Fox cable hosts are doing the job of the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, by admitting that the economy under President Biden is strong. Bernstein joins MSNBC’s Ali Velshi to discuss the latest “expectation-busting” jobs report.
It doesn’t, though. The owner should cover the cost of ownership, as they’re the one who gets the valuable asset at the end. The tenant should pay proportionally less than this, merely the cost of them living there for a temporary period.
If you live with someone and pay towards their mortgage, you can rightfully claim a share in the equity of their house. However, if you’re a tenant and pay the entire mortgage, and then some, you don’t get anything. That’s patently not right.
You don’t get to claim part of the equity just for living with someone and paying part of their mortgage. You would have to set up a joint venture or other business structure, otherwise you would just pay rent to the owner/ roommate like they were your landlord.
And even if the partnership was legally set up where you got a percentage for paying rent on a room in a house, unless you retroactively paid part of their downpayment, it would be an insignificant percent the home’s value…probably to the tune of 1/360th of the home’s value, minus the downpayment, minus the growth in value for however many years they have been paying on the loan, and your share would essentially be less than half of your rent going to the value of the investment due to taxes and insurance.
Most of what you are paying for on a home is taxes and insurance. My mortgage is about 65% taxes and insurance. If I were to rent my home, should I pay all of the taxes and insurance that occur in real time so the tenant has a less expensive place to live or pass that on to the renter as a cost of living in the residence?
I’m not a landlord because I ran the numbers and this just barely profitable in a best case scenario where you had nothing but great tenants, no downtime between renters, and no major house repairs, but there is a huge amount of risk with letting stranger occupy your most valuable asset. The expectation that a home owner should offer a discount on the actual cost of the home because they get to sell the house and recoup the asset value is not realistic. When you consider the amount of damage, additional maintenance, turnover costs, downtime between renters, and a whole mess of other things that cost additional money that come with renting to tenants, it is understandable why it’s hard to find cheap rent.
It sucks that this is how the system is, but housing prices have to come down and wages have to come up before this problem gets fixed, and the landlord isn’t the demon you think he is. Corporate firms buying up hundreds of houses to manipulate prices up on the other hand…
I agree that there is a lot more wrong with the system than just mortgage rates being higher than rents. The tax, fees and interests are certainly a good target for how things are wrong. With regards to damages, obviously tenants should be more easily held liable for damages they cause - and equally landlords should be more easily held liable for failing to provide a well maintained property (eg no mould).
The system is generally screwed up through and through. The people on the bottom get shat on, but even as you work your way up there’s always still someone above shitting down hill. But that’s no excuse for resigning and not sorting the shit out.
For starters, we need to sack all MPs and implement something closer to a direct democracy, or at least representation truly as a public service.
Also forgetting that the “then some” part is only warranted if we want an incentive for people to buy houses to rent out. If it was a socially beneficial thing to do. Society would not lose out if buying a house on a mortgage and renting it out was not a profitable thing to do.
Exactly. If it wasn’t so exploitatively profitable, fewer people would do it, and more houses would be available on the market - lowering prices and giving more people an opportunity to buy and own their own home.
We’ll have to agree to disagree.
I’d appreciate if you could justify your position. I think, when you carefully consider it, you’ll understand that it’s skewed the wrong way and not justifiable.
If I buy a house with a mortgage, it costs a lot of money, but I can live in it right away and afterwards I have a house, which I can sell. If I rent, I only get to live in it for so long as I pay rent - I own nothing at the end. You get more for your mortgage but pay less, surely the rent should be lower and proportionate to what you’re getting?
Sure, if rent was cheaper than a mortgage, people would be far less inclined to be landlords - but why should that be a given path to profit? Why should the housing supply by usurped by those who already have an excess of wealth?
Sure. The terms of the owner’s financing are none of the renter’s business. The only facts that are relevant are that the owner is willing to rent out their property at a certain price, and the renter is willing to pay that price, and both parties are entering into the transaction of their own free will. If the owner and renter are unable to agree on a price, they are free to go their separate ways. No harm, no foul.
The renter has no real choice, though. The renter can either accept the price the landlord offers, or go to another landlord who offers the same price, or be homeless. This makes the renter open to exploitation by landlords. Sure, every landlord does it - but that doesn’t make it any less exploitation.
This is exactly the type of thing where government should come in and regulate. I’m saying that such regulation should position rents as lower than mortgage rates.
See, I don’t buy this. The renter may not like the other options because they’re in a less desirable neighborhood or farther out from the city center, but that is not the same as having no choice.
In my experience prices don’t vary that much across cities, you’d have to move far away to actually get a cheaper rent. Doing that means finding a new job and all sorts of other difficulties.
In any case, the tenancy simple isn’t worth the rent that’s charged. If owning the property you live in is worth some amount, then renting it should be worth less.
This is why we’re just not going to agree—you’re saying because the property owner does not live there, they should operate at a loss, which I disagree with.
It’s not a loss though. They’re buying a property, they get to keep the property at the end of it - and further the property will almost certainly increase in value.
Why should the tenant pay more than it costs to own a property, if they don’t get to own anything?
If a landlord doesn’t like the opportunity because it isn’t profitable enough, they could always sell the property - creating more opportunity for renters to buy their own homes. Right now, with no rent control, the system is pure exploitation.
choosing to be wrong: it’s a bold move, cotton. let’s see how it plays out.