[hackerfromthefu]

The reality is in many cases the 'profit' margin is negative! There's many many stories of owners that quit the situation in disgust and fear of how bad it is financially, due to running costs. A bad year of maintenance, a bad tenant, can cause big losses in a business where margins are usually slim for the first decade of ownership.

If an investment house was a business, it often takes a decade to see substantial returns, sometimes after many years of hard slog and even losses. Would you accept that from the businesses that hacker news dreams of?

[bombcar]

Yeah, it's fun to hate on landlords but often they're not making much outside of appreciation - or they're basing their profit on renting a house today purchased ten or twenty years ago (which would be better to sell and do something else with the money, often).

I think the fundamental issue is that the whole renting market is buying long and selling short (buy a dwelling for a long period, rent it for short periods) and that causes issues on one or another direction (either you rent for what appears "too much" because you need to build reserves, or you rent for what appears "fair" and the first major expense kills the landlord).