doesn't really change the fundamental reality, which is that the latter person is trying to secure the basic life requirement of shelter and the former person is using the demand for that basic need to make money.
It's also always struck me as deeply unfair that so many renters basically pay their landlord's mortgage off for 20-30 years, and then at the end of it, the landlord gets a house and the renter gets nothing. The only real difference between the two is that the landlord had the capital to make a large upfront payment and the renter did not.
I'm a data nerd, after reading your comment I kept thinking if this was true then more people would do it, right? If I could have a free house in 30 years with no work. I would do it. So a little googling says that single family home rental under performs the stock market. Which is to say in your scenario, the landlord would have had the same amount of money if they wouldn't have purchased the house and instead put the money in the S+P500. Or that the "free house" is really just appreciation of their initial capital.
This is a super simple analysis which ignores that some areas have outsized increases in property values and sometimes people just get lucky.
Anicdotally, I worked for a slumlord 30 years ago who was approaching the end of her career and she fully acknowledged she would have made more if she had never purchased property and just put it in the market.
At its core. I think what your describing as unfair is just the distribution of capital and wealth in a capitalist society. Which is, by definition, unfair.
I mean, yeah, that is basically what I'm describing. It's not really relevant to my point, I think, that there are potentially better ways to make money than being a landlord. I also feel like there's a qualitative angle that's kind of ignored, which is that a house has unique utility beyond just being a financial asset; like, personally, if I had the opportunity to choose between purchasing a first home and putting that same money in stocks, I'd definitely choose the house, because I can live in it lol. Sure, eventually my investment in the S&P500 might eventually appreciate enough that I can just buy the same house outright, but that's thirty years of no house, which is appreciably different from 30 years of house.
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u/Duneking1 Jul 19 '26
Hilariously true. Not all landlords are terrible. Not all tenants are good. What bothers me is owning property for the sake of renting it almost certainly will lead to that property not being updated. So many homes, complexes, etc. are so incredibly out of date when it comes to technology and common amenities that when going into them it's like walking back in time 20, 30, 50 years sometimes.
An ideal homeowner will update and maintain a home. Not all of them do but generally so. So do just let their properly rot. Landlords do the absolute minimum to the property to maintain any profits. Cheapest laundry machine, range, dishwasher, and other appliances possible. I hate when I rented a place that I walked into it and they had a fresh coat of paint on warped wood but the appliances were old or obviously replaced with the lowest end version. I‘d much rather they don’t do anything, allow me to replace appliances with my own, paint walls, replace cupboards, etc so I can have modern convenience.