[dagw]

If you purchase a flat, it's under the implicit assumption that you or your family will be the only ones occupying it

I also live in Sweden and that is a very Sweden specific assumption. Even just across the border in Norway that assumption doesn't hold.

Sweden on the whole is very anti small private landlords and have lots of laws making it basically impossible to make money by buying a few flats and renting them out, but that is also a pretty uniquely Swedish take on the property market.

[null_object]

> Sweden on the whole is very anti small private landlords and have lots of laws making it basically impossible to make money by buying a few flats and renting them out, but that is also a pretty uniquely Swedish take on the property market.

This is an extremely idealized version of the real situation - at least in Stockholm. Here, the only real cap on the number of apartments being bought for (often illegal) hire, is the spiralling cost of real estate. Many of my colleagues rent their apartments on the black market - which is often the only way to get a home within the city.

Official rental apartments generally have a waiting-list of around 20 years within the city-limits, and even needing to commute from far out in the suburbs a newly-arrived person will probably need to rent on the black-market. This is a well-known and documented situation.

Airbnb has definitely made the situation much worse in Stockholm - the supposed '3600' apartments are actually far greater in number, as can be seen if one switches off location-permissions in your browser, and take a look at available rentals in the area.

[dagw]

You're of course right. I should have written that Swedish law is very anti small private landlords and that legally making money by buying a couple of flats and renting them out is basically impossible.

In fact when I moved back to Sweden after working abroad for a few years after University I spend the first 18 month living in a illegally rented flat, so I'm painfully aware of how the system works in real life.

[mrep]

So how is there housing for people to rent? Does the government build and maintain all rental property?

[alexanderchr]

You’d usually rent from someone owning an entire building. Usually a company but sometimes an individual.

[gerikson]

No, there are private and council-owned landlords.

[mrep]

Can you explain more? That still sounds like you are able to "make money by buying a few flats and renting them out" but with extra steps.

[gerikson]

Expanding on 'dawg, it's generally only profitable to rent if you're a company devoted only to renting, and the regulatory regime punishes the landlord with only a few units. This is because rents are not market-based, but instead are based on "use value" (bruksvärde). A 19th C apartment in the middle of the city can theoretically be worth "less" from a rental perspective than a newly built apartment in the suburbs.

Any annual rent increases are set via a form of collective bargaining, and if a landlord charges more, the renter is entitled to their money back.

The upshot of this is that it's much more profitable to buy a rental building and flip it to the renters via a bostadsrättsförening (a bit like a condo) or to only build to sell.

[dagw]

No, the landlords in these cases own the whole building, not just a few flats. If you own the whole building then you can of course rent out the flats in that building. But if you just own a couple of flats in the building, then you generally cannot easily rent them out.

[gerikson]

Thanks for expanding, I do admit writing from a parochial perspective.