The first sentence of the link you posted shows that the GP used the term correctly:
> Rent seeking (or rent-seeking) is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity.
Landlords produce nothing. They don't provide housing; builders do. All landlords do is hoard housing and get other people to pay their mortgages. They literally want to get paid for owning stuff.
Anyone who has said that "landlords produce nothing" have never been a landlord (and, honestly, I'm not sure they've ever owned a house either).
And I can say this as someone who is a homeowner. I hate owning a house, and I loved renting. There is a ton of work to do maintaining a house, and it's not really a job I want - I've got a job, and I don't want another one. With renting, if anything is broken, anything needs maintenance - not my problem. Also, if I want to move, I just leave when my lease is up. No need to go through the entire house sales process (which, obviously is quite easy these days, but obviously it's not always like that, and it's rarely like that everywhere - plenty of people have been "locked" into their homes by declining neighborhood values).
I'm certainly not saying my approach fits for everyone, but saying "Landlords produce nothing" is just false. While land may be an appreciating asset, homes themselves fall apart over time and need lots of upkeep and maintenance.
There's a trivial way to check whether or not a landlord is a rent seeker: offer to pay the bill for a mutually agreeable all-inclusive property management service in lieu of rent.
At the very least, they do maintain housing. It takes constant upkeep and updating to keep a structure in decent condition. Unless they're a slum lord, which isn't the most sustainable business model.
Some landlords rehab a completely unlivable structure into something livable. That's something too.
I am a renter and I hesitate to own my home because of the upkeep costs and responsibility. So I subscribe to shelter-as-a-service.
Yes, landlords maintain housing. So do homeowners who live in their homes. If anything, homeowners have more incentive to properly maintain their property than landlords, because they live there. Maintaining things properly often costs more money than doing the type of "good enough" repair that a landlord would be tempted to do because it's less money out of their pocket. So, if anything, "landlords maintain housing" is an argument against landlords.
The point is that "landlords maintain housing," along with "landlords pay property taxes" and other such statements are at best a wash. Those things would happen anyway, no matter who owned the housing.
Yup. What a homeowner does to maintain their home is a nontrivial amount of work and cost, so if a landlord does it they should charge a nonzero price for that service, right?
Or are you saying they shouldn't be 'competing' with homeowners at all? In my experience a landlord is not willing to buy at the same price point as an owner occupier, as they are less emotional about the property.
I used to be a landlord and didn't enjoy it much, so nowadays I own paper (stocks, notes) and literally do nothing.
The residents are no better off paying a landlord to pay for repairs than they are paying for them themselves. That's ridiculous. How does paying an inflated price for the same "service" I can do for myself by picking up a phone benefit me?
To be clear, I am saying landlords should not exist, at least not as they do now. They're the equivalent of scalpers for housing.
The landlord providing the tenant with shelter (and the labor of maintaining that shelter, fronting the capital for the ownership of the shelter, insuring the shelter, assuming the risks associated with ownership, etc) is in fact a "reciprocal contribution of productivity". He is engaged in collecting rents, but he is not rent-seeking, which is the process of capturing value without providing anything of economic value in return. The exchange of money between landlord and tenant results in a net economic gain for both parties, and is therefore not rent-seeking, while the tenant exploiting government restrictions on evictions to capture shelter without providing a reciprocal contribution is engaged in rent-seeking (specifically, he is seeking the landlord's rents!)
If you read past the first sentence of the article it explains this quite clearly.
> Rent seeking (or rent-seeking) is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity.
Landlords produce nothing. They don't provide housing; builders do. All landlords do is hoard housing and get other people to pay their mortgages. They literally want to get paid for owning stuff.