In 2010, I had a $600/month rental with a kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, in apartment washing machine/dryer and a fairly large walk-in closet.
With 13 years of inflation, that'd be $850/month. That apartment now goes for over $1200/month (Almost certainly hasn't been renovated). [1]
The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever they like to rake in the profits.
And the way you can tell it's not government policy driving up prices is this trend has been seen across states. There's no federal zoning laws, so why would everywhere from California to Idaho see the same drastic spikes in home prices? Why are existing units that have existed since at least 2010 (and I believe back to 2005) commanding $400 premiums over what inflation would dictate? Do you think back in 2010 they were losing money renting to me?
> The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever they like to rake in the profits.
Even if it's true that a few large businesses own most rentals, that kind of oligopolistic behavior should be undercut by new people entering the market by building more apartments - unless there's a big barrier to entry, like the difficulty in building things when there's restrictive zoning!
> There's no federal zoning laws, so why would everywhere from California to Idaho see the same drastic spikes in home prices?
The incentives that produce NIMBYs - wanting to keep supply low so that housing prices stay high, and not wanting to deal with any of the annoyances of increased density - are the same everywhere.
> Why are existing units that have existed since at least 2010 (and I believe back to 2005) commanding $400 premiums over what inflation would dictate? Do you think back in 2010 they were losing money renting to me?
No, but now there are more people who want to live there and they haven't built enough housing to keep up, so the bidding is more intense.
> Even if it's true that a few large businesses own most rentals, that kind of oligopolistic behavior should be undercut by new people entering the market by building more apartments - unless there's a big barrier to entry, like the difficulty in building things when there's restrictive zoning!
You're missing the forest for the trees here. The 'new people' entering the market sell the apartments and buildings they create to the big businesses in question. I've lived in apartments for my entire life, eventually they all get acquired by Greystar. Even the smaller ones.
Either these companies have an unlimited amount of money and the construction companies should thereby hire everyone in the city to build ever more housing so they can make an unlimited amount of money, or they have a finite amount of money and the construction companies will eventually have taken all of it and yet still be able to build more housing after that.
It is government policy. Specifically, it is restrictive zoning. Landlords do not get to set prices to whatever they want, they set prices to what the market will pay.
If rent has gone up faster than inflation it just means that demand has increased or supply has decreased in that time.
You can build apartments for ~$250 per sqft. The issue is that local governments make it really hard to build more apartments. If you disagree I implore you to go get a construction loan, build some housing, and rent it out.
>If rent has gone up faster than inflation it just means that demand has increased or supply has decreased in that time.
Not quite. Landlords have the ability to fake demand in order to raise prices. One of the ways they do so is by leaving units intentionally empty (as they've done in NYC), which artificially restrains supply and allows them to raise prices on the units they own much higher than they'd normally be if they were releasing all units to the public. They can do this because these large apartment units are all owned by a small number of companies.
How is that going to make them money? They would have to withdraw enough units to raise the market price across an entire city -- and forego the rent on all of those.
That kind of thing only makes sense if the city is imposing some kind of rent control or similar so they can't rent them out for the market rate and start getting weird incentives for rich people accounting chicanery.
It makes them money because if you pay attention, apartment prices almost never fall nowadays. They always gradually go up. In a market where supply is constantly being added to meet demand, you would expect costs to go down in cities where people are leaving. For example, NYC's population has remained relatively static or even gone down, but the rent prices sharply go up, far more than inflation.
Keep in mind the majority of the value is in the property too, not the amount made from rent. They can effectively sit on the property and still grow value, then withhold apartments in order to either force legislative changes or force rent to go up. The loss of value from leaving those apartments empty is less than the gain in value from being able to raise rent, which results in perverse incentives.
COVID was an outlier for the obvious reason, during which it dropped by <0.1%/year, and is already back up to the high water mark.
Meanwhile the city has added less than that amount of net housing with the obvious result.
The housing market is also in a very weird state right now, because the fed raised interest rates, which long-term lowers housing prices by making it harder to borrow for a mortgage. But because the lesson people took from 2008 was to get a fixed-rate mortgage, now most existing owners have below-market mortgage rates and can't move without taking out a new mortgage at the higher rate, so they stay put, which means there is no inventory on the market and anyone trying to buy has to be desperate enough to outbid anyone else for the scarce inventory. But that can't last forever because eventually people will either be forced to move for any of the usual reasons or will have paid off enough of their existing mortgage for this to be less relevant -- or interest rates will go back down. Which, counter-intuitively, could actually lower housing prices by increasing inventory, especially because by then there would be pent-up demand for sellers to be able to move.
There is also some uncertainty in the stock market -- it had pretty much been on a bull run since right after the crash in 2008 until COVID but post-COVID has been a rollercoaster -- so you have a lot of investors looking to diversify and buying up real estate. Which they might be stupid to do because housing prices are crazy -- look at this graph and realize that 2007 was a massive housing bubble:
> Keep in mind the majority of the value is in the property too, not the amount made from rent.
They still get that whether they rent it out or not. It's like saying well, I could get a 9% return from this investment, but if I refuse to rent it out then I'd still get a 5% return, so let me do that and set the rest of this money on fire for no personal benefit.
> then withhold apartments in order to either force legislative changes or force rent to go up.
But this is the part that makes no sense. To be profitable, you not renting out a subset of your units would have to make the rents on the other units (i.e. rents city-wide) go up by more than the entire amount of the rent on the units you withheld. How are they going to do that? The largest real estate investor in NYC owns far less than 1% of the real estate.
For that to make sense would require some enormous disadvantage to actually renting out those units, like rent control or laws that make it hard to evict destructive or non-paying tenants. Because that would make renting the units a significant risk to your investment, since a buyer wouldn't pay full price for a building full of tenants paying below-market rent or trashing the building who can't be removed.
But then the cause of the rent-increasing behavior is the inept laws that increase the cost of providing rental units by so much that it's not even profitable to do it when they're already built, and the solution is to remove the laws creating the perverse incentives.
Self-serving politicians like to take offense when investors respond in predictable ways to toxic laws, but umbrage doesn't lower the rent.
It has nothing to do with inept laws. It has everything to do with the corrupt behavior of often large companies that own all of these rental units.
Like I get the feeling you don't rent. When I was living in Austin, my apartment rent shot up over 30%, in an area on the outskirts of Austin near nothing. It's nice to think that this problem could be solved by simply dumping supply on the market, but even in areas where that's being done or where there isn't significant demand rent is skyrocketing. And even when supply is dropped, it's bought up by said large corporations and investment groups that price fix it anyways.
It's occurring throughout the entire US regardless of local laws, though some areas are gouged even further. We know large landlords collude on this sort of thing to the point there's an actual term for it called warehousing [1]
> When I was living in Austin, my apartment rent shot up over 30%, in an area on the outskirts of Austin near nothing.
Austin's population has been increasing by ~4% annually for decades, which is high. Construction responds to that but it has a lead time. And Austin has zoning restrictions, but notice that it also has lower rents than cities that have more.
> It's nice to think that this problem could be solved by simply dumping supply on the market, but even in areas where that's being done or where there isn't significant demand rent is skyrocketing.
Can you name any US city where the amount of net housing growth exceeded the amount of population growth over the last 30 years?
> And even when supply is dropped, it's bought up by said large corporations and investment groups that price fix it anyways.
Most of them are buying it to rent it out, which adds supply to the market. The problem, regardless of who the buyer is, is that they're not building enough pretty much anywhere.
> "They're sort of not advertising their full inventory," Walkup said, "simply because they don't want to overwhelm the idea of what the supply currently is."
That's something else entirely -- they have a bunch of empty apartments and they wait to put some on the market until they fill the others, because why pay to advertise multiple units when they're all about the same? They're effectively all still on the market because as soon as anyone actually rents one they start advertising another one.
What you should be asking is, why don't they lower the prices some so they can rent them all out quickly and get some rent instead of none?
But that is the bad laws. If there is a short-term reduction in demand for urban apartments because of COVID, normally the incentive would be to lower the rents to whatever it takes to fill the units and then raise it again if the demand recovers. But if you have rent control or similar, once they rent it out they'd be stuck getting the short-term lower prices for decades to come, so they'd rather stick it out until they can find a tenant at a higher price.
Get rid of the bad laws and that incentive goes away.
But you still need to allow more housing to be built, because otherwise the rents would go back up as soon as COVID is over and people start moving back into cities.
Urban landlords don't have any kind of market power outside of control over zoning boards -- there are too many of them and none of them own a high enough proportion of the units to make a dent. Which is why they capture zoning boards to prevent supply from increasing to satisfy demand.
Isn't that what lobbying is all about? You effectively have companies paying politicians to keep these zoning laws that keep the rents as high as possible. Profit above all else.
Arguments that boil down to "government policy" can basically be translated to "big companies policies". Whether it's through illegal or legal bribing (lobbying), it's what we see after decades of influence.
It’s big companies but it’s also (mostly?) the nice retired insurance agents and school teachers who like their quiet neighborhood and the fact that the house they bought 30 years ago can be sold for 4x its inflation-adjusted purchase price when they’re ready.
100% agreed. Our individualism and own greed are also a great contributing factor. After-all we ultimately elect those politicians and also have to profit similar to a company (hopefully not at all costs though).
> It’s big companies but it’s also (mostly?) the nice retired insurance agents and school teachers
Those retired agents and teachers have exactly zero influence on local and state politicians.
Those big companies who host fund raising dinners at the CEOs mansions and contribute millions? Yes, a lot of influence. To the point where we've seen plenty legislative bills which turn out to be just cut & paste from what some corporate sponsor wrote.
You're talking about national politics or state-level politics in big states like California. The mayor of a random town with 50,000 people is not getting a million dollars donated to their campaign by anybody.
It is actually the local voters who decide who governs the town. But when residency in the town requires you to own a house, the existing residents vote for people who make housing prices go up.
> But when residency in the town requires you to own a house
There is no such place in the USA. Residency means you live there, which you can do also by renting a place. Then you get to vote on all local elections.
Seems to be happening all over. These are South Western Ontario (yes, Canadian bucks) numbers.
The 2 bedroom apartment I rented in college (ended around 2013/2014) was $719/mo. It is now $1699/mo.
It wasn't exactly in a nice area, either. Recently the news caught a story about somebody's drug dealer setting off fireworks in his apartment, which I suppose is pretty exciting if not in the worst ways.
If it costs twice as much to build a residential structure as it did 10 years ago, then rent will cost twice as much. There's no conspiracy, it's not Blackrock buying up all the houses, it's not the greedy politicians. It's caused by government spending beyond its means, expansion of the monetary supply, and the increased regulations that create more risk for investors and causes prices to go up.
The price of inputs went up because of COVID supply chain issues and higher demand for inputs. There are all indications of the high prices being temporary and they're already starting to go back down.
With 13 years of inflation, that'd be $850/month. That apartment now goes for over $1200/month (Almost certainly hasn't been renovated). [1]
The issue is oligopolies. Few large businesses that own the majority of available rentals and thus can set prices to whatever they like to rake in the profits.
And the way you can tell it's not government policy driving up prices is this trend has been seen across states. There's no federal zoning laws, so why would everywhere from California to Idaho see the same drastic spikes in home prices? Why are existing units that have existed since at least 2010 (and I believe back to 2005) commanding $400 premiums over what inflation would dictate? Do you think back in 2010 they were losing money renting to me?
[1] https://www.camdenliving.com/apartments/irving-tx/camden-val...