I mean, if every house for rent is owned by someone who only owns a small number of houses. They still want to charge as much rent as they can get away with. Always have.
FishFace
joined 1 month ago
Your point by point objections don't really change the picture - these are all things that people do. In a market that is not completely elastic, if you increase prices, some people will stop paying and we will see that in the data. Every time I've checked this for the USA (where this argument is usually made) there is no recent increase in vacancy rates.
So how about I offer you an alternative scenario: investment companies are seeing that housing is shooting up in value already, due to low rates of building, hence making it a more attractive investment relative to other things. So they buy them up and charge high rents - but at the same time all the individual owners of rental property also see that they can charge high rents, and do so. All we've done is swapped who is screwing renters, not by how much.
If this has "literally been studied" then I'd be very happy to see the studies - like I said I've tried to find data on this, and never found anything to suggest that replacing individual owners with corporate owners increases prices. Maybe my search-engine-fu is lacking (but also... every other time I've discussed this online no-one has come up with anything either. What I'm trying to say is that I don't hold this position for lack of trying to challenge it.) But in contrast, I've seen plenty of studies comparing population growth to house building and coming up with a huge deficit.
But the vacancy rate is not shooting up; it's steady/decreasing: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/31454.jpeg
I can't find any good data on corporate versus individual ownership.
Whenever people try to buy housing they will be outbid by companies that already have plenty of capital. This leads to an everlasting spiral where the rich people will always have more buying power and normal people are perpetually stuck paying absurd rents to those same rich people making them even richer.
How is this different when every house for rent is owned by an individual? They have the exact same incentive to charge high rents.
Yeah if you literally only 100%, or close to it, of housing in a city, that's true. But no company does in anywhere I'm aware of. There are cases of massive consolidation but the largest competitor acquires like 17% of housing. There are also always some vacant houses even if that number is very low.
Housing is a necessity but there is still some elasticity. People can move in with parents, move to a cheaper region unaffected by the attempted market abuse, share with more people, live in their car or literally be out on the streets. All of those options (none of them good ones) mean that some people will not pay the higher rents if there's an attempted squeeze - some houses would stand vacant. (Or: stand vacant for longer).
This is not a defence of free market economics in housing; I think local authorities should heavily invest in social housing. I just don't think that we have any evidence of the high cost of housing being due to excessive company involvement in housing. We are seeing housing crises across the western world in all sorts of cities and all sorts of distributions of ownership.
Oh damn, I didn't realise
Well maybe. But I think you're not understanding how caring works. It's easy to not care if you don't even think about the humanity and life of the person you're affecting. Having something like this can easily cause someone who never thought about their victim to suddenly do so.
It doesn't always work, but it's useful to understand that not all criminals are hardened. If you go down that road you end up with the US justice system.
Company ownership of housing seemed to work fine in Germany, and is significantly better than non-professional landlords who will see to your faulty boiler or tap in 2-7 business months.
High housing costs are mainly due to one thing: lack of housing. That is caused by not building enough houses, or not filling the ones you do have (e.g. because they are Airbnbs and are vacant most of the time). For companies to cause problems they have to buy so many homes they can abuse their market share by forcing rents up, which you would see as an increasing vacancy rate. As far as I know this has not been happening.
Ok, but what's wrong with a standard single lever mixer, or a two handle (temp and flow) mixer? Never had a problem with them.
I don't understand how what you're suggesting could work any differently than a standard mixer tap, where if you want full cold you turn it the way to cold, and pull all the way to fully open. You say "you'd generally lose maximum water pressure" - how does the mechanism you're thinking of actually set the ratio of hot to cold, and how does it not lose pressure?
But I don't really need to, now...
Why would you need separate hot and cold knobs if all that matters is the ratio between them?
Well then, we're back to some people cutting their costs by doing all the things I said above. You dismissed them all as if reasons why they're not practical are reasons why they're impossible.
All those landlords have the exact same incentives to charge as much as they can get away with, to subdivide properties and to exploit their renters as corporate landlords do. Consolidation can allow prices to increase - but it doesn't always, and typically not by a lot, until consolidation reaches very high levels. 3-7% is what I've read for company mergers (note that the case studies include large market shares and companies dealing in necessities).
So I propose that corporate landlords have manipulated the market by no more than 10%. So about 6 months of house price increases at current rates, or two years at less crazy rates. Everything else is caused by low supply and such.