All landlords are leeches. Every single one of them.
Many are. But I’ll stick my neck out here for when I rented in socal.
My landlord Randy was a retired dentist. He had built an ADU on his property in order to care for his very elderly mother. She had since passed away, leaving him with an empty mobile home in his backyard.
It sat empty for a few years, as his now-adult children and friends didn’t need it. He couldn’t sell it because of minimum plot size, setbacks, and utility issues.
I ended up renting from him for two years, and it was an excellent situation with reasonable rent and a great relationship.
I think a great many landlords are garbage, and I don’t think it’s possible to be a corporate landlord without being garbage. But there are some situations where a landlord is just a person who finds themselves in a situation where renting a space out makes the most sense. Open to other perspectives on this.
Landlords, by virtue of being a landlord, means their income is generated through rent seeking off the basic human necessity of shelter via simply “owning” the domicile that is being lived in by someone else through the system of private property ownership which is a core feature inherent to the unjust and oppressive capitalist economy.
By having their income be generated through simply having ownership over a means of survival makes them of the bourgeoisie/owning class and are inherently leeches off of those of the working class who must rent instead of own.
Landlords should not exist. Period.
I think they key counter-argument comes from your position “leeches off of those of the working class who must rent”. I agree with this! But it ignores people that want to rent for whatever reason, like living somewhere for a few years to attend university.
The only reason people want to rent is due to the inherent complications of the capitalist system making it unfeasible for those who fall underneath an arbitrary financial threshold to be able to own property plus the unnecessary complications that monetary systems cause in the exchanging said property.
Under a communal system of ownership. You can own the home for a few years while you live in it, under the rule of usufruct (use-based ownership), and once you are done the property returns to the community as a collective until someone else has need of it.
It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. But it is only because of the current systems we live under arbitrarily making this more complicated so that a few individuals (the owning class) can exploit these complications for profit and personal enrichment
Putting the cart before the horse here. We live in a capitalist society and people need temporary dwellings now, they can’t wait for a proletarian revolution and total restructuring of society.
Cool, but that has nothing to do with my point. I never said people should wait. I said landlords are leeches.
The fact that people can’t wait and the current system leaves them with no other alternative other than to be leeched on by someone who withholds private ownership over their home is an inherently oppressive situation to be in.
I just think your point is too black-and-white. In the current system there exists people who want temporary housing and people who own more housing than they require and are willing to let others use it for a mutually agreeable payment. Your claim that this is inherently oppressive requires that the renter would not choose ownership if they had the means. Is it often an unfair, coercive dynamic? Yes. Do rent-seekers ruin everything? Yes. Do we need to villainize every single person who doesn’t donate their spare mother-in-law or inherited property to the homeless? No.
This could actually be interesting if it was the opposite…
You can get a small discount, and pre pay the next month in advance. You can miss any of those payments up until the end of the month when the remaining balance is due.
The discount is based off how much you paid early.
Landlord gets a reduced risk as every early payment is money that is in his hands and available up to a month before.
Ours emails us this crap to. It’s going to be in my review when I move out. Ever since the Texas megacorp bought this place it has gone downhill.
Burn it all down
$15 plus 1% of rent plus card processing fees.
If your rent is $1200 and there’s a 3.5% processing fee, you’re looking at $70/month in extra fees.
Move. Into the streets of needed. Say no to insane bullshit
When you’re rich everything is free and when you’re broke it costs a lot.
yup. It’s fucking expensive being poor :/
This is clownshit.
Can he force you to enter a contract with them? Sounds illegal.
No, I still have the option of paying it all at once without going through this finance company. But they’ve been spamming my email letting me know about the “new payment option.”
Report the emails as spam, especially if they’re from the loan shark directly.
All at once? It’s either monthly with fees or a whole year of payments? This sounds illegal but what’s legal these days. I would say fuck this guy and give him a check every month and if he refuses then put it in a escrow account and tell him if he will only take one lump payment then he can wait until the end of the year to collect it.
By forcing lump payments they are removing your bargaining power when shit goes wrong. Withholding rent is the only power a renter has.
I mean all at once as a monthly payment, not for the full year.
Ahh then just block the emails.
Your landlord is a fool! They should have raised the rent by that same amount and then offered you a $10 a month discount to pay it all at once.
Rookie doesn’t know how to play a numbers/scam game. /s
In truth, sorry you are only being given such a scummy “option”. The simple math shows that the more often you pay (i e. the earlier the recipient gets your money) the more they make in the long run. They should just do that and be decent about the whole thing.
Why would anyone do this
Short answer: late stage capitalism
Long answer: Because they don’t have enough money to make rent on time and the associated fees are less than the late fees. Being poor is expensive.
I just moved from a shithole place that used and promoted Flex. The alternative was $300 late fees.
Pay earlier to avoid fees?
Brilliant, thanks!
I’m so grateful that big brain lent a fraction of their vast intelligence to think of us simple folk.
I’m genuinely curious why you can’t pay earlier…
Yeah I don’t think you’ve ever had to earn your own money.
I don’t appreciate being called a liar but I have nothing to prove to you. Hope you have a nice day
Do you tell deaf people to just hear as well?
He said he has to use flex or pay late fees. I’m curious what the alternative to flex is that forces him to pay late fees and why paying a few days earlier somehow doesn’t work to avoid fees. Just seems weird to me, but I’ve never been in that situation.
How do you pay early if something has happened and you don’t have the money? Not everyone can get mommy and daddy to do an instant wire transfer when things go wrong.
You’re supposed to have a 6month emergency fund built up. I just wanted to know what the alternative to flex pay was but apparently I didn’t ask that in the proper way. Sorry
Same reason people finance their groceries over 4 weekly payments now.
Rocket Mortgage has had this commercial for a couple years where some schlub is trudging back into his house lamenting the fact that six bags of groceries has become two (thanks to inflation). Suddenly his house starts talking to him and reminding him that he could get a Rocket Mortgage loan backed by his small amount of equity and use the money to buy groceries. Dude lights up with joy and dances into this house. It’s just beyond fucked that this is obviously one of their most successful commercials. It’s amazing that they can turn borrowing money for food into a positive.
I knew we were fucked when dicks sporting goods had a paper printout saying they would finance your yeti cooler on the end cap with the coolers.
I now refuse to ever own a yeti product. GFs family has a few, I refuse. The 2 yeti cups i have were gifts. And a 3rd one we found at a thrift store for $4.
14.99 plus payment fee of 1% of rent amount. So if your rent is 2k that’s another $20 per payment.
For what? Please tell me this is not the only payment option.
My apartment complex tried outsourcing their payment portal, attaching a fee to it, and making it the only way to pay.
I ended up going down to the office to write a check in front of them once a month, making sure to complain loud enough to be overheard when they had other people inquiring about apartments.
Apartments these days will nickle and dime you to death. Late in my tenancy, they wanted me to sign up to have my pets put into a database. They were also going to charge $25 per pet per month to have them in the database. You bet your ass I was in their office the next day with my pet addendum to discuss their breach of contract. My rabbits were not the dogs that kept getting loose and shitting all over the place.
Had an apartment a while back, they changed owners and didn’t really tell anyone until I got a note on my door saying next months rent, due in a week, can’t be done online, needed to be cash check or money order or eviction process would start. What if I was out of the country or working remotely and didn’t get the note? No email, no call, just note on the door.
I threw a fucking fit, this was the last straw after a parking lot flooded with gravel, moldy laundry rooms, flooded apartment. Then threaten me with eviction because of their bullshit?
I wrote up my refusal to renew then, like 2 months into a new lease. Made them reimburse me for having to get a money order (don’t have checks), then began looking to buy. When renewal came up, they said I needed to renew and raised the prices. I referred them to my email and printout and told them to fuck themselves.
They tried to bill me for cleaning after I moved out, just never replied.
A check, that is petty revenge for sure. We had a portal when we were renting from a slumlord (though we were renting a ridiculously awesome house from them for a reasonable price, one they owned themselves, most of their portfolio was dumps owned by Chinese people who bought them unseen) and yeah it had a fee but $3/month was the fee. I still thought it was funny, paying online is cheaper for them than dealing with my paper check, but we have to cover the cost of online portal but not the check? I’d probably charge people for giving me a check and make online free, if anything.
We did pay pet deposit, not pet rent. Fair I think, pets do add liability, even rabbits might get stressed and piss in the corner or something.
rabbits might get stressed and piss in the corner or something.
Oh yeah, they’re little pissers.
However, we already had a pet addendum, and laid out the pet fees and conditions for keeping the rabbits in the apartment. We also don’t let them on carpet because eating synthetic fibers can bind up their gut and cause them to die horribly.
Go the steam route, make it as convenient as possible and people will be happy to give you money.
Same shit as with pet screening. I already have to pay a $200 deposit for having a cat, a $30 per month fee for both cats and now $40 per cat per year for pet screening.
