There were subsidies provided by multiple levels of government[1][2], down the city level where I live. Apparently there was at least (if not more than) the usual level of misappropriation of those subsidies, so complaints from landlords abound.

[1] https://dfpi.ca.gov/2021/03/15/covid19/

[2] https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/coronavirus/assistan...

My sister manages a large portfolio of properties in Virginia and North Carolina in her role as a director at a medium-sized property management firm.

The reality for her company, and many landlords, is that it was extremely easy for a deadbeat tenant to stop paying rent. They simply printed out the form, filled it out (it was essentially a 1 page form), and they could immediately stop paying rent and not be subject to eviction. No verification was needed. City workers who were definitely still employed according to public records were doing this on 3 of her properties when they did an audit.

Conversely, the programs that would reimburse landlords required far more rigorous documentation, AND ACTION FROM THE TENANT. That last part was the killer. The deadbeats simply had no interest or motivation to fill out paperwork that allowed the landlord to get reimbursed.

I know that this is anecdotal, but my sister is also an elected representative of an industry group that represents property management companies. Her group did extensive surveys and analytics, and concluded that in the state of Virginia, the problem was widespread, and her company's experience was actually a bit better than most of the other member companies.

She would call me to vent quite a bit. She was furious at how "thoughtless" the original implementation of the moratorium was under the Trump administration. She thought for sure that Biden would come in, see it as a Trump artifact, and revise it in a careful way. This didn't happen, and he instead extended it twice. It was extremely detrimental to their business, but more importantly, to any and all new tenants, as well as existing tenants. New tenants had to pay far higher rents. Her company had to cover the losses from the deadbeats, and additionally, had to "price in" the risk of a new tenant suddenly filing the moratorium form and ceasing to pay rent.

It never ceases to amaze me how bureaucracies will double down on policies while ignoring the unintended consequences they produce.

Yup, the programs could have been better implemented, and requiring action from the tenant (presumably to prevent landlords from claiming 'unpaid' rent on empty units) supposes more cooperation between tenants and landlord than is reasonable to expect.

The deadbeat tenants don't really escape their liabilities though. They've gone for so many months not paying and not pursuing aid. So when they're evicted, eventually, they owe so many months back rent to the landlord. I'm sure some will escape through bankruptcy, expatriation, new aid, etc, and that the annoyance (if not the cost) of pursuing the rest will be substantial. But anyone that actually realized a financial gain at the landlords expense through is going to face liens, garnishment, and seizures until they're square. If there really are tons of these people, it would seem like a good time to be in the collections business.

> Apparently there was at least (if not more than) the usual level of misappropriation of those subsidies, so complaints from landlords abound.

For the most part, we saw landlords REFUSING these subsidies and refusing to help tenants get them - https://newrepublic.com/article/163840/erap-cash-tenants-not...

> Is the assumption that all/most landlords have infinite money

Individually, no. As a class, yes. Property rental seems a lot like a Subway franchise in this respect. If one property owner becomes insolvent, the property will be sold to another person who is not. The tenant might be evicted by the new owner but, on average, probably not.

Edit: pardon my obscure Subway reference. Subway franchises are notorious for going out of business with incredible frequency. You'd never notice because an insolvent franchisee's best option is to sell the operating business to another, solvent franchisee. Subway arranges the sales. Then Subway sells more franchises with statements to the effect of "80% of locations have been operating for over 20 years" (not their actual words).

> Individually, no. As a class, yes.

Elevating group identity over individuals is the root of some of the most evil activities in human history.

It should be noted that individual human beings who moved to a new home and chose to rent their old home got burned by this moratorium as well. Often getting put in a situation where they were forced to foot the full bill of two mortgages, with no end in sight. There was a well-reported case of a terminally ill cancer patient who lost all of her income when a tenant in her split-level home stopped paying rent by abusing the moratorium.

Your Subway example was hilarious, BTW. I've seen that happen so many times lol.

Preventing a short spike was the goal. The eviction moratorium was never intended as a long term fix to homelessness.

As a landlord, I can tell you that the government does NOT replace ANY of the missed rent.

Moreover, while many tenants have continued to pay their rent - MANY have gradually started realizing that I am unable to evict them, and have completely stopped paying rent. Moreover, they have started collaborating under the assumption that there is more protection if they do it together.

Like other landlords, I have lost a tremendous amount of money in this pandemic. My 12 unit complex represents my retirement, so this hit me very personally.

It's incredibly unfair that the most honest tenants continue to pay. The ones not paying are not paying because they know they can get away with it - not because they cannot pay - they are all still working.

Even though you can’t evict them, I would have assumed the missing payment would catch up with them eventually - e.g. by tanking their credit rating, or selling their debt to a collections agency… Is this not the case? You just swallow the loss and go on?

This.

See another comment I made discussing my sister's experience.

The childish, dorm-roomy attitude of landlords being "big faceless corporations" is wholly inaccurate and distorted. The same group also has this view that most people using this program were honest, good citizens experiencing true hardship. This is absolutely not the case according to every audit my sister's company did, as well as the research the industry organization she was elected to did.

It's a bunch of dirtbags capitalizing on a poorly constructed policy.

There have absolutely been rental relief options available to landlords, I don’t know if your situation qualifies.

You are also entitled to sue your tenants in arrears for every penny of unpaid rent plus the costs of collecting. Even with a judgement you may not be able to collect if they have become destitute, that’s the nature of the business you are in.

I sincerely hope you get a chance to retire, society would be a lot better if everyone is able to. Hopefully we don’t all need a 12 unit building to do so!

The friction to stop paying rent was essentially zero. A 1 page form with no verification. The friction to get reimbursed, depending on where you are, was very high, and in the case of my sister's situation, required cooperation of the tenant, who had zero incentive to provide it.

I know you WANT to believe this program didn't screw over landlords, and that most of the people utilizing the program were honest, good human beings. That's simply not the case when you talk to any landlord.

Feel free to ask the person you are replying to what their experience has been. I have yet to meet a landlord that doesn't have a hugely negative view of the entire suite of pandemic programs.

It seems we are hearing exact opposite stories from people on opposite sides of the landlord / tenant relationship.

Does a tenant's lack of payment effect them negatively in other ways? Like credit report, or ability to get an apartment later (if you evict them after this memorandum)?

As a paying tenant, I don't think it's unfair to me if others don't pay up.

Financial advice always says, don't put your eggs into one basket. If a single multi unit apartment represented your retirement, that seems to have just been bad investment?

Anyway, rental assistance programs are available out there. Just need to put the work in and apply and wait.

Just because they can't be evicted doesn't mean that get free rent, especially if they're employed. You can still file a lien on them or garnish their wages.

It's a garbage situation. I hope things get back on track for you, and I hope karma gets those people what they deserve.

Your property value likely doubled in the past year, I think you’ll survive

>As a landlord, I can tell you that the government does NOT replace ANY of the missed rent.

I can see why people get so frustrated with landlords. It’s the same kind of frustration when Wall Street asks for government intervention after making a series of bad trades

This isn't a fair analogy at all. Landlords didn't cause the cause the pandemic. If anything, the government did. However, they are the ones who are forced to pay for provide a service that the government desires, housing, at their own expense. This might make sense if it were a tax, but it disproportionately effects certain people. Imagine if they 1% of people were randomly selected to forfeit 10% of their 401k for housing during the pandemic.

Even worse, a long term eviction moratorium is incentivizes landlords to filter out poorer tenants with income and credit requirements, making housing more expensive for them.

>This isn't a fair analogy at all. Landlords didn't cause the cause the pandemic. If anything, the government did.

If the government bans cigarettes, should the government then reimburse every shareholder in Philip Morris?

>However, they are the ones who are forced to pay for provide a service that the government desires, housing, at their own expense

Someone had to brunt the cost of the pandemic. It would have been bad public policy if the government had let people go homeless.

Regardless, my point isn't that the government acted piously here, it's that real estate is a capital asset class and should be treated as such. If you get in the game of capital speculation you shouldn't get to go crying to the government when things don't go your way. I have the same amount of sympathy for people who all-in on urban real estate and the people who go all in near to expiration SPY calls. The government's primary concern shouldn't be protecting people's capital investments.

> If the government bans cigarettes, should the government then reimburse every shareholder in Philip Morris?

No, but that's because Phillip Morris isn't actively offering anything to the government. A landlord that isn't allowed to evict is. If the government forces them for provide cigarettes to soldiers during a war, they have to pay them to do so.

> Someone had to brunt the cost of the pandemic.

That's what taxes are for. Even money printing is better. It doesn't make sense for them to target landlords who serve low-income tenants in particular. That would be like forcing grocery stores to offer free food to poor locals. In the short term, it may help some people, but in the long term, grocery stores in poor neighborhoods would simply shut down and everyone would be worse off. That's why we have food stamps instead.

> If you get in the game of capital speculation you shouldn't get to go crying to the government when things don't go your way.

I agree that land speculation is particularly useless and the government should try to get rid of it, but that's not happening. Property speculation is higher than ever.

Your account has breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. Worse yet, it has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's a line at which we ban accounts, because it is not what HN is for and destroys what it is for. More explanation here:

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I wonder why people think being a landlord is not a job.

why do you think it is one?

There's obviously work in maintaining an inherently depreciating, heavily worn asset. This is true of both landlords and anyone who loans out physical goods as a service.

Depreciating? That’s not how real estate works in the US

that work is done by maintenance workers — unless the landlord is personally out performing all the repairs, in which case they deserve to be compensated for their labor like anyone else. as mentioned below, the maintenance workers mysteriously aren't the ones entitled to a third of my paycheck...

secondly, ask anyone who's ever rented — landlords are notoriously awful at keeping up with maintenance. so if we're considering it a job, then they get paid far more for doing far worse work than any other occupation i can think of. does that not make you angry?

> that work is done by maintenance workers — unless the landlord is personally out performing all the repairs, in which case they deserve to be compensated for their labor like anyone else. as mentioned below, the maintenance workers mysteriously aren't the ones entitled to a third of my paycheck...

I'm not really following what you're saying here. It doesn't really make any difference whether or not the landlord does the work themselves. Either there's risk, and work to manage that risk, in renting out, or not. If there's not, then why wouldn't everyone be a landlord?

> secondly, ask anyone who's ever rented — landlords are notoriously awful at keeping up with maintenance. so if we're considering it a job, then they get paid far more for doing far worse work than any other occupation i can think of. does that not make you angry?

Some landlords are awful, yes I agree. Some people are bad at their jobs, you must also acknowledge. You vastly, vastly overestimate how much money an average landlord actually makes.

> does that not make you angry?

Why would it? If being a landlord is so easy, why wouldn't everyone do it? I like the flexibility of being able to move and not having to necessarily put down hundreds of thousands of dollars up front for property

> If being a landlord is so easy, why wouldn't everyone do it?

maybe just sit and think about this one for a minute?

the answer is that they don't have the capital, which is why it's a relationship of exploitation. by virtue of owning more capital than me, my landlord feels entitled to the fruit of my own labor. it's just feudalism in a new garb, as reflected in the terms we use (landlord/lady)

You don’t need much capital to be a landlord, hence mortgages. If you’ve never owned a house you can put literally 0% down.

The reasons to not be a landlord are plenty:

- potential downturn in the area

- tenants ruining your property

- inability to do maintenance affordably

- provide basic amenities and keep up with legal obligations can and do change unexpectedly

- potential eviction expense and risk

- rent collection, as we’ve seen from the pandemic

- dealing with people

People who think being a landlord is a slam dunk as long as you have the capital and it’s no work don’t know what they’re talking about.

Reminds me of people who think running a website is free money because the computer does everything.

I never said it was “free money,” i said it was exploitation. just because it takes some effort to extract money from me doesn’t make it justifiable.

In other words, here’s the world’s smallest violin for my landlord’s “potential eviction expense and risk”

as for mortgages, please show me a worker living paycheck to paycheck who’s been approved for a mortgage for a twelve unit building

How is being a landlord any more exploitative than offering any other service?

Tenants are under no obligation to rent to a given landlord or in a given area.

Your example doesn’t really make sense - someone living paycheck to paycheck would default on a mortgage even if they got one. It’s for those people that renting makes the most sense.

You originally implied that renting out property is not a job, which implies no work. To receive money for doing nothing would be “free.”

Anyway, you seem to have an irrational hatred of landlords based on falsehoods. Hopefully you can find solace.

Landlords do not offer a service.

They hoard housing, making it scarce, thus forcing others to rent it from them if they want to be housed.

If we outlawed the practice, landlords would have to sell their properties, significantly increasing the number of residential units on the market, and thus reducing the price and making it much more likely that someone living paycheck to paycheck would be able to afford a mortgage on one.

None of the work involved in maintaining a property requires that the person (or company) doing so be the property's owner. It would still be perfectly reasonable for an apartment building, as a co-op, to hire a single management company to handle cleaning, maintenance, etc—somewhat similarly to how some HOAs hire a company to do landscaping for all their residents. And, yes, potentially subject to inefficiency and corruption, but we live in an imperfect world, and it's not like apartment maintenance is a perfect bastion of competence and altruism today.

Housing doesn't just grow on trees. It's capital-intensive to produce. Capital that needs to see a return on investment, since it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are a certain class of people that simply cannot be relied on to pay a mortgage. These people still demand housing, so are served by the renters market. If you force every landlord to sell their housing, you're basically punishing them for investing. Since your heavy-handed regulation has now scared off all the capital from housing, how will you build new houses?

I'm not a fan of eliminating landlords, but I can easily and trivially see a system how housing is built and provided without landlords or mortgage providers. The old Latin American way: you buy each brick when you can afford it. Unfortunately the imbeciles in government would have an aneurism: "NOO!!! you can't just buy bricks and stack them without a special stamp on a piece of paper!!!! How else can I buy my next new Prius without your tax money?"

I lived for months out of a tent, and virtually the only reason I don't now is because of the retarded CPS / child abuse regulations in US let petty bureaucrats arbitrarily decide what adequate housing is. The US has insane building codes and zoning regulations that make housing way less affordable than it could be to build with a working man's cash.

Even in the Latin American way, surely there are people who can afford more than one house, and decide to rent out the surplus? But I agree that regulatory overhead in housing construction is very high, and this contributes to the cost of housing.

The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?

>Even in the Latin American way, surely there are people who can afford more than one house, and decide to rent out the surplus?

Sure, I don't really have a problem with landlords benefitting from investing into a house and renting it. I'm kind of with Adam Smith on the problems of rent-seeking of the value of the raw land, but I'm not sure a better system than private property can be found for dealing with that.

> The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?

Maybe somebody elses, maybe nobody's, maybe their own? I have no idea. If you aren't discriminating you can build a house brick by brick anywhere until someone with guns or a sledgehammer makes you stop, be it a land owner, gangster, government, whoever. I'd be interested in knowing myself.

> Your example doesn’t really make sense - someone living paycheck to paycheck would default on a mortgage even if they got one. It’s for those people that renting makes the most sense.

you just made my point for me — there is a class of the population that is forced into spending a third (often more!) of their income on housing, which is being hoarded by another class. no different from a feudal serf being forced to turn over their hard-won harvest to the nobility. but sure, they can go find another manor to live on, they’re under no obligation to give their labor to this particular lord...

So are you saying that people should not be allowed to.. accumulate capital? It's a bit of a radical thing to suggest. How did the landlord get the money to afford the building in the first place? Say he was a high-ranking professional or a successful entrepreneur and he used the capital he earned to buy a building - what's immoral here exactly?

it’s only “radical” from the narrow perspective of the last few hundred years of western capitalism.

> Say he was a high-ranking professional or a successful entrepreneur and he used the capital he earned to buy a building - what's immoral here exactly?

he’s using his capital to extract more wealth from those with fewer resources than himself. (that’s also how he accumulated the capital in the first place — but that’s another conversation.)

> last few hundred years of western capitalism.

"Capitalism" is just liberty + private property. The idea of a free class of citizens has been around for millenia, and the idea of private ownership of property has been around for longer. Property owners and tenants have existed since the dawn of agrarian civilization.

The radical innovation of the last few centuries was the private, limited liability corporation, but that's not really the problem here is it?

> he’s using his capital to extract more wealth from those with fewer resources than himself.

As every living thing competing with other living things in an environment of material scarcity has done since life began.

Maintenance work is a job, owning real estate is an investment. Sometimes done by the same people, sometimes not.

Yes, I agree that owning real estate is an investment - renting it out is a job.

True, the parent commenter's concern is about the returns on their investment though.

Personal attacks are not warranted here.

Also, it's quite common in the US for retired people to have a lot of their retirement savings invested in rental property.

That doesn't read as a personal attack to me. If someone is overexposed to one risky asset due to poor portfolio construction maybe that's just life in the free market? Property owners are getting paid to take on the risk and illiquidity of holding dirt and bricks, it's not risk free and as a taxpayer I don't see why I should bail out peoples' investments. If anyone needs help paying for food, housing, healthcare, etc then let's put the money towards that.

There's a reasonable argument that it's unjust that being richer by itself gives you access to better returns but small time landlords are not the worst affected by that.

IANAL, but it sounds as though GP has a job... Managing a 12-unit apartment complex.

hmmm, i live in a similarly sized building with a live-in super. he's not the one receiving a third of my monthly income. where is the rest going?

> where is the rest going?

Have you owned a normal-sized house? Repairs, insurance, inspections, et cetera. Also staging, advertising, pursuing delinquencies.

Rental yields in most cities are in the low single digits. Where that isn’t true, it’s because local politicians protect the landlords by restricting development, often in cahoots with grandfathered-in renters.

> Repairs, insurance, inspections, et cetera

rents in the city where I live are up 11% in the past year. did the cost of repairs and inspections increase by that much?

> Also staging, advertising, pursuing delinquencies

ah, so I'm paying for my landlord to increase their rate of return and put my fellow tenants on the street. got it.

> rents in the city where I live are up 11% in the past year. did the cost of repairs and inspections increase by that much?

I'm charging about 20% more than I did this time last year for repairs. Material, tool, and fuel prices have been going up, and those affect me greatly. I'll probably go up more soon. I have so much work lined up that it'll be 2023 before I can get to you if you talk to me today. And it's near impossible for me to find any helpers right now.

>rents in the city where I live are up 11% in the past year. did the cost of repairs and inspections increase by that much?

It increased much more, even the official inflation is 7% over 2021.

Thank you for the belly laugh!

> Tangential and honest question: how do eviction moratoriums help?

They allow politicians to pretend they've resolved a problem, while managing other aspects of a crisis. Later, when the moratorium expires, hopefully the media is concerned with other things and the plight of the evicted will go unheeded.

It's also a middle-of-the-road measure between doing nothing (bad publicity) and declaring a rent holiday / subsidizing rent from taxes / expropriating rented-out apartments or other such measures (politically difficult, angers donors and politicians' social milieu).

If you look at the Irish famine crisis, a huge % of lives lost was because of landlords evicting people.

So, it prevents that. And it's an important thing to prevent.

> Are governments subsidizing 100% of the missed rent?

Not quite. Only 0%.

This is completely false. The federal stimulus packages had billions in subsidies to landlords. That's in addition to the indirect support that the govtlernment has provides (such as the stimulus checks). Also most states have additional money for landlords.

There was all kinds of federal stimulus money given to businesses/property owners. It was just gobbled up by those who knew how to work the system (read: large property owners).

So... not "0%" as claimed in the comment I replied to.

Yes, I was in agreement with you and expanding upon what you said. The OP might have received nothing, but that's not because nothing was available, just that property is a dog-eat-dog world and OP was dog chow this time around.

I didn't receive anything because I wasn't in a position to (don't own rental property, and don't qualify for income-based assistance even if it existed for this purpose).

But my less affluent neighbors also didn't receive anything in direct support of rent payments, despite their jobs disappearing.

This is not the same as subsidizing rent so as to avert piling debt upon struggling renters whose jobs were suddenly and forcefully cancelled, some for months on end.

Yep. The moratorium only made it that you can't evict someone. It didn't make it that your tenants didn't have to pay. However, many tenants (for a variety of reasons that may not be their fault) chose to use the money elsewhere. So now the moratorium is ending and the thousands of dollars of missed rent payments are catching up.

Some states had programs that would provide some money to renters to help them with that, but it wasn't enough for a lot of people.

Nearly every state has a program to provide some rental payments back to the landlord.

It's going to be less and more delayed than rent payments, but that's expected during a crisis.

Renting isn't, and shouldn't be risk free.

> Renting isn't, and shouldn't be risk free.

That goes both ways, as a renter you risk getting kicked out, while as the landlord you risk not getting paid. Landlords typically evict and get someone who will pay but they were unable to. While there were programs for landlords, it was hard to get money out of them for various reasons.

If free high-quality public housing is available as an alternative to renting, then fine. Otherwise, why should renting not be essentially-risk-free? People don't rent as some sort of risky adventure, they need a place to live.

I mean, medicine is socialized (*) so that living will be "risk-free" health-wise, so why not housing?

(*) - Yes, I know that doesn't hold in the US...

> That goes both ways

Did I imply it doesn't? Evictions are no longer banned at a national scale. So, uh, yeah? We already know it goes both ways. In this special circumstance, the government essentially came in and said "We're not going to allow you to do that type of business for a bit for the sake of society."

Landlords by definition exist because the state allows them to exist. If the state wasn't there, landlords would probably be at the mercy of the 90% - and things would get ugly. So, to keep enjoying those protections that the government is giving, you need to follow circumstantial business changes. Such as a pandemic.

I feel it’s more to present a compassionate attitude, and prevent instability, big spikes. Plus there’s a cost in kicking people from their homes.