Landlords are parasites, using extortion to take money from tenants
Now that the election date has been set, I look forward to seeing policies being issued by parties on the ‘left’. Not that there’s much ‘left’ about the current Labour Party, but I continue to live in hope.
I’m particularly interested in seeing if any policies are issued that focus on the near impossible situations being experienced by people who are renting their houses, a rather significant proportion of the population.
Renters face continual rent rises imposed by landlords, and are powerless to do anything about it. A landlord once told me that he had to raise the rent to keep up with the market. I looked at him rather quizzically and asked him to define that market, and where the ability to bargain or negotiate the price was. The so-called rental market doesn’t meet the definition of a market, “a place where buyers and sellers can exchange goods and services” and where both have negotiating power.
This clearly isn’t the case with renters. To be blunt, landlords use blatant extortion, knowing that tenants have no power at all to bargain or even to look for an alternative rental – for a start the rent would be similar, moving houses is so expensive, and the cost of establishing new rental agreements just adds further insult.
You could say that landlords subscribe to the Godfather method of doing business, by making tenants an offer they can’t refuse.
They just put up prices to a level where they think their tenants can get by, and by matching their rents to those being imposed by their landlord peers, such as basing annual rentals on the advertised rentals for new listings.
They try to justify increases on rising costs, but never seem to reduce rentals as the costs decrease e.g., reductions in interest rates or the very advantageous tax changes handed to them by the group of rental property owners masquerading as our current government. And, isn’t it strange, the rent increases are usually far greater than the actual rise in costs.
Life is particular hard for lower income people, especially beneficiaries, who are paying increasing proportions of their very limited income straight to their landlords. As is well documented, every time beneficiaries get an increase, especially in accommodation allowances, landlords immediately put up rents. Ask university students what happens every time their accommodation allowance is increased. Greed. Avarice.
Parasite is too kind a word for landlords, yet what’s effectively what they are.
The elderly are especially vulnerable. Due to life circumstances increasing numbers of the elderly do not own their own houses and are forced to rent, having to meet rental costs from their national superannuation. This is barely adequate as it is to cover day to day living, without having a substantial proportion sucked off by greedy landlords.
I know of a profoundly deaf man in his late 70s, who is now having to pay $425 per week in rent ($22,100 per year) out of his national superannuation, and this leaves him with barely enough money to live on. That is outrageous.
There is nothing moral about landlords reducing their tenants to penury, in order to finance their lifestyle – this person’s landlord is most definitely not short of money, in fact the opposite.
And the same applies, I feel, to most landlords – they effectively extract a very significant proportion of their tenants’ income, using it for their own lifestyles and to build up their already bulging bank accounts. If they used a gun to take the money we’d call it robbery. Not much difference, is there?
We should not be conned by their claims they are providing an essential service. This is blatant nonsense, there is nothing altruistic about their business model. Pure greed.
So a question for the parties on the left – what do you propose to do about this? The ball in your court. Given the percentage of voters who are renting, there are a lot of votes out there waiting for you to come up with the goods.
I’m not holding my breath.
In election year it is important for stories to be factually correct ..Records show for the first time in a decade (6 of those years under Labour) average rents have fallen by 1,8 percent .In Wellington it was 9 percent .
While it must be hard for the deaf man the landlord is not a charity and he must set the rent at a profitable level and it is the state’s roll to help people live in them through rent support if applicable.
lol ‘rent support’ i.e. subsidizing landlords to amass further capital
Bullshit, they’re on the rise as is inflation, stop the lies Trevor. Landlords aren’t charities yet the government treats them as such withy rebates. Disgusting.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360928682/price-inflation-rises-31-above-reserve-banks-target-range
Trevor, you are an idiot.
Trev, you never question your own complacency – too simple as usual. The houses are a capital investment that rise in value faster than CPI. The landlord needs to cover costs, also to receive a reasonable return on investment that would match what banks are paying. The tenant now pays for electricity, water used, and may supply their own whiteware, frig, clothes washer. The landlord pays rates, insurance, also it is best to have a good balanced, and fair manager charging about 8% of rental, and set aside a suitable amount for running repairs and maintenance probably $1000 p.a.
Those should be covered, but landlords who say they have to keep up with market values are toads.
Trevor that’s driven by lack of demand. If the answer to reducing rents is tanking the economy and having renters with something more like an actual income leave the country, I suggest you reconsider your adulation for a useless government
And once again they are on the rise as students return to the market .Every year prices drop when uni shuts down for summer but return higher the next feb .So the drop is false and once again the media is fueling another lie .
Let’s run the numbers on Trevs claims that everything is great because rent has fallen…
Hmmm, 1.8% of $600 per week= close to $12 dollars a week!
Rejoice plebs, you can have a block of cheese, maybe… Until the farmers decide they need another 4WD.
Hey Trev, you referenced profits for the landlord and stated they’re not a charity. So they’re paying tax like a business right? And have been since becoming a landlord? Standing on their own 2 feet like a business right? Not receiving $750 million a year in tax breaks, like a parasite?
Are you sure the landlord “worked” for their property? A lot of the landlords I’ve encountered inherited their property. No hard work involved at all.
Remember kids, study hard or you will end up dumb like Trev.
The landlord is not a charity he is a parasite
Perhaps, Trevor, you will be able to enlighten me as to the difference Nacts $2.5 billion in landlord tax breaks has had on rents this year?
Well, Trevor is a piece of shit who is comfortable with the status quo and obviously couldn’t care less about an elderly disabled man living in poverty.
Just mealy mouthed bullshit from a cretin.
My idea…
Given that tenants are paying for the landlords asset, when the landlord sells a property, all previous and current tenants should be given right of first refusal with the sale price reduced by the amount of rent the tenant paid during their tenancy.
Simple, effective and equitable. It would recognize that it is in fact the tenant paying for the asset.
If landlords don’t like it, tough shit.
Yours is a suggestion worth implementing. I can’t stand the property investors who think that they are doing the world a favour while ignoring the hardship they impose on those unfortunate enough to be providing their income. There used to be more caring types who had rental property decades ago that understood the value in having reliable long term tenants so they kept the property maintained and rents affordable compared to today where property managers treat tenants as cash cows and do as little as possible to keep the property maintained.
The dire situation of many renters will not be solved by any political party of the colonialist regime. Those parties are comprised of landlords and beholden to landlords, and colonial capitalism as a whole cannot see beyond rent-seeking and property speculation as its main focus of economic activity. Tenants and workers will have to look after themselves in this country. They will have to take on the landlords, and they will have to fight the regime if they want to improve their lot in life. China decolonized, and now 90% of its population own their own homes. Singapore decolonized and put in place an impressive system of public housing. However you do it, you have to bring an end to colonialist rule if you want to rid yourself of the parasites.
The ball is not “in the court” of “the parties of the left”. They dropped the ball decades ago. The ball is squarely in the court of tenants themselves. Tenants will have to up their game.
By the way, not all landlords are unscrupulous or inhumane and not all tenants are “good tenants”. If you consider yourself to be a “good tenant” you should remember that the only ones who can make a difference are precisely people like yourself. The “bad tenants” never will.
Yup…it’s systemic and a feature not a bug.
The colonial westminster system is doing exactly what it is meant to and every vote is a vote to continue that system irrespective of left/right ideology.
The system and those who profit by it are not going to bite the hand that feeds them.
Systemic change is what’s needed and devising/implementing that system can only be done by A super I.
No.
Everything changed from Thatcher thru Blair. We call it Neo-Liberalism now. Don’t make it some distant colonial issue. People found that driving people into workhouses and poverty didn’t work and built some of the best social platforms in the free world, which were then copied here. It’s the Neo’s who stole it all.
Here in NZ there is no choice but to vote for the Neo’s, apart from TPM, who I have no doubt will have to use neo-liberal economic outlook for decades yet. As one of the colonial bastids you seem to think exists, who is faced with being thrown into the street when he’s 80 years old by a psychotic 20 year old landlord because no one in power will regulate rental housing, I can immigrate to relative poverty now, or die in homelessness here in 30 years. The problem is the people here, they are utterly insane with greed. Community is dead. So should I be here for the next election, I’m voting TPM. Those folk hate me as a musket toting colonial apparently, they’re thick as shit, full of hate, but they are the only people with a memory of community that can survive the neo-liberal insanity, and ironically the only feature colonials have in common with them, so they get the vote. The rest are evil traitors to their own origins.
Well, Trevor is a piece of shit who is comfortable with the status quo and obviously couldn’t care less about an elderly disabled man living in poverty.
Just mealy mouthed bullshit from a cretin.
My idea…
Given that tenants are paying for the landlords asset, when the landlord sells a property, all previous and current tenants should be given right of first refusal with the sale price reduced by the amount of rent the tenant paid during their tenancy.
Simple, effective and equitable. It would recognize that it is in fact the tenant paying for the asset.
If landlords don’t like it, tough shit.
‘the state’s roll(role) to help people live in them’. That is called socialism Trevor and you keep saying it is a bad thing.
Greedy landlords disgust me and make me feel physically sick so time for many to take a long, hard look in the mirror and realise exactly how rapacious they have become. ‘You don’t kick a man when he’s down’ and that’s exactly what they are doing. Are they so stupid as to not realise if our renters leave NZ, or family take them in, there will be a glut of rental properties with NO tenants? NZ landlords have had it so good under this lily-livered CoC at the expense of those in need. It’s bad enough that our wages/salaries disproportionately benefit the already ‘sorted’ plus this CoC is fast selling off state owned rental housing and land. So surely there isn’t a need to be any GREEDIER!!! Where the hell do they think these people should live – in a cave, in a garage/shed, under a house? Are landlord’s whole lives just about the great God – money? You can’t take it with you! It doesn’t bring happiness! DO LOOK IN THAT MIRROR – time for a huge wake-up call.
Councils are part of the problem – I am paying more in rates now days than I was paying to rent in Wellington in the 90’s. I appreciate the library, arts and basic amenities, but could do without the endless growth and promotion and wankery. Over the last 20 years rates have just kept shooting up and up with no end in sight. I am not a landlord, but I am certain that those who are will be adding the cost of rates onto the renters. So let’s see councils half their rates and landlords be made to drop their rent by the same amount.
Expressed the wide concern that a majority of citizens feel JimmyJ. These are all dodgy denizens in Councils administration and even community voted, bound to run up debt to build structures that glorify the city they say, but also are a memorial to themselves, and measure of their achievement. It’s a mixed up attitude, makes me think of the Brit film ‘Never mind the Quality, Feel the Width’. Quite funny Wikipedia tells the tale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_Quality,_Feel_the_Width
“the landlord is not a charity and he must set the rent at a profitable level and it is the state’s roll to help people live in them through rent support if applicable.”….
..So my taxpayer dollars should also get used to support the landlord parasite class, the same parasites who got a massive tax break?
End the accommodation supplement and watch rents fall- it’s not like the houses are going to go anywhere.
If Hipkins believes that handing out icecreams is the path back to power he is sadly mistaken.
Part of the triad ( the influential third ) of the right wing government is Thatcherite
via the Grand Daddy of NZ Thatcherism.
If they hand out ice creams there is a small stick of dynamite replacing the Cadbury Flake.
Trump has given the hard right the heady realization that anything goes.And the first thing that will go will be Labour at the election.
My comments certainly stored up the usual people talking for tye Lwft view .It is a worry that these people represent the crowd that wants to run this beautifully county .
“talking for tye Lwft view”
“o run this beautifully county ”
My god that’s awful English and you are still living in the UK Trev as NZ is a country not county and was once beautiful but it’s a worry the present mob running the country are represented by your unhinged views.
Relevent facts are:
NZ is corrupt, but has no anti corruption agency.
NZ is vulnerable to climate extremes, but is encouraging fossil fuels and discouraging EVs.
NZ doesn’t have the money to properly fund health, yet there is no capital gains tax.
NZ has longstanding homelessness and house buying and renting unaffordability.
One answer: reduce inwards migration to near nothing, so there is population decline, to drive unemployment below 3%, and free up housing for younger buyers and retired renters, and ease over all enviromental impacts. And then bring in a moderate CGT to address the landlord gravy train. Try asking a homeless person, do they want a house or higher GDP?
Otherwise: we wait till Auckland city engulfs Hamilton and Tauranga, and our population hits 50 million, and then it will be too late to do anything about an even bigger mess, and we will all be renting our houses from overseas landlords. And NZ will be governed by an AI chatbot provided by google, and ozempic will be added to our drinking water, and we’ll all be eating soylient green.
Part of the problem is borrowing, with interest pushing up landlords’ costs. Borrowing should only be for productive purposes, and perhaps for consumption; not investment (except where the investment itself was for productive purposes). Interest should not be deductible either, and if a landlord did borrow he would be required to set the rent as though he were renting out a freehold property, i.e. no rent would be passed on to the tenant as part of the rent.
And it’s not just private landlords. Urban Plus in Lower Hutt, council-backed providers of housing for low income elderly, always raise their rents to the exact amount of any rise in accommodation supplement for superannuitants. Starting the very same week the rise kicks in. This on top of annual rises too.
” Landlords are Parasites, Using Extortion to Take Money From Tenants.”
Well, yes. Perhaps.
But.
While I’m no landlord, how do landlords differ from any other enterprise? In Reality Land it’s the banks who create the need for landlords. If you must get all righteous and start clawing at your scalps in indignation then you must also begin to claw at the banks. Banks, create the dis-ease. The moment a bank gets a dollar, they lie about how they did it while they artificially inflate the value of their enterprise. The banks take a dollar in at the front door then they lend it out the back door and say they must now have a generous stipend from the general us’s for the privilege. How the fuck does that work? Quite well, possibly.
Go here. Read this.
NZ banks ‘some of the most profitable in the world’
https://www.thepress.co.nz/business/350094635/nz-banks-some-most-profitable-world
But also
The astounding profit *Australian banks make in New Zealand every hour
https://www.stuff.co.nz/money/350557023/the-astounding-profit-australian-banks-make-in-new-zealand-every-hour
* Who were once owned AO/NZ banks. I mean, really? And why has TDB blocked me?
OMG! I’m unblocked. Again. Ok then… ( Watch Fargo.) Here we go, you betcha.