Most of Canada is being actively price fixed by a handful of large real state companies that have purchased huge patches of housing and tend to do the minimum to maintain or improve and act more like litigious predators who price fix and remove all ownership from the experience
> But compared to the housing stock as a whole, it’s less than half a percent. Even looking at just single-family rentals, the vast majority of which are owned by small and medium-sized landlords, the Urban Institute’s “large institutional” share makes up around 3%.
3% amongst a single demographic, across the entire expansive geographic region of the USA, is in fact a shitton. Have you ever flown around taxiing above a place in a plane and fallen into awe at just how large the Earth is, even from only a mile above? In this case it equates to Yikes.
I'm sure the PE folks are just doing their best move but eek.. the net effects..
Average landlord in the US owns like two properties. This is not happening.
There is a conspiracy theory it's happening though - a funny thing is that the people repeating it can't decide if it's caused by "Blackstone" or "BlackRock", which are two different companies that sound the same.
More importantly you can't enforce a cartel in housing without legal force, because every participant is motivated to defect. So the way landowners enforce one is through zoning laws. Just get rid of those!
There’s nothing wrong with, say, buying a two family home, living in one unit, and renting out the other to help pay the mortgage. But corporate landlording, where an organization owns multiple buildings and runs it as a profit-maximizing enterprise, is a cancer on modern society and needs to be phased out.
In my view, corporate landlording is a relic of the past and really has no place in a progressive society. The financialization of housing stock in the USA where I live has been a disaster.
was living in a building owned by a corporate landlord until late last year. they took two years to fix a major roof leak and in the end only fixed it because i hired a lawyer.
on paper, corporate landlords should have better-maintained housing stock. in practice, i've never personally experienced it.
> You're just trying to ban apartments here. Corporate SFH housing basically doesn't exist but mom and pop large apartments don't either.
This definitely isn't true - there are markets where apartments aren't allowed/desirable, and in which corporate actors 'build to rent' entire subdivisions.s
That's rare though. Build to rent an entire subdivision is a risky business because there are so many unpredictable costs involved with owning that many houses, and you have to maintain them even if they're not being rented out. It's much more common to build them and then sell them off so the family owning it has to deal with it. As I said, that's why the average landlord in the US owns two properties.
Apartments have the opposite situation for weird legal reasons; there are almost no condos built in California anymore because the laws allow the original developer to get sued over quality issues, whereas for apartments the landlord has to deal with it.
It is rare in my part of the world, but it isn't (currently) rare in places where roofs don't have to withstand snow. No comment on the historical trend.
> Apartments have the opposite situation for weird legal reasons; there are almost no condos built in California anymore because the laws allow the original developer to get sued over quality issues, whereas for apartments the landlord has to deal with it.
This feels like it confuses a couple of issues - one really needs to know the recourse a homeowner has against a home builder and how long this lasts (and to compare that recourse to what is available to condo owners)
I mean, is banning property rental so absurd? Drastic sure, but what about apartments couldn't be filled either by co-ops or condos with some choice carveouts for short term rentals and the like.
"A month's rent less HOA fees may not translate to not less than 1/360th of an ownership share of the rented space" would be the 1 liner policy statement.
What if you want to live somewhere for less than 7 years / can't afford a mortgage and maintenance costs / the coop board doesn't personally like you / the coop board is racist and you're a minority?
Prices are set by supply and demand, not by whether the seller has decided to be evil or not that day. They cannot collude without assistance from governments restricting new construction.
> Prices are set by supply and demand, not by whether the seller has decided to be evil or not that day.
Whether and to what extent the sellers in the market have decided to be evil is, in fact, an aspect of "supply", which is simply the function mapping the terms of sale (in simplest terms, price) to the number of units sellers are willing to sell on those terms.
This is true even under perfect rationality, since deciding to be evil is just a way of describing someone whose utility function gives high positive value to something that the person making the description sees as a source of strongly negative value.
I think the "build more" stuff rings very hollow. I live in the sun belt where no politician has ever said no to a developer, and I assure you that rents and home prices are broadly unaffordable here too, though perhaps less so than elsewhere.
It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY.
You have single family zoning and height limits like everywhere else in the US. Allowing sprawl development works for a while but eventually you just run out of sprawl.
Rents are down in Austin, Berkeley and LA lately because of construction though. Funny enough, the LA one was an accident and they're trying to undo it.
> It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY.
Rents in my politically purple region 900+ miles from any coast have increased 100% over the past decade. What I pay now for a 1bd exceeds what I paid for a 2bd in a nicer part of the city when I originally moved here. Rental applications no longer require 3x income, only 2x now; it's just expected that people devote half their gross income on housing.
How anyone not making six digits lives in NYC is beyond me.
Check the median personal and household incomes over the last decade; both have increased, while household sizes have gotten smaller.
As people get richer, they have smaller households - ie, they stop living with their parents. If you don't allow smaller housing units to be built to match this, they will compete for existing ones and drive prices up.
REITs started booming after 1992, which probably dramatically increased the scale of corporate landlording, along with the improving rental management tooling/software that is making it increasingly easier to manipulate the rental prices and push it upwards.
What did you select 1992? What is particular about that year. And do you really think property managers had sophisticated software to adjust rents in 1992? Computers in 1992 were pathetic. I guess you could use Lotus 1-2-3 from DOS.
"corporate landlording" -- I like this term. I haven't heard it before. It sounds like it will go well on a rag newspaper for a front page headline.
Question about this so-called "corporate landlording": Tall apartment blocks in urban centers are exclusively build by corporations, as they require many millions in financing to build. What is your proposal for these urban centers?
You are confusing the initial construction with the long-term ownership. Most of the time, the corporation that builds the apartment block will sell the apartments, not continue to own them and rent them out.
The developer and property owner are (usually) still different people in this case. Owning and constructing a rental property have very different risk profiles so the same people don't want to be in that business.
> The developer and property owner are (usually) still different people in this case.
I would say the general contractor might be different, but the developer and property owner and always the same where I live for tall apartment blocks with 100% rentals.
Even if this is true, this is a distinction without a difference. If a developer can't sell their property to someone else, there's a good chance they wouldn't build it in the first place. If they do decide to never sell their apartment complex, they won't have the liquidity required to build another.
High-rises aren't generally more efficient in terms of space than low-rises. Urban centers should be primarily large numbers of low-rise multi-housing complexes, which don't necessarily need to be owned by corporations. Ideally they'd be co-ops, and those co-ops would allow subletting.
That doesn't make sense to me. If you stack 30 floors of apartments or offices, surely that takes roughly 10x less land (except extra space for elevators) than stacking them to 3 floors.
Obviously any form of multi-tenant space is more efficient than single-family housing, but there's a sweet spot somewhere between single-family and high rise that's the most space efficient.
Having lived in like 9 different places now, I completely keep flip flopping on them. It only takes one neighbor burning tires while doing burnouts, drag racing, and shooting rifles at all hours of the day to seek sane people to live around (true story). Or a lady who refuses to cut her yard, so you get mice and snakes everywhere in your yard. In the nonHOA places I lived, 3 were awful, and three were mostly fine.
On the other hand with HOA, having another entity to tell you what to do with your large purchase doesn't sit right with me. On paper they're not so bad. My experiences with them(three times) have been completely incident free, plus got access to a nice pool and garbage collection. But you'll read a lot of no doubt true horror stories that show how things can go awry.
Functional municipal governments handle garbage collection, building recreation centers with pools, cleaning up green spaces when people dump tires, mowing overgrown sidewalks and controlling vermin.
I've personally had my city pick up tires from a green space (also recorded the company that dumped 'em), cut overgrown yards and sidewalks, and they consistently collect my trash.
Why would someone with a functional local government ever entertain the straightjacket that an HOA enforces on its residents? It's not their business what color I paint my house, where I put my basketball hoop, or what size and style hedge I grow around my front yard.
The simple answer to your question I think is that the vast, vast majority of the US does not have a functional local government that does any of those things.
I remember calling the police about the rifle firing(this was not on acreage), and they acted like I was annoying them!
From what one developer in Florida told me, the local government doesn't want to pay for roads, services, or amenities for any new developments, so requires they set up an HOA to cover it. Seeing as over 80% of new build homes are in an HOA, I tend to believe that.
> the vast, vast majority of the US does not have a functional local government that does any of those things.
Not very true for municipalities with above minimal population. It is true that some local govs are less funded, ergo less effective. But the trend is to do well with the resources available.
> I remember calling the police
Police are not code enforcement.
> Florida told me, the local government doesn't want to pay for roads, services, or amenities for any new developments,
I'm FL for 30 years. Local govs don't tax for neighborhood road improvements. They do tax for code enforcement. Residents get what they pay for and code enforcement is pretty good - responsive but not onerous.
source: volunteered for code enforcement for 4 years
> Functional municipal governments handle garbage collection, building recreation centers with pools, cleaning up green spaces when people dump tires, mowing overgrown sidewalks and controlling vermin.
They don't generally do any of those but the first on private property, except maybe (for the cleanup tasks) after citing and fining the property owner for failing to do it in addition to charging them the cost of having it done, and they often do the first only under a contract with the property owner, so that with a shared structure with a common set of bins, the contract would need to be with an association responsible for the shared bins.
An HOA is just another form of government more local to your house. There can indeed be very specific covenants but most of what you mentioned a city will not do until very far down the path of misery. Joining the board or participating in the HOA is a great way to get your voice heard.
While cities may do the things you describe, its usually going to long after the problem emerged.
They are absolutely against the law. The problem is that none of it is enforced in any manor. Try calling the police in most places for something that isn't an emergency. They'll tell you to file a report, and they'll look into it at some point(hint: they won't).
At least with HOAs, they will fine you and possibly take your house. For these extreme cases it's a great way to keep people in shape. I guess the problem is when they get abusive and try to do the above for yard weed, paint, or other benign violations.
I am in the same boat. I am sure the horror story HOAs exist but I have never experienced them. I don't like the idea of them but I think they are necessary in most communities unless you are living on large acre sized lots.
Having served on an HOA board for years, I can mostly verify this. There isn't a lot of overlap between wise, community minded people and the people who strongly desire to be on a board.
The boards that have lost their way are dominated by people who really want to be there.
HOA's that exist for the management of the common areas of a shared development and, when the development involves one or more multi-unit structures, for managing issues that relate to the shared structure are not an awful concept.
HOA's whose charters allow them to, and who actually do, act to regulate things like the aesthetics or worse specifically negating functional utility of non-shared parts of the property when there are no structural or safety impacts to the share infrastructure are awful.
No they aren't. Some are awful, because awful people get on the boards. But an HOA is just a management organization for all the shared property and amenities in a neigborhood or condominium development. Some people like living with well defined rules, mandatory property and exterior appearance standards, some people don't. If you don't like the idea of an HOA then don't buy property that's subject to one.
HOAs for neighborhoods consisting of single-family housing are a nightmare. HOAs for co-ops are a necessity as you need to maintain the building, elevators, entryways, shared-spaces, etc.
> There’s nothing wrong with, say, buying a two family home, living in one unit, and renting out the other to help pay the mortgage.
There's obviously something wrong with that.
> But corporate landlording, where an organization owns multiple buildings and runs it as a profit-maximizing enterprise, is a cancer on modern society and needs to be phased out.
It's literally the same but on a larger scale?
And actually I found little landlords to be the most "profit maximizing", petty, cruel and stupid. At least big organizations have some sort of reputation to protect, unlike anonymous landlords.
to be honest as a renter I've had way more annoying experiences with individual landlords than with corporate landlords.
My sort of conspiracy theory is that it's individuals expecting big returns driving up a lot of rent prices, rather than big rental corps that understand the value of slow consistent returns and don't feel the need to drive people out to resell. I have no proof of this though.
"Average landlord in the US owns like two properties" factoid actualy just statistical error. average landlord owns one property. PE Georg, who lives in on a yacht & owns over 10000 homes, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
1) It's not a conspiracy theory that during the biggest housing crunch in modern history, PE firms were gobbling up the majority of all SFH sales in many markets.
2) While true, BlackRock was essentially founded by Blackstone. Their naming is no coincidence.
3) Both were involved in said practice to an extent, with Blackrock having a share in American Homes for Rent, and Blackstone Invitation Homes.
1) Depends on year and zip code. While I don't have specific numbers for these two companies, there are numerous reports for 'investor' purchases. In some zip codes, 90%. Nationwide, 24% of all SFH sales in 2021, for example.
3) 10% for Blackrock. Blackstone is a little trickier as they sold off IH in 2019, only to buy Tricon in 2021.
> It's not a conspiracy theory that during the biggest housing crunch in modern history, PE firms were gobbling up the majority of all SFH sales in many markets.
No, they had a majority of SFH /rental/ housing, which is by far not the majority of SFH housing.
They also say in their investor releases that the strategy only works because restrictive zoning prevents building any new housing to compete.
High housing costs in the UK are not caused by the royal family. They're caused by the UK (and Ireland) having the worst planning system in the world which makes it illegal to ever build any new housing. It's actually even worse than the US - at least zoning implies you're allowed to do something by right.
The US also has a better tax system since it uses property taxes more often, which reduces land values.
That "lord" in "landlord" ain't there for no reason. Are people finally prepared to understand that landlords are just the modern incarnation of parasitic aristocracy?
One might think. But common and even corporate landlords are not that powerful.
See the fact that the FBI is raiding them for price fixing. Which they should, as rent prices are a major political instability pressure point and a major factor in the unspoken social contract. Private landlords exploiting tech to destabilize housing needs to be checked without quarter.
Federal Police virtually never raid actual aristocrats in such a public manner, and especially not with a focus in their livelihood. Remember that the aristocracy was traditionally a powerful position: collectively challenging the King and often winning.
The aristocracy actually morphed into parliamentary government, which is the dominant government throughout the West. That's where you find the legacy that you thought resided with modern landlords. While some might still earn a living in that manner: making and wielding the law long ago became more attractive.
I think this has led to parliaments being confused with legislatures;
a similarly sublte distinction exists between prime ministers and presidents.
I worry this kinds of apparent loses sublte distinction will be politically abused in the coming election under the scenario were the direct vote count and the electoral college suggest different winners
I think that you are unnecessarily getting lost in semantics. Regardless, I'll clear up my meaning.
By "parliament" I'm indeed referring to a legislature or a body of lawmakers that passes law.
Often, that body is named "Parliament". In the US, it's Congress. My meaning would exclude any body with the name of Parliament that does not make laws. Though, I'd acknowledge that such a system would likely be a proto legislature and carry lawmaking influence.
Prime Minster and President are just titles. Their function in any one government would reveal their role, from diplomat to commander to figurehead.
The "direct vote count" does not suggest a winner because it isn't a thing in the US except at the State level and in the minds of wishful thinkers. I have no idea what you mean by the relevance of a "subtle distinction" in that context.
35% of landlords were between the age of 55 to 64 years
there is no such claim that all were merely renting out an extra room.
It's more fruitful to look at the landlord power distribution of number of properties per landlord and cast those renting two or more houses toward the "(small a) aristocrat" category .. with those renting out multiple million dollar plus houses in dense inner city upscale suburbs likely being very well heeled.
Are you suggesting the FBI should raid Canada? Because I’m increasingly convinced they would do it if you asked, if for nothing more than just a change of scenery.
