this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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With homelessness exploding due to how the asset-owning Parasite Class is jacking rents into the stratosphere, why is any residential property vacant at this time?
Vacant residential properties should be taxed out the nose - well above any rent or price appreciation - until they are occupied by legitimate tenants.
Because the last tenant put holes in the walls, their dog's piss caused the floor to lift, and the shower they plugged then overflowed fucked up the bathroom?
So there are repairs to do in order to make the place livable and then time to find somebody else who won't just wreck the place again?
Yeah there are lots of shit landlords but one of the continuing factors is the remaining good ones with a basement suite etc bailed after terrible tenants.
A vacancy tax is a good idea but there needs to be caveats for timelines especially if stuff like reasonable maintenance/repairs is taken into consideration.
Ironically my friends who bitched about "shit landlords" also happened to be the drinkin' smokin' big-dog-ownin' types who were the worst type of tenants and ruined shit for everyone else
Sorry, that's actually already factored into the cost of the rent.
The real reason why so many properties are vacant is that even though landlords know they could fill the vacant apartments by lowering the rent, there are companies that make money by telling landlords how much to set the rent for, even if they keep the apartments vacant. showing that they will make more money with less overhead by doing so, so that the decrease in hassle will justify the decrease in profit.
There are a couple of various lawsuits and actions that are going on about these companies right now, and we have yet to see how it's going to play out. But, the cat is out of the bag, the genie is out of the bottle, the likelihood of rents returning back to something that people can afford with minimum wage income any time soon is pretty low.
Don't landlords dislike vacancies because empty units get broken into and vandalized, creating more cost?
https://truthout.org/articles/real-estate-software-aided-price-fixing-cartel-among-us-property-companies/
Yeah, apparently, when they are using this real page software, they are able to figure out how much they can charge for an apartment and how many apartments they can leave vacant before dropping their prices, and as long as the software says they'll make more money doing something one way, then that's what they're going to do.
I know they use software to figure out optimal rent, I just wonder how sophisticated the algorithm is. It might just use industry statistics and simple arithmetic to determine how many people will move out if rent is raised a by a certain amount, how much this will increase revenue, and how much the additional vacancies will reduce revenue. Finding the sweet spot wouldn't be hard at all. But this isn't worth much unless it also takes into account the costs of vandalism, evicting squatters, and whatever else might be involved.