I mean, this is how businesses work in general. If you don’t buy their products/services, then they wouldn’t be able to continue providing them.

I understand that we’re trying to draw attention to exploitative landlords, but if anyone can afford to keep their property regardless of whether or not you pay rent, it’s the exploitative ones.

The problem is that landlords don’t create value, they seek to endlessly profit off of one time labor. Rent-seeking creates no real Value of any substance.

They do create value. They provide maintenance free housing as well as short term housing (short term as in 1-3 years.) Not everyone wants to stay in the same location for 5+ years. If you move around alot It you want to rent is usually the better option.

Now sure you could argue they are over charging for that service but that doesn’t mean they aren’t providing value.

The only reason why we are having issues is because there is a housing shortage that is raising the price and large companies have taken advantage of this by buying up all the houses at the crazy price and renting them out at crazy rent prices eating up the market for actual people to want to buy a house.

They provide maintenance free housing…

Keep in mind this isn’t always the case. Landlords where I used to live are increasingly requiring tenants to pay for some maintenance costs. A past landlord had us pay for anything $300 or less.

“Free” as it isn’t the renters responsibility. If something breaks they call the landlord and say fix it.

Obviously the maintenance cost will be baked into the rent cost, or as an added fee as shown in your example.

We had to fix it or arrange to have it fixed, then the landlord would verify it was fixed to their satisfaction. The landlord was otherwise hands off until it exceeded the cost limit. This was the norm for the area.

Ahh ok, I miss read your comment.