Posted on 02/16/2021 11:14:04 AM PST by Brian Griffin
In England and California, much is made of second homes that are not placed in the rental market.
The primary reason that second homes are not rented out is because of highly justified owner fears of tenant problems.
These fears keep millions of higher quality houses and spacious condos out of the rental market. If millions of houses and condos were added to the rental market, rents would fall somewhat.
The government insists on small security deposits because of a desire to make it easy for tenants to rent a place to live and to move. Security deposit laws were passed when housing units were mainly small and Americans would not have smashed the windows of a federal building.
I propose that the government and small one-unit landlords both have their cakes by allowing one-unit landlords to ask for and possibly collect security deposits as high as they desire, while retaining the two-months rule for multi-unit landlords.
Many tenants have more than the amount of two months rent to supply as a security deposit. Thrifty shelter seekers should be able to rent better homes and obtain lower rents because of their superior self-control.
Millions of second home owners and potential landlords realize that a security deposit equal to two months rent is insufficient to cover all-too-frequent tenant-caused physical damage and loss of rental income. This is especially true with respect to spacious high-quality housing units. Keeping potential tenants from living in spacious high-quality housing due to unrealistically low security deposit caps is stupid.
The freedom of one-unit landlord security deposit setting will be tempered by tenant ability to come up sufficient funds. Market forces will insure that nearly the best possible balance is struck.
Lawyers are already advising landlords to eliminate year long leases and replace them over time with month to month leases.
That has a couple of benefits:
You can keep tenants current on rent—since you can evict them if they don’t pay the next month’s rent.
You can inspect the units before renewing the monthly lease and not renew if the unit is not in good shape.
The government’s “don’t evict” policy will soon start to have the opposite affect. There will be an increase in homelessness with expired leases.
That has a couple of benefits
In times of rising inflation, the landlord can also raise the rent as needed. Coming soon to a community near you.
“The government’s ‘don’t evict’ policy will soon start to have the opposite affect. There will be an increase in homelessness with expired leases.”
Biden will bail the tenants out, at great taxpayer expense.
Each of these tenants and their rugrats will also get the $1,400 checks unless the Democrats take care to identify the problem tenants ASAP.
The “stimulus” and the bailout programs should be co-ordinated to prevent double-dipping.
I know a lot of people who have second homes not on the rental market. That’s because the second home is a getaway refuge for the family. Cabins near the seaside or national parks or other nice areas are used whenever they can get away for a break. They might agree to let family members or close friends use the homes but mostly they are kept available. Think of all those New Yorkers who fled to their second homes during the Covid restrictions.
.Gov may well create such a “bail out the newly homeless” policy—but the implementation challenges in the real world boggle the mind.
One of the things we will start to see on a large scale are benefits that are technically in the law but are difficult to collect, particularly in a timely manner.
This is a classic feature of socialist countries—the bureaucracy grinds slowly so that the “benefit” becomes “in name only”....
Then as big time inflation kicks in, .gov is paying old benefits with dollars that have reduced in value.
“Just image my scenario where the renter is out $7200 (6 months security deposit) or so from extremely questionable charges at move out time.”
You could take lots of picture at move in time and e-mail them to yourself.
“the implementation challenges in the real world boggle the mind”
Biden or his HUD Secretary should appoint somebody to work full-time on what we know is a big problem.
I spent some of my career working with .gov on software projects.
They are incredibly slow to react—in fact they _still_ have some Fortran based software issuing checks in some cases.
Most domestic agencies lack in-house software development skills so they must contract out to get anything done.
In the real world the contracts are awarded to “friends” of the administration who are experts at lobbying, but not so great at programming. :-)
The contractor in turn sub-contracts out the job to someone who actually can do the work, but those competent folks are usually busy (because they are competent!) and fail to dedicate adequate staff to the task.
This leads to lots of delays, meetings, screaming matches—all of which often as not leads to the subcontractor and in some cases the contractor not getting their contract extended or renewed.
Then they start again...
.Gov can turn a one year software contract into a failed ten year disaster—happens more often than not.
Have the tenant take out an insurance policy to cover damages that may exceed the security deposit, and refund the premium when they vacate if the premises are in acceptable condition. Win-win.
I don’t rent my seasonal home because it’s mine.
Not because I fear damage, it’s that the best weekends are the ones I want to be there, not someplace else collecting rent and not enjoying my place at the peak weekends (Memorial Day to Labor day)
My summer home on Keuka Lake is not for rent because I have my boats there, my ski stuff, fishing stuff, and water trampoline. If I were to rent it out, where am I going to keep all MY stuff because I’m not going to include any of it in the rental contracts ?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.