Before we hit that pitchforks and fire threshold, I had a couple ideas on divesting from traditional renting.
If you’ve found your way to endoflandlords.com, you might be curious what our angle is. Is this a Far Left call to action against their political enemies? An intentionally provocative title to earn some SEO Credit? A joke? It’s all a bit more straightforward than that, I would like to compile resources on how and why to escape the cycle of renting in America, both for myself and anyone else who would find that useful.
That’s great man I’m happy for you, but I have some concerns on a systemic level. There will be more, a whole website’s worth even, but here are some quick examples.
Rent-seeking is not the only factor to blame for the absurdly high home prices we see today, inflation will increase the prices of homes over time, and wages have not increased alongside inflation. More research is needed, but I have a theory on the connection.
If home prices continue to go up, fewer people will be able to afford them and will need to rent. As demand for rentals goes up, landlords can charge higher prices for rent, since it’s more likely that someone will be able to afford the higher price if there’s a bigger pool of potential applicants If demand for traditional rentals falters, landlords will eventually have to dump stock, increasing the stock of homes available, and slowing the increase of house prices.
My plan for this site is to provide alternatives to the traditional renting arrangement to help people out of the cycle of renting, and maybe even convince a landlord or two that there’s more sustainable and less fraught ways to invest then hording housing stock.
As home prices and rental prices continue to outpace wages, we will eventually reach a point where speculation on the price of homes will fail to translate into actual purchases. Landlord pricing tools like RealPage’s pricing algorithm may allow landlords to predict this tipping point and brace for it, or they may tune their prices to get as much as possible out of renters before the whole thing falls apart. Either way, the eventual burst of this bubble would be catastrophic for most people, landlords included, and the particularly skittish ones may sell early if they catch even a whiff of organized action coming from tenants. My hope is this would soften the blow of this inevitable crash.
The relationship between a renter and landlord is inherently tense and uneven.
If a renter terminates their end of the relationship, the landlord will be out a few months of rent, with the added safety net of already having first, last and the security deposit from the renter. If a landlord terminates the agreement they have with a renter, the renter is homeless.There are laws that protect renters from this kind of behavior, but most renters do not know them, and even if they do, they rarely have the legal power and time required to act on those violations, especially if trying to contend with a large property management company. Regardless I’ll be sharing some resources and legal entitlements of a renter here to help those who have the resources to fight back.
I hope to create a resource that is comprehensive, useful, and most of all honest about the modern housing situation. Depending on your side of the arrangement, some of the critique I hope to provide will seem harsh, or not nearly harsh enough. If you’ll allow me a quick editorial, I’m generally a pretty conflict averse person, so I’d like to see a future where the landlord is not a hated fixture of everyday life for the average person, and instead a fairly innocuous position where both parties feel they’re receiving some benefit from the arrangement. This will require some balancing of the power dynamic between renters and property owners, and if the resources shared here can help make that happen it’ll be worth the time.