Meanwhile, every time I’ve rented from a corporation the property management has been evasive and incompetent, punting issues down the road and fixing issues with as little effort as possible (often leading to lasting damage and more expensive repairs down the road). All of the private owners I’ve rented from have been incredibly helpful, quick to deal with issues, and willing to flex on move-in/out dates, month-to-month terms, etc.

Sometimes it’s about the personal touch, not “economies of scale.”

Oddly, I agree with you.

When I rented from a personal landlord, when the dishwasher was leaking water across the kitchen they told me it was my problem to replace it with a like model as it must've been my abuse. I barely cook so I have no idea what I could've done wrong.

When I rented from a corporation it was no questions asked, even when I was at fault. They were even proactive with things like filters for the heating/cooling.

My takeaway? Private owners and corporations can both be total jerks to renters. Generalisations about them will (generally) miss the point.

> the personal touch

landlords. Give me a break..

Hm. This is a US-centric website discussing a piece of news from Berlin. Which country are you speaking about?

That’s my experience in the US cities I’ve lived in — NYC and Denver. As discussed in another comment, the truth of the matter is probably closer to “neither private owners nor coporations are universally good or bad.”

What you are missing is that corporate ownership makes it much easier to raise rent. It is very hard for 100 000 individual small time landlords to collectively raise rent in normal conditions (i.e., with no housing shortage). Many will lower rent to get their properties rented faster. But if you have a dozen or so large corporate owners it happens almost automatically.

This is very simple and well understood economics. If you lower the number of providers of a good or service they gain bargaining power.

Large corporations work very hard to make sure there is as large as possible number of providers of every item they buy and every service they use. But somehow when it comes to ordinary people, we are supposed to pretend it is a good thing. No, it is not a good thing.

"It is very hard for 100 000 individual small time landlords to collectively raise rent in normal conditions (i.e., with no housing shortage). Many will lower rent to get their properties rented faster. But if you have a dozen or so large corporate owners it happens almost automatically."

Yes, a 100,000-firm marketplace forces participants to be price takers.

Yes, a 1-firm marketplace allows the firm to arbitrarily raise rents.

Why do you think a dozen-firm marketplace "automatically" tends toward the latter?

A dozen seems like a pretty high number. Explicit OPEC-style cartels are illegal (I assume) under anti-trust law so we're talking about about some pretty implicit forms of collusion.

The way it works here, all the corp landlord have their rent prices track the housing market. So when average price of a certain class of home moves up 5%, so does your rent.

In 2004 the state of Berlin sold 65000 flats for 405 million euro. Now they are buying 14700 flats for 2.46 billion euro. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSW_Immobilien . Back then they had the same coalition in power as today, the taxpayers money at work.

The important context here: The conservatives who were at the helm pre 2004 created a big banking crisis that brought Berlin on the brink of insolvency, which forced the state to sell a bunch of public property: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bankenskandal (German only, sorry)

> In 2004 the state of Berlin sold 65000 flats for 405 million euro.

So, the average price per flat was € 6,230. That sounds impossibly low. Or were these distressed, dilapidated properties?

In the same period or a bit earlier, hundreds of thousands of apartments in Bucharest and other major cities were sold at preferential prices (read: heavily discounted) to the renters. It was a populist measure, people bought apartments and sold them a year later at 4-5 times the purchase price.

Also the old Communist era small apartments were cheaply build and without much value. 6000 euro looks low, but I bought in 1998 from the open market an apartment for $13,000 (the transaction was in USD). These days, that apartment is around 3-4 times more expensive (I don't have it for many years), but it is still small and poorly insulated. "small" means less than 50 square meters, one living room and one bedroom.

Back then the general sentiment was that Berlin was going to shrink. A lot of high-rises were razed in the eastern districts, others were converted into low-rise buildings as part of the "Stadtumbau Ost" program.

It's not good. It's better than awful. What a horrible way to decide how to structure society. Landlords are parasites that expect their tenants to pay >100% of their mortgage costs every month or they'll be heartlessly ejected into the street.

I mean, as opposed to other businesses where owners expect customers to pay <100% of the costs of the product?

There’s a bit of a difference here, in that the landlord is also coming out the other side with an appreciating asset, not pure costs and the consumer coming out of the transaction with the asset.

The landlord gets 100% of the appreciation as well as 100% of the equity being built by the mortgage payments while the tenants are forced to pay for everything except the initial investment. It's extremely unfair and hurts the most vulnerable people in society.

Sorry but this is an ignorant take of someone who I presume does not own property. I would have thought similar until we bought a house. Some costs that a renter never thinks about: property taxes, home insurance, flood insurance, leaky roofs, flooded basements, mold remediation, HVAC system replacements, the list goes on. If you think a landlord buys a house and never has to put another dollar in, you are on crack.

If you are a landlord you face plenty of other risks - time between tennants, you incur all the expenses and none of the revenue. Ditto if your renter stops paying and it takes you months or years to evict them. Or your tennant does damage to your property that their security deposit doesn't come close to covering.

On top of all that, there are real risks of asset decline. Just because that hasn't happened recently in most places doesn't mean it won't happen. I can name 5 plausible scenarios under which my house ends up never being worth what I paid for it.

It seems to me that you and others claiming that being a landlord is free money just have zero idea of what it actually takes.

All of those things and more are paid for by the rent since it keeps going up 5% every year while the mortgage payment stays the same.

I don't understand how anyone can view this as unfair. It's as basic as basic economics gets. It is obviously the case that downstream consumers of goods and services pay more than upstream suppliers. The initial investment is an enormous risk for the landlord, not something to just shrug off.

I guess if you view housing as somehow exempt from market dynamics, then this view holds water. I'm sympathetic to that view, honestly.

Housing market dynamics are strongly influenced by federal policy and the National Association of Realtors is one of the biggest spending lobbyist groups in the country so I would say that by design the housing market is unique and I believe that landlords are abusing that situation, intentionally or not, in a way that harms vulnerable people.

Many markets are strongly influenced by federal policy and have enormous lobbying groups, and capitalism by its nature harms vulnerable people. I don't see what makes housing unique in this sense.

So any company that increases its valuation as a result of more customers or more revenue is also extremely unfair?

So it is services generally that you have a problem with?

> the landlord is also coming out the other side with an appreciating asset

This isn’t true of services in general. Are you reading the comment you’re responding to, or are you just being belligerent?

The restaurant isn't disassembled when you leave, when you eat a meal at a establishment you pay for the upkeep of a building that will grow in value over time and yet receive no upside. If you take an Uber, you pay the auto loan of the person driving you. I guess a pure service like housecleaning doesn't leave behind a productive asset, although the business itself is one.

Obviously you get a hard product when you get a meal. You get someone's labour when you ride and Uber and consume gas and car.

When you rent, you basically are buying someone else a house. You don't get any service in many cases, as the landlord can contract our 100% of maintenance and repair and still make massive amounts of money.

When you eat at a restaurant you are in the very same way also buying them a restaurant. That food will only satiate you for a few hours and eventually you will have to eat again, having nothing to show for the service. In the same way you can rent a house from someone, have shelter from the elements for a time and once that business has concluded have nothing to show for it.

I don't' advise eating out too much or renting long term if you can avoid it. I also don't advise living in a major city. You can more easily take the first two pieces of advice if you take the third first.

No, you're absolutely not buying them a restaurant. They are fundamentally making money because they provide labour in exchange for it.

A landlord is not providing labour. They are acting as a middle-man between you and the bank. They provide no service to society. A restaurant is, as they provide cooked food. One is a zero-sum game, the other is actually producing something.

Your advice is frankly shit on the societal level. There is no way for everyone to avoid long-term rentals unless we do things you are opposed to. Equally it's impossible for everyone to avoid living in big cities, the entire economy would collapse. It's senseless to punish people for doing things that are necessary for our common prosperity and interests, such as living in major cities.

‘ A landlord is not providing labour.’ All built structures undergo entropic decay so maintenance would count as labour being done in both cases, the apartment and the restaurant using the textbook definition. These costs would be packaged into the rent and the price of meals.

Plenty of landlords subcontract maintenance, actually. There is landlording, and there is maintenance, some landlords do both, many do no maintenance themselves.

So through market calculation we can deduce that maintenance is only a small part of rent, the majority of rent is derived from being a middleman with the bank.

This is not the case for a restaurant, you'll find that all of the value in takeout comes from the labour and the capital necessary to make that labour efficient.

Would any landlord sign an agreement stating that you would do all the maintenance and then allow you to live there for free? Of course not.

> Would any landlord sign an agreement stating that you would do all the maintenance and then allow you to live there for free?

This happens frequently enough that you can find a number of articles on how to approach that very arrangement from a tax perspective[0].

[0]https://homeguides.sfgate.com/record-work-done-rental-proper...

That's not what work done in lieu of rent means. Work done in lieu of rent will only replace part of rent. For example I might get annoyed that repairs aren't getting done and offer to do them instead of paying on month of rent as part of a yearly lease, but no one will allow you to only do maintenance and never pay rent.

Show me someone who, on the open markets, offers to allow you to live in a property in exchange for nothing else.

>no one will allow you to only do maintenance and never pay rent.

> Show me someone who, on the open markets, offers to allow you to live in a property in exchange for nothing else.

Property caretaker

A property caretaker is a person, group, or organization that cares for real estate for trade or financial compensation, and sometimes as a barter for rent-free living accommodations.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_caretaker

‘ you'll find that all of the value in takeout comes from the labour and the capital necessary to make that labour efficient.’

Last time I checked kitchens and kitchen equipment are not immune from entropy…

Kitchens and kitchen equipement are necessary to allow cooking, but repairing the kitchen by itself provides zero value to anyone.

Huh? Even a kitchen not in use provides value as all tools do. Unless you don’t believe that tools have latent value?

Don't many restaurants rent? They're stuck in the same predatory situation.

That's only the "happy path" (for the landlord) story. I had a coworker who enterprisingly rented his old apartment to someone, who ended up squatting and forcing him into an expensive and drawn-out litigation. The tenant absolutely abused him and the California law which favors tenants quite strongly. He was a young guy in his 20's, not rich, and that woman really hurt him.

And of course there are other risks too; can you imagine being an entity that owns lots of commercial for-lease real-estate right now?! They must be scrambling to stop the bleeding, since Covid has sent demand into the earth.

My point is that being a landlord is not without risk, and it's not always an "I do nothing and make money by leveraging your fear of homelessness" situation (although, granted, this is the ideal state landlord's seek, which is itself kinda gross).

> since Covid has sent demand into the earth.

This needs more context.

Around here, it's nigh impossible to get a place. Social housing has waiting lists for over a decade, private renting is more expensive than a mortgage, and buying a house requires you to overbid. There are (plenty) stories of folks overbidding 50k€ and still not getting the house.

If you can afford to buy a house, buy it, divide into subunits, charge 80% of mortgage to each of the 5 subunits.

Anyway, that's what tge housing market looks like here. So I'm guessing your experience is from elsewhere.

Perhaps you missed the word "commercial" - which means renting to businesses, rather than individuals. Covid has increased WFH a lot and many small businesses are going virtual, and even larger businesses are scaling back their physical offices. This has the net effect of driving down demand for office space.

It's a bit confusing since you discuss commercial properties between two paragraphs discussing housing rentals. It isn't specifically clear that your comment about low demand only applies to commercial properties.

good? landlording isn’t and shouldn’t be pitched as a risk free investment strategy. I’m glad some landlords have finally realised this.

> My point is that being a landlord is not without risk, and it's not always an "I do nothing and make money by leveraging your fear of homelessness" situation (although, granted, this is the ideal state landlord's seek, which is itself kinda gross).

Yep, that's the problem, at least in the US. Ideally we'd reduce risk on both sides. Rent control wouldn't have to hurt this - your tenant's rent doesn't go up much, but your mortgage isn't going up much either.

It's not like small landlords are in position to redevelop and increase density anyway, so I'm skeptical of arguments about housing stock if you limit the upside (and downside!) of small private landlording.

It's often pitched as the most productive investment strategy for the middle to lower-upper class. Get one property, leverage it into a second, leverage more rents into a third, etc. Even in tenant-friendly states! Yet it's literally just rent-seeking and landlords riding along a wave of demand that they help create (by leveraging their properties and rent to acquire more) to squeeze higher and higher rents out of people is not particularly economically productive overall.

Covid is the first real blip I can remember that's hit those landlords so hard, but the truth is many of these people are over-leveraged and were in a precarious position to start with given the risk. Let's say there were no eviction bans: they could evict all these folks not paying their rent, and ... try to rent out the units to the people that got evicted by other landlords? Because they couldn't afford the old market rate in the first place? Doesn't that just depress the rental market even more?

> Yet it's literally just rent-seeking

That's not the economic definition of rent seeking.

> and landlords riding along a wave of demand that they help create

Demand for owning, yes. But for renting they create supply, not demand, in effect helping lower rents.

> That's not the economic definition of rent seeking.

It is. In fact, the general economic concept of rent and rent-seeking are generalizations of the inherent features of real property rents, which are the source of the name.

(EDIT: Fixed egregious touch keyboard vomit, clarified “land” to “real property”.)

If you want to collect land rents you would buy assets that are mostly land, e.g. empty lots, or even single family houses, not apartment blocks where you're paying more for the building than the land.

Just FYI, it looks like you might have a typo in your post. I usually enjoy your posts and think they're well thought out, so I felt the need to point this out.

> Demand for owning, yes. But for renting they create supply, not demand, in effect helping lower rents.

No supply is created by person A buying a rental building from person B. Person A paying a higher purchase price does nothing good to the rents charged in that building.

Yes, there is no lobbying or current manipulation of the government, but for small landlords it's often just a game of "I want to take advantage of population increasing over time to make more money over time" coupled with "I want to take advantage of other people improving the economy so that I can charge higher rents as incomes increase." Neither of those are productive, and the latter is hard to avoid calling parasitic. They don't have the ability to redevelop into higher density, or often even do much to change the condition of the property. So you get small mom-and-pop rentals in SF or similar places that charge far higher prices for far shittier units compared to those put on the market from larger developers or management companies in, say, Marietta, GA.

But if someone buys a house and rents it out instead of living in it, that creates rental supply.

In a free market, pushing up prices of apartment buildings would also cause more apartment buildings to be built. Of course many places like SF are not a free market because NIMBYs block most construction, which keeps supply down and prices up.

Rental supply is an idiotic concept. You are increasing rental supply by diminishing owned housing supply. You're not doing anything for housing supply, which is the only thing that matters.

And no, pushing up the prices of rents don't incentivize building. Building rentals is meh compared to just buying existing housing supply. While house prices are increasing, so will rental prices commensurately, because renting and buying a house are not isolated and independent choices.

In reality, there is no increase in construction, because the increase in housing demand is no different from someone buying a house, and the increase in property costs that follows it doesn't change anything.

> You are increasing rental supply by diminishing owned housing supply. You're not doing anything for housing supply, which is the only thing that matters.

They're two separate markets. Increasing rental supply does drive down rents.

If in one location, rents are very low but house prices are very high, then landlords would have incentive to take properties off the rental market in that location and sell them, perhaps using the proceeds to buy investments elsewhere.

They are absolutely not two separate markets. You can buy one and sell it as the other, and you can decide to sell the same housing unit as a rental or outright. It's the same market. There is no separation between the two.

Increasing owned housing supply decreases property costs. Decreasing property costs reduce the costs of renting, and they also make buying a house more competitive than renting, which is why increasing housing supply, not rental supply, drives down rent.

Beyond that, increasing rental supply alone will not decrease rent. It's perfectly viable for rents to increase despite more rental units if the alternative of buying a house got more expensive. See the recent increase in rents as property prices increased, despite no change in rental supply.

They've still gotta live somewhere. Overall housing supply has not been increased.

I actually think this case is worse for the overall economy than the rental building scenario!

Perpetual rentership is more economically precarious and less stable than ownership. But here we have the folks with assets and income sufficient to purchase properties buying up additional ones to pull ownership further out of reach for more people. So yay, we've converted a property that someone might've otherwise purchased as an asset to yet another rental.

I also don't agree with your claim that in a free market this would cause (much more rapid) increased construction in most cities, given current attitudes about small-landlordship. You can't build there without tearing something else down first, and small landlords are not often going about replacing ten unit buildings with twenty unit buildings! That requires a different level of capital. In SoCal can see this in neighborhoods in places where the current zoning allows, say, 5 story buildings, but those new five story buildings are still sparsely scattered amongst old two-story buildings that are simply too attractive to keep (the dream people are pitched that makes them become small landlords isn't "sell everything eventually to a developer, it's "passive income".) Small landlords made a lot of fuss about earthquake retrofitting, a much smaller expense than "kick out all my current income-generating tenants and rebuild it all." It's been much easier for developers to convert old low-density commercial or industrial property, since the market is more fluid there (and often with much more slack in it, in large cities).

I similarly don't expect a high number of single family lots to turn into four-plexes in the next fifteen years now that CA has changed zoning on them. It's definitely different at four units than two - where duplexes aren't selling for any more than SFH currently, since the qualitative demand for a true single family home is just that much higher - but I don't think it's enough different for a significant number of people to want to cash out or try to play developer.

(NIMBY's exist everywhere, too - acting like they're unique to big expensive cities is self-defeating. The way lower-cost-of-living cities have maintained those costs is a combination of less demand and more land to expand into. If you can build your new mega apartment complex on empty land, you don't have to convince those small-time landlords or property owners to sell all their separate buildings! Dallas County didn't increase in population much more rapidly than SF County because of rapid increases in density - just look at the Dallas city population vs the burbs.)

> old apartment

> California

Prop 13. Your friend is doing just fine.

Why would you care about the risks of being a parasite on vulnerable people?

It’s all awesome until the roof needs to be redone or the cellar is flooded.

I had my deposit stolen recently by a large corporate landlord in SF when COVID lockdowns started.

Large corporate landlords are the ones who calculate the legal costs of massive abuses and do it anyways.

California small claims court costs like $50. If you win there's a permanent ruling against the landlord.

It's worth going through the process just to learn. It's also crazy how difficult it is.

Do you mean that it’s noticeably more difficult than the equivalent process in other states?

I've never tried in other states. But on an absolute scale I found it ridiculous how many gotchas they put in place to keep you out of court. I remember sitting there watching so many people get told by the judge "you forgot to file proof of service" or whatever and get their case thrown out. And it takes a whole day. How many tenants can easily get a day off?

If I were a landlord I'd keep every deposit no matter what.

By gotchas do you mean folks who misfile their paperwork, or that there’s actually hidden paperwork brought out after a proper filing?

"misfile" yes. But it's amazing how easy it is to do that. This isn't like the DMV or a passport where most people can get it right after a couple tries. You really need to be on top of your shit to win in small claims court.

Ownership moves from corporate to communal, which also manages several thousand units already. There's no individual owner involved in this scheme.

Yes but looked at another way, this is taxpayers subsidizing real estate investment. The act of buying all the units by the government actively raises the collective price of real estate making it an even more lucrative investment.

The taxpayers should also gain from any appreciation of the housing stock, no? Seems like a reasonable, if very abstract, take on community ownership (on paper).

Short term, many people gain from artificially inflating the value of goods in a supply restricted market, but that is just market manipulation, no real value added. Those apartments will be demolished one day and the value will drop from $100,000 to $0 in a second.

So it moves from one landlord to another. In my experience (in Sweden) the communal landlords are no different from corporate, and most people don't even know if their landlord is communal or corporate.

I've never had a prompt and responsive landlord. But at least with an individual, you get the responsible party on the phone. With property management companies, you need to navigate the corporation in order to get work done, and some are quite skilled at putting stupid barely-legal obstacles in your way.

> Economies of scale are real.

Agreed. Try getting google on the phone for support.

Actually it depends on the line of business. It is quite easy to get Google on the phone for Google Fi for example. As for their "free" services, you are not their real customer but the product they sell.

It's famously hard to get any kind of support for GCP and the Android store as well, so I'm not sure this applies only to their "free" services.

You get the best of both worlds with housing cooperatives, where the tenants are also collective owners of the units. Those are pretty common in Berlin and the rest of Germany (at least Eastern Germany).

You have a large enterprise giving tenants the advantages you described, while also removing the incentive to rise rents on every possible occasion.

I wish there was more of this in North America. It’s either rent and own nothing, get soaked by a condo corp, or own a McMansion freehold out in the burbs.

It’s also much easier to avoid scams.

Plenty of individual owners will rent out units they don’t actually own , rent it out while in foreclosure, etc.

That said, always see the unit first. Avoid luxury apartments! Get the cheapest place in the best neighborhood

The worst is renting a condo and then something affects your unit that requires the HOA's involvement... might be faster just to move out.

When I was in Berlin I got the exact opposite experience. Same in Hamburg. Are you actually talking about Germany?

Believe me, I’ve lived in both individual and corporate owned rentals. I fully agree that the latter are better organized, and economies of scale are real.

But I’d much rather nobody invest in housing, and governments handle scaled affordable housing - so that there’s accountability and no profit motive.

P.S. Please no replies claiming anything run by the gov will fail; those are boring and called whataboutism.

Government run housing can have its own problems too. For example in Singapore, there have been huge issues with gay couples being unable to rent housing. This can happen with some private landlords too, but at least in that situation there can be multiple suppliers and you only need one to rent to you.

While we’re using anecdotes, corporate owned housing can have issues too. They discriminate against renters with low income, unstable jobs, mixed-race families, etc etc - examples from “first world” Netherlands, where companies like MVGM own majorities of rental housing.

> While we’re using anecdotes...

Shallow dismissal. Singapore discriminates against LGBTQ couples as a matter of policy. Just because it doesn't affect you doesn't mean it's an anecdote.

https://the-singapore-lgbt-encyclopaedia.wikia.org/wiki/Publ...

It's still an anecdote. Corporate housing discriminates against poor people and people of colour as a matter of incentive, which is no different in practice.

In any case, it doesn't change anything, if Singapore is oppressing LGBT people they will do so government owned housing or not.

Sorry but it’s just not an anecdote. It’s government policy, as you can easily determine by googling. It’s not like we have to take one person’s word for it that this is happening.

The argument is not about Singapore. You're making the argument that it's not a good idea to have government-run public housing (presumably in Berlin/US/UK) because one government somewhere they did something bad through that they could have done even with private housing.

It's an anecdote for your argument. If the argument was "did Singapore discriminate against people through housing" it wouldn't be. If the argument is "should we have public housing [here]" then it's an anecdote. You'd have to show that this would happen in the place in question. If you want to make a general statement, you'd have to make that clear and make the case that in such countries landlords wouldn't discriminate against you for being LGBT (which they absolutely do).

I’m not making any argument about whether it’s a good idea to have government run public housing. I think you have me confused with another poster.

Your definition of ‘anecdote’ seems way off to me. We’re talking about an objectively verifiable data point. Just because it doesn’t fully confirm some argument that someone’s making doesn’t make it an anecdote. Check the dictionary definition.

Anecdotes are objectively verifiable data points. The key is that they are a single data point and can't be used to make a general argument because of that. It's a single interesting story about an event. That is a valid definition of "anecdote".

Housing discrimination against LGBT people in Singapore isn't a single story, it's government policy.

The definition of 'anecdote' has nothing to do with arguments. 'Anecdote' isn't a back formation from 'anecdotal argument'.

It's completely legal for private landlords to discriminate against LGBT people in housing federally in the US, as well as many states, counties and cities. And it happens quite often.

There's also the Fair Housing Act exemptions, where small private landlords with fewer than about 4 units, or landlords that share buildings with their tenants, can ignore the discrimination limits imposed by the FHA.

I think Singapore discriminating against LGBTQ is the bigger deal than Singapore owning the housing.

It's all part of the same deal for people living in Singapore. They don't get to pick and choose which aspects of the government they want (democracy in Singapore is a farce.)

Sure, but that goes to show that "state ownership" simply means very different things in a democratic state vs a non-democratic state. Democratic state ownership is a kind of public ownership - the voters have some amount of control over the state, and through the state, over the owned resource. Non-democratic state ownership is a kind of private ownership - the dictator(s) have direct control of the resource, and the voters have no more rights to control state-owned property than corporate-owned property.

Indeed! As I acknowledge in the last sentence of my comment. Because of these things, I think the healthiest housing markets are those with a good mix of suppliers (both govt and private). Supplier competition comes with many benefits.

My point about MVGM and the rental corporations mentioned in the post, is that they’re massive and bordering on mono/duopolies. That reduces the “mix of suppliers” you’re talking about. Moreover, most corporations act similarly when driven by profit, so it’s a false choice.

The vast majority of public housing in Singapore is owned, not rented. However, government policy is that subsidized flats are only available to married couples, and thanks to colonial-era British laws still in force, in Singapore that means only a man and woman.

>and thanks to colonial-era British laws still in force

These laws could easily be repealed. The root cause of the problem is that Singapore is still a pretty homophobic society. (Also, did Singapore have same sex marriage before British Colonial rule?)

The quasi-fascist PAP has ruled Singapore with authoritarian force since the 1950s. They have the uncontested power to change any old British law they wish. If they haven't, it's because they've chosen not to. If you want to point fingers, all fingers in modern Singapore should be pointed directly at the PAP.

A non-democratic state like Singapore is very different in discussions of state-provided services compared to mostly democratic states.

A democratic state is, ideally, controlled by the people who live under its rule. As such, services provided by the state are, to some extent, under the control of these people, who can use their political power to influence those services directly in various ways. In contrast, people don't generally have any right to change the way a private entity chooses to do business, as part of the basic definitions of property rights. Basically, people often want public ownership, and use the idea of state ownership as the mechanism to achieve that.

This difference though changes completely when discussing an authoritarian state like Singapore (and even more so in dictatorial states). The benefit of democratic control that is expected from state ownership in democratic states doesn't exist if there is no democratic control of the state in the first place (this is one of the reasons it is absurd to talk about the USSR as "socialist", when all economic activity was in fact controlled by a state that was in turn controlled by a ruthless dictator). In a non-democratic state, state ownership is just as much private ownership as corporate ownership.

Of course, the problems get even more complex when you have a quasi-democratic state that is nevertheless actively discriminating against certain groups of people.

You live in bubble and are failing to look at all aspects of your situation including your own wealth.

Can you explain how wealth status of renters affects the competence of corporate landlords?

FWIW, I've also had nothing but good experiences in corporate-owned/managed housing.