Culture around renting

It may come as a surprise to some, but not every landlord is a filthy rich evil lad in a cape, twirling his moustache. At the same time they're not the St V de P either.

Likewise not every tenant is decent and reasonable, trying to make ends meet.

The more landlords leave the market, the worse it gets for tenants.

But what's causing the high rent is the govt economic and housing policies, lack of action and economic conditions. Landlords will just follow the market the govt has created.

Its the private rental market. Its not meant to be social housing or affordable housing.

The problem is trying to use a market driven business to supply a social need.

The Govt should create a social/affordable housing long term fund that people can invest in and get a modest return from. Then the Govt could set fixed rents etc. But they don't want to do that as they would then have to pay for it, and police it, in terms of managing arears, bad tenants and repairs. But they don't the cost and expense of that.

Ultimately those that prefer to rent (rather than having no other choice) don't want the upfront cost of buying and maintaining property. So they are making a similar choice.

As has been said to you before, it is not, nor has it ever been the responsibility of private landlords to provide homes for those who need them.

...but again, this is the fundamental basis of modern libertarianism, that the private sector, via the so called free market, is capable of providing all needs to all, and apparently far more efficiently than the state can, this is clearly and simply, untrue!

WARNING - MASSIVE POST INCOMING!

Speaking as a German, I don't think you can simply compare the rental market in Germany to the one in Ireland. The differences between the housing markets in general is far too massive and extends beyond just houses and apartments into things like social policy and urban planning.

For starters, the German housing market is far less kind to developers than the Irish one. Let's look at rural and suburban developments first. You'll rarely if ever see a developer in Germany build an entire estate of cookie cutter houses of the type that blight the landscape here in Ireland. All the public infrastructure is designed by the local municipality and only then will individual plots of lands be made available for housing. This ensures that there is proper infrastructure in place and avoids the situation we have here in Ireland where massive housing estates connect to glorified dirt tracks. It also ensures urban permeability and allows people to freely move from one area to another without having to pop out of an estate, onto the main road and into another one, once again, unlike the situation here in Ireland where estates are often siloed off from each other and their surroundings. A developer might still end up building a dozen or two houses in a residential area, but they won't all be built at the same time or even in the same style.

Then, there's the issue of building a house as such. This is a much bigger affair in Germany than it appears to be here in Ireland. A typical German family may simply build or buy one house in their lifetime which is then passed on to their children. The concept of a "starter home" or of people moving out and onto the housing ladder as soon as they have a stable job is, well, not exactly alien, but nowhere near as common as it seems to be here. When people decide to buy a home of their own, they're usually at least in their mid to late 30s. Mostly, people move into long-term rented accommodation when they move out from their parents, something that is simply seen as normal. The same goes for moving into an apartment rather than a house, or even raising children in an apartment. The houses themselves are also usually far more individualized to their owner's needs and wishes, again, unlike the estates we tend to see here in Ireland. Because a house is likely to remain within one particular family for generations, there tends to be a lot more thought going into it than would be the case for houses built in large estates. Despite most houses in the small estate where I grew up in having been built at roughly the same time in the 1960s, and most by the same developer, a housing fund called "Neue Heimat", no two houses looked the same. Naturally, this means that houses are more expensive than they are in Ireland, which is one of the main reasons why so many people will wait until relatively late in their lives to buy or build one.

This slower pace in building or buying, and the longer path to home ownership, also means that the rental market is quite a bit more slow-paced than in Ireland. Landlords generally know that their tenants are going to be renting for years, if not decades and will generally set rents in a way that maximizes long-term ROI over short term profit. Because the vast majority of rental apartments will be the home of their tenants over such a long period of time, apartments will generally be rented out unfurnished, usually with only the kitchen and bathroom fitted out, and in quite a few cases actually only with the bathrooms. That's why the first trip of many people who have just signed a rental contract will be to rent a van or a small truck to either transport their stuff over, or to head to the likes of IKEA. The latter was the case for me when I rented my first place back in 2006. This of course reduces the initial investment of any landlord and also their risk, as they have fewer assets in the apartment that could end up worn out or damaged.

There's also the social housing aspect that needs to be taken into consideration. Following WW2, a lot of cities and municipalities invested heavily in state-funded or subsidized housing, mainly due to the fact that much of the preexisting housing stock, particularly in urban areas, had suffered terminal existence failure at the hands of Allied air raids during the war and millions of additional people from East Prussia and Silesia suddenly needed to be housed as well, since those areas had caught a bad case of the Soviets. This means that from the 1950s to the 1970s, a massive amounts of houses and apartments were built, with the cities acting as landlords. These were not social housing projects as such. People were still expected to pay rent and the city or municipality could, and did, evict tenants for non-payment of rents. These apartments were advertised on the open rental market just like every other. Social housing was usually provided by the social welfare office often transferring the money directly to the landlord in question rather than purchasing housing stock specifically to rent out to social welfare recipients. As such, you could, and did, end up with situations where an unemployed person could end up living next to a professional of some sort.

This was the case for me back in 2006. At the time I moved out from my parents, I was what was called "Langzeitarbeitsloser", a long-term unemployed person and in the lowest tier of Germany's social welfare system. I was still able to rent a flat in a decent apartment building from a private landlord, with the social welfare office transferring my rent directly to my landlord up until I finally landed a job a year later. Sigh, the good old days of paying 450€ in rent...

Finally, there's the cultural aspect. Renting is just seen as par for the course and even high officials can often go for decades in rental accommodation. Angela Merkel's Berlin apartment is such a case, she's been renting it since shortly after she was voted into the Bundestag in the early 1990s. The same goes for former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who ended up renting and living in a "Neue Heimat" built terraced house in the Hamburg district of Langenhorn from the time he served in the Hamburg Senate (the state legislature of Hamburg) in the 1960s until his death in 2015. Renting is not seen as second class housing and there's no association of renting with being subservient to someone of higher standing, as the term land"lord" seems to imply. In Germany, the person who rents out an apartment is simply known as a "Vermieter", whilst the person renting is simply called "Mieter". Whilst most people translate Vermieter to landlord, the former term has none of the baggage that appears to be associated with the latter term, particularly in Ireland.

So yeah, a very long post, but I hope it illustrates some of the key differences between the housing markets, and why comparisons are such a tricky affair.

What people don't seem to grasp is the current legislation encourages LLs to sell off existing rentals, out of the rental market. But introduce new rentals at higher rents. What's more it encourages smaller landlords with lower rental incomes to leave and larger LLS with high rental income to enter the market. LLs didn't create this legislation, the Govt did.

What this means is there no hope of a stable rents in that environment. Its impossible to plan a long term rental as a renter while this goes on.

What are the roots of the Irish obsession with property?

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2019/0321/1037676-what-are-the-roots-of-the-irish-obsession-with-property/

Perhaps you are referring to Government thinking/policy, but I very much doubt any private LLs think they either capable, or responsible for “providing all needs to all”. In fact I would suspect that their policy is to provide a limited benefit to a targeted minority.

Yep, but in my experience I can't agree totally with the conclusion. Specifically, with regard to the middle class (of which I'm lucky enough to be a member), we are obsessed with owning property and we do see full time renters as "wasting money" on rent.

I don't think that's a mindset. It's financial reality due to the market here.

I remember when rent was cheaper than a mortgage per month. Even then renting was a short term gain only.

If we had long term rental arrangements that would hold until death. Then you could argue it's a mindset. But we don't.

...yup, this is exactly where these ideologies lead to , and this isnt just apparent in our property markets either, i.e. monopolisation of markets, with the overall objection of wealth extraction, or rent seeking, as much as possible, and as fast as possible, and ta hell with the consequences!

...again, ownership levels are more or less at European averages here in ireland....

...again, people are in fact trying to fulfill a critical human need, i.e. 'security of accommodation'!

yes of course, not all needs can be provided by sme's, including ll's, but if the decision to enter these markets is taken, ll's must also accept, that this is what theyre also accepting, i.e. its not just a method to provide income, but they are also accepting their social responsibilities along side this, and if you dont want to accept such responsibilities, maybe they should not be granted this ability to do so.....

...but this is clearly the outcome of the persistence of such ideologies, i.e. wealth extraction, at all costs, and ta hell with the consequences.... and the easiest method of doing so, is to keep inflating the price of pre-existing assets, and again, ta hell with the consequences....

markets are absolutely essential in helping us to provide us with our needs, but unfettered markets, thats clearly just a train wreck, and for all also!

"Wealth extraction" is the private purpose of a market, especially a private property market.

Responsibility of a public/social housing is the function of the state or Govt. if the Govt wants to service that responsibility it can't do that with the private market.