Landlords are price gouging wildfire victims
Landlords are price gouging wildfire victims
An excerpt from the article:
Ms. Jones has been scouring the West Los Angeles rental market to find a house that the family could rent for the next eight months, or longer. On Friday morning, she noticed something disturbing on the rents of at least three of the properties she had been tracking: 15 to 20 percent increases overnight.
The sudden surge in rental costs took Ms. Jones by surprise, but aligned with what she has noticed since wildfires started to tear through the Los Angeles area on Tuesday. Ms. Jones was touring a rental house in Beverly Hills with her client on Thursday when the listing agent raised the monthly cost by $3,000 — on the spot. Agents and landlords are aware that some displaced Angelenos might be willing to pay given the circumstance.
“People are so panicked and desperate to get into a house right now that they’re just throwing money into the wind,” Ms. Jones said. “People taking advantage of this. It’s horrendous.”
And now, totally unrelated to this, the definition of "parasitism":
Association between two different organisms wherein one benefits at the expense of the other.
I'm a little horrified that a 15-20% hike is $3000.
That's uh, well, even before the price hike that makes me feel very Luigi....
The people who are looking for a rental in this article and who lost their Pacific Palisades home make an order of magnitude more money than you or I would ever expect to make
That's a lot of coins. Makes me bump my head on question mark blocks.
Yeah these people clearly have (many) other options for housing.
Honestly not sure why this article even exists if this is the most egregious example of price gouging they could find.
Well demand did go up.
Bunch of jackasses, I hope the landbastards' houses burn down and none of their family or pets are harmed and their houses are the only ones destroyed in the neighborhood.
How about we just hope the pets can be rehomed because they didn't ask for asshole owners and don't deserve to be punished.
Here's the thing though.....being an asshole doesn't affect pets. Pets have no concepts of rent, or money, or social class. Hell, even HITLER had a cat and a dog. I'm sure that dog loved hitler. And you can't blame the dog. The dog has no idea that the person he lives with signed paperwork to establish concentration camps.
The dog just knows he comes home, gives him treats, and then he, the dog, and ava braun all lay down by the fireplace, and watch netflix.
And so these dogs today, they're just the same. Living with assholes, and clueless. Just as it always has been.
We only know they are terrible, greedy, and lazy people. There ain't enough to say they aren't wonderful animal caretakers that provide for their furry friends in excess of the reasonable base level.
Nice carve out haha. Safe!
Now I would just like to take a moment to warn anyone who owns an investment property near the fires that the listings are online with the exact address where literally anyone can find them, they can see that you are taking advantage of the market conditions as is only fair to improve your financial position, they know the house is unoccupied and probably isnt being surveiled or protected in any meaningful way.
There is next to nothing to stop people with no respect for the law or how hard you work from going straight to the property and vandalising it or otherwise making the property unrentable. They dont even need to break in, glue in the locks or spraying the garden with weed killer as they stroll past.
Please take care.
They would have to decrease the rent price if a couple of windows are broken correct?
probably isnt being surveiled or protected in any meaningful way.
You should probably assume all of these properties at least have video doorbells and smart cameras
Doesn't mean you couldn't be brazen about it, especially if you have nothing to lose
Headlines soon: "Residents gouging landlords"
If this shit doesn't stop, that's the final outcome. People are getting insanely desperate.
15 to 20 percent increases overnight
the listing agent raised the monthly cost by $3,000
That's $15,000 a month, $180,000 a year before the price increase. Maybe try hunting for normal people rentals and others would have an ounce of care or sympathy for you.
I'd also wager that most of these people have properties themselves that they use to gouge money from others for "passive income". Well, they can passively suck it.
Yes, they suck.
But what they're gonna end up doing is renting a class down from what they were going to do, so they'll end up getting a house that would have been 60 grand a year, but is now 90 grand.
And the people who were going to do that are going to be renting a place that would have been cjlheape4, and so on.
In the end, the price-gouge4s on the high end raise rents for the rest of us. We've seen the same thing all over the country with the lack of available-for-purchase single-family homes as more and more places are build-to-rent only. That's kept renting apartments instead of buying houses, and apartment rents have skyrocketed.
There's a 1br apartment I rented about 10 years ago for $510/month. I just looked it up and it's now $1900 a month.
$800 when I moved in, I was paying $900 when I moved out over a decade later, it then rented immediately for $1600 after I moved out, and around $2000 now.
Wages have not kept up with that.
You are arguing about the difference between price gouging of a Toyota Corolla vs a McClaren GTS - necessity vs luxury.
The price gouging has been happening legally for years and nothing has changed or been done to fix it. The high-end clients in the article clearly own property if they're willing to spend that much on rent.
I have no sympathy for that specific example because it's reported like this is some novel, new experience, as opposed to it being a systemic issue that's plagued everyone else. My sympathy goes to the others mentioned in the article who clearly aren't in the market for luxury-class rentals.
Don't want to be priced gouged? Don't rent those luxury houses from the parasites. Lower your expectations and you might find something else more reasonable.
But sympathy, or lack thereof, isn't a requirement for the practice to be illegal and action to be taken, and I never said something shouldn't be done about it.
They're talking about a rental house, and in LA of all places
Everyone is in the same rental hellscape - you can sympathize with people being exploited even if they're in a different tax bracket than you. Have some class consciousness, jesus
Class consciousness? Last I checked, a 3-4 bedroom rental house in the LA area has plenty of options in the $4k to $8k range.
Here's a few examples for you.
Zillow doesn't even have a "price minimum" filter option greater than $10k a month.
The article specifically states some rental properties were increased, and the only example they gave was a property in a range that literally 99% of the population can't afford. Is the 1% now suddenly in the same class that I need to be conscious about?
RealPage’s popular software was collecting nonpublic pricing information from multiple property managers and feeding it through a common algorithm, which then recommended an optimal rent level to those who used it — in violation of rules that prohibit such coordination, federal prosecutors alleged. They also accused the landlords of improperly communicating directly about their pricing through calls, emails and participation in “user group” forums hosted by RealPage.
The company pushes landlords to use an “auto-accept” feature on its software, authorities said, and makes it onerous for property managers to reject its suggestions.
Wonder how many of these units are managed by The Algorithm.
Someone should do something about this.
Let's outlaw homelessness!
We love capitalism so much, here have some more.