Are you suggesting the government steal their property?

No, but it could implement hefty property tax on properties owned by non-residents.

Vancouver Canada taxes foreign buyers 20% on top of the listing price and has a speculator tax of 0.5% (eventually 2%) tax on homes owned by people not paying provincial income taxes (primary residences and long-term rental properties are exempt). They also have a 1% annual tax on the assessed value of "empty homes".

And then those hefty taxes will be passed on in the form of rent. The non-resident never ends up on the hook.

I own property which is currently collecting rent.

The rent is set by the market — if I charged a million bucks a month (it’s a one bed flat) it would be empty.

No matter what my costs are, the number chosen by my agent has to be both “as high as possible” and “no higher”.

I do know the government can mess up and if you Google “rent controls” the standard downsides there are real problems if the government goes too far — but there is room to improve the current unreasonable (in my favour) mess.

I don’t understand when people believe this - as an owner of an investment property in Auckland, NZ, I almost never can just pass on increases to my tenants, unless I want long stretches of no tenants, even with the shortage as it stands.

The market dictates what I can charge.

And if I have good tenants I’d rather keep them than immediately try to recover costs.

You might buffer changes in costs and provide some stability to the tenants just as they can provide some to you by extending a lease rather than vacating. But, you do need to adjust and pass on the costs, or fail as an investor. In a significant way, the service in a healthy landlord-tenant transaction is for the landlord to accept the liquidity hit and risk of property ownership and redistribute it along with other costs in the form of rent.

Where people may get confused is in ignoring the land appreciation assumptions built into a speculative investment. They don't always recognize that a capital-rich investor might be perfectly happy to buy a property and sit on it for decades without thinking of it as a revenue source. They can only imagine a more leveraged landlord where the property is purchased with a minimal down payment, the rents have to cover all mortgage, tax, and other operating bills, and the landlord may only have a limited amount of emergency capital.

The second point here is the most important. I know a handful of real estate investors and one that is far away the most successful. He buys everything in cash. He has a contracting team on payroll that fixes whatever needs fixing so he's not immediately outlaying any additional funds to fix up a property, other than the opportunity cost of having those employees busy. He hasn't mortgaged a property in probably half a decade or more.

If he thinks a property will appreciate and make money, he will absolutely buy it and let it just sit on his books for a decade while the RE value increases and he waits for an opportune time to develop or rehab it.

Just introduce the property tax, and either increase services or decrease local taxes

So you want to lower rent in the area by charging more money to non-residents, who will then pass the fees down in the form of higher rent?

I'm not suggesting anything. If you can't respond without libertarian insinuations that government be the bad agent here and simply repossess the property, please don't.

Feel free to come up with constructive solutions though.

Saying "what about" the people who have already lawfully purchased property certainly has the implicit assumption that something has to be "done" about them, doesn't it? I didn't insinuate anything.

They can go fuck themselves.

Please don't do this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html