Your mistake is in framing landlord as a job.

Try your hand at maintaining a property other than your residence. I sure as hell can’t keep up with my own home, let alone another.

You’ll be downvoted but you’re correct. Being a (good) small time landlord for affordable housing is a full time job as well as basically being on call 24/7. Unfortunately when a corporation does it, it has the power to bleed everyone dry.

good

landlord

Pick one

Betty and Bob who are in their sixties, and Bob who still does all the maintenance on the apartment, aren’t the bad guy. They’re renting out a portion of their property because society failed them, because the capitalistic elite failed them, and they don’t have the safety net they should have already had to carry them through their retirement years.

It takes five seconds to realize that mindlessly saying ‘ALAB’ removes too much nuance here. Big corporations that are buying up the land and putting out overpriced apartments? Pricing out the community that lives there? Yeah, absolutely. Pass me a pitchfork and I’ll jump in behind you. But all of this ‘A*AB’ stuff gets nonsensical very quickly.

Betty and Bob are in an unfortunate situation, but they’re taking a thing of value and charging money to cover all costs, and make a profit. The tenant is therefore paying the mortgage and all repair costs, and then even more to support what amounts to a leech.

It might be a good arrangement for Betty and Bob, but it makes living somewhere more expensive.

Which is the general point. I can be sympathetic to Betty and Bob, but landlords buying houses leaves less houses for everyone else for a ‘job’ that doesn’t add any real value to society. It just props up someone with the economic means to buy multiple houses and make them a living while hanging the rest of us out to dry.

Ok, so we’re going to throw a negative generalization up to support our narrative of ‘ALAB’.

I purchased my home within the last 4 years. Before that my wife rented from the same owner for 10 years. Living in midtown Atlanta, a place that is now full of 1.5 million dollar homes on postal stamp sized lots. That landlord or owner may have had a few properties, we don’t know, but it was a personal rental that was a 2Bed/1bath for 2/3rds the local rate. And they did the maintenance at their expense.

They also have kept up with her afterward, and mentioned that they wish that they could have found another tenant like us. If I rented out a portion of my place while I was living out of town for work? I’d aspire to be as good as they were. Sadly, it’s just me now so maintenance and yard work would have to wait for the weekends.

Let’s just have a little more nuance. Big Corpo is bad, but not everyone who is trying to make a living is.

I’d say there’s a difference between renting out a portion of a house the landlord also lives in and purchasing whole other homes and renting them out.

Besides, no matter how nice the multi-home-owning landlord is, the reality is they don’t purchase homes and rent them out without making a profit on all expected costs, maintenance included. The better deal for the renter renting a whole home would be to own the home and maintain it, because then they’re saving the profit the landlord charges.

A nice polite leech is still a leech.

Sure, everything you purchase in a capitalistic society has profit added to it, but normally there’s also added value. You pay more in the brick and mortar store vs buying online because the added value is getting the item immediately. You pay more for the car part at the mechanics shop vs doing it yourself because having a professional install it adds value.

What value does Jim-bob owning 5 homes and renting them out to make a living add to the tenants?

What value does Jim-bob owning 5 homes and renting them out to make a living add to the tenants?

A place to live without having to handle maintenance/upkeep themselves, to be approved for a mortgage, save up for a downpayment, or to have to sell (and navigate all the mess of that process) when they need to move.

Admittedly, some of the above rely on you having a landlord that isn’t shit.

I know a few people who could afford to buy a rather nice home, who instead seek out short term lease rentals to live in, so they can travel more and not need to be tied down to a specific place.