Company that makes rent-setting software for landlords sued for collusion

RealPage worked with some of the nation’s largest landlords to raise rents, says lawsuit.

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[_GntlStone_]

Oh no.

Anyway...

Yes... rental property owners working together to crank up rent to an amount where people feel even more squeezed and/or live from paycheque to paycheque is such a non-problem that we should ignore.

That's not the take I was going for, I was trying to show disdain for their business model by expressing how unsurprised I am that this is happening.

I don't just live paycheck to paycheck, but day to day as I work for tips.

But, sure, be a judgemental dick and assume you know anything about me.

You can't blame us for interpreting it as disinterest/disdain.

Maybe express yourself more clearly in the future?

 

[_GntlStone_]

This app certainly doesn’t help, but housing becoming a speculative asset to put money in and not a roof over your head is what caused this.

Break the big conglomerates and ban things like hotel houses and that will also help a lot.

Frankly, I'd go even further with single-family homes and make it ruinously expensive to own a house you don't live in. Eliminate the so-called passive-income aspect of home ownership and you get rid of landlords sitting on properties for years and letting them slowly decay until they can't squeeze any more money out of them. It'd be a lot easier for folks who just need a place to live if the market wasn't artificially inflated to suit the whims of capital.

I'll admit I don't have as neat a solution for apartments, and I think there should probably be some sort of rental market, but at the end of the day I think we, as a society, are going to have to start treating housing more like a right than a privilege before any of this gets meaningfully sorted out.

Personally, I like doubling your property taxes for every home you own that you don’t live in 8 months out of the year.

In the case of apartment buildings/complexes, the entire building counts as a single unit for the doubling, but C-level execs (or the appropriate parallel) living in a building 8+ months reduce the unit count by 1 to a minimum of 1.

Own six apartment complexes in Detroit and live in a house in Ann Arbor?

Your home = property taxes x1
Apt 1 = x2
Apt 2 = x4
Apt 3 = x8
Etc

Sounds good, except we own a condo we "lease" to my mother-in-law. Her rent is about ten percent of what we pay, because that is what she can afford.

My parents have a similar situation where they rent a house to my step sister for their mortgage payment.

My fantasy legislation is open to some amendments re: family members, charity, and the like.

I've stopped tracking our costs, because she will never pay us enough for the tax implications to manifest. The good news is that she is 40 minutes closer to us, and can walk to our house if she wants her grandson fix. We also bought at a time when the mortgage was about a thousand dollars less than rent on a similar apartment. HOA fees cut that in half, but her quality of life has improved. Prior to moving, my wife would need to go to the hospital with her every other month or so. There have been no such trips since she moved closer to us.

Worst come to worst, you could always put her name on the deed or put it into a family trust with succession provisions, and still pay the costs.