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by dwb 17 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.
1 comments
Brendinooo 17 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...

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dwb 17 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.
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Brendinooo 17 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.

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