Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by brookst 14 days ago
Yeah. “Rent-seeking” is just a fancy rhetorical term for “people doing things I don’t like with money”.

Subscriptions are rent-seeking. Loans are rent-seeking. Spending millions in capital to buy a building and renting apartments for thousands? Rent-seeking. Copyright and patents, for sure, unless an AI company is involved in which case copyright is noble and must last a thousand years, because AI companies are rent-seeking.
2 comments
dwb 14 days ago
No, too reductive. Rent-seeking is when people manipulate a situation to charge money without providing value themselves. Landlords are rent-seekers to the extent that they don’t do much, they mostly just own property - typical rent is many, many times the value of someone looking after the maintenance and building insurance for you (and anything else you want to argue a landlord does). The housing supply is naturally quite limited so the market doesn’t self-correct.

And anyway, if enough people don’t like the things people are doing with money, we can stop them from happening! So a pretty odd gotcha, to me.

link
Brendinooo 14 days ago
I mean, you saying that landlords don't do much is the exactly what I meant when I said "arguing about what 'adding economic value' means"

>typical rent is many, many times the value of someone looking after the maintenance and building insurance for you

I'm curious about this.

I'm not sure if there's a universal rule of thumb, but it's something like "expect 1-4% of the home's value in maintenance every year" - $4,000 to $16,000 on a $400,000 home. Take the lowest end of that - $333/month in expected maintenance a year. Add $100/month for home insurance.

You're claiming "many, many times" $433 a month in that scenario? Given more recent interest rates and the uptick in "maybe you should rent for awhile, actually" articles/videos I've seen, this doesn't strike me as plausible...

link
dwb 13 days ago
Certainly where I live, rents are many times that, yes. If landlords really were just charging cost plus a modest profit (despite that I really object to any profit on housing) I wouldn’t be outraged.
link
Brendinooo 13 days ago
okay, so like...7x that $433 figure? $3000 a month? If a mortgage + escrow payment on a 400k house is around $2500/month, a comparable rent is $5500 a month?

Where do you live, if I may ask? I live in a reasonably sane market which might be why this isn't clicking for me.

link
Brendinooo 14 days ago
Not sure what the intent behind this reply is but - I guess it's strictly true and I think we're agreeing in some sense, but to be clear I think it is totally fine to say that scalpers are doing things I don't like with money, and I'd like to see their excesses curbed.
link