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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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Rent is absolutely ridiculous. It’s been going up every year and I don’t see any sign of it stopping soon.
As it stands I could barely afford a 1-bedroom apartment (and that’s assuming just bare necessities and minimal food). Forget ever renting or even owning a house. But yet they can keep finding people willing to pay such high rent. I don’t know how.
Not always, especially if it's a company that's holding a lot of units -- they'll keep the rents high even if they can't fill all of them to ensure the valuation of the others stays high. The math works out such that they'll earn more from 12x$2000 than 20x$1000, for example. Plus, not as much money spent on upkeep for unused units.
Edit: And quick edit to add, the best way to fix this is to tax unused units or property (roughly, there's a lot of nuance there). In fact, that would fix a lot of the current housing and rental market insanity. It'll be a monumental effort to push past realty lobbying, but any time you see this proposal pop up in regional politics, please show up and voice your support if able.
I didn’t know that some companies did that.
I figured that unoccupied units would be a drive to lower rent to fill them, not keep them high and unused just to keep values up.
The large companies use software like RealPage to essentially collude and keep prices high. They only their rental unit info into the software and an algorithm analyzes all of the data input by the companies to automatically raise prices and suggest the primal available units to maintain that increased price. There are several neighborhoods in my city where 70% of the unit owners use RealPage.