NY just banned evictions. Say they keep this ban for 3-4 months, a reasonable assumption. It typically takes 3-5 months for an eviction process normally. That would bring us to 9 months of Landlord not getting a penny on his unit. Now consider the backlog that will be at the Courts, when the rush starts when half of the Country cant afford to pay rent by month number 3. This means that your probably talking 18 months to get an eviction. How many people are going to go oh free rent for a year and a half and i dont have the money anyway and not attempt to do just that? If a third of the people decide to do this, there isnt a Landlord in the Country that could still pay his bills. The Landlords are getting stuck with the price of everyone staying home and not working and this will cause a disaster.
NJ, not NY but I have a single rental unit. The current tenant, who has not paid her rent on time since November, just let me know by text she got laid off. I’m not sure how to respond. I can work with her but if she thinks this means free rent, we will have a problem.
Its going to cause massive economic ripples. It took a decade to recover from the great recession and this will be worse.
I have already told my tenants that I won’t be collecting rent for April. My tenants won’t have to pay me back later, either. April is a freebie, no strings attached. If that continues into May or June, meh, whatever.
I won’t even consider evicting anyone under these circumstances. There are more important things than money, IMHO.
Think of all the money they will make charging exorbitant
late fees to people who are going to get just a little behind because of this. Late fees, over draft fees, payday loans. It’s all the freaking late fees that make one bad month for otherwise responsible people into a spiral toward bankruptcy.
You’re one of the few good ones. My experience in dealing with most landlords has not been favorable: greedy, unwilling to make repairs, usurious, cruel and uncaring. Until recently, Portland has had a no-notice eviction law in place that allowed people to be put out on the street with zero warning, regardless of whether or not they were good tenants. Guess who lobbied for that?
When I hear people feeling sorry for landlords, three things pop into my head.
- some landlords are families and individuals, not much different from their tenants, and many, as we’ve seen in this thread, are good people doing their best
- many landlords are in fact large corporations that make a lot of money and missing a few months of rent is a drop in the bucket for them
- a farmer returned home from town to see a hobo sitting in the porch with his feet on the railing. The farmer said,”get off my land.”
“Your land? How’d you get it?” responded the hobo.
“I got from my father.”
“How’d he get it?”
“From his father.”
“And how did he get it?”
“Why,” said the farmer proudly, “he fought the Indians for it.”
“Well then,” said the hobo as he got to his feet, “I’ll fight you for it.”
Here in Indianapolis, the city government passed some tenant reforms to protect tenants from abusive landlords. So the landlord association lobbies the state government to overturn the city measures.
I got an email from Ally Bank yesterday. They are suspending all overdraft, excess transaction, expedited shipping, and other fees. They are also deferring all home and auto loan payments.
This was a welcome change from all of the “we’re concerned about your safety and are washing our counters” emails.
I’d like to see a cite for this. What I’m finding is, “Beginning Monday evening, eviction proceedings and pending orders will be suspended statewide until further notice as health officials work to curb the spread of COVID-19, Chief Administrative Judge Lawrence Marks wrote in the memo to court employees.”
As you might guess, some renters are going to have a hard time making rent, given the impact of COVID-19.
Can the OP explain to me how a ban on evictions in New York will bankrupt every major landlord in the country?
#2 buying up a huge percentage of starter homes after the housing market crashed and renting them is one of, if not the, biggest reasons younger people can’t buy houses. So “screw those guys” sums up my thoughts about the plight of landlords.
You are fortunate that you presumably don’t have a mortgage on the property (or have enough other sources of income to pay it). Your annual tax and insurance payment on the property must also be covered by other income.
I sincerely applaud you, but it is undeniably true that some landlords simply can’t afford to be so generous.
I, too, hope they aren’t turned out into the streets, penniless, with nowhere to go.
No argument here. Henry George had a point!
And it is undeniabley true that if the tenents are broke and unempolyed, evicting them won’t get you an more money than being generous.
However, evicting tenents will enable you to clear the property and revert to farmland. If that is an option for you.
I too told my tenant that I’ll be lenient, and we’ll figure something out. I hope what that means is spreading April’s rent out over the following few months, but maybe it means just eating it. Yes, that’s money straight out of my pocket. That’s money I can’t use to pay for the fixed costs associated with the condo. If we’re starting a deep depression, then things are going to suck for me and my tenant. That’s what a depression is.
What are my choices if my tenant has no income for the next 2 months? Evict him, and hope that I can move somebody else in who isn’t affected by all this? Screen prospective tenants over video chat as I give virtual tours of the place? Take my chances with random people coming over, if they’re even willing to? If the alternative is that my condo sits empty, then I may as well let the person who already lives there stay on until he can start paying rent again.
Yeah, things are bad. Nobody who’s being realistic ever denied that. All this, it’s bad for small businesses, it’s bad for restaurants, it’s bad for poor people, the airlines are going bankrupt. Yep, and the alternative is not do anything and hope it’s only 4 million people who die in the US?
What do we do when it’s not 2 months of lock down, but 2 years?
This sort of thing is among the risks you take when you invest in real estate. In terms of the specifics (pandemic leading to emergency government measures protecting tenants who can’t pay) it’s pretty hard to foresee, but in general terms (not getting paid rent on time so you can pay the mortgage) it’s something every landlord has to deal with eventually to a greater or lesser extent. I’m not unsympathetic; this is a scary time for everyone. But zooming out a bit: what justifies you getting to build equity on someone else’s money if not shouldering the risks of things going sideways?
My husband and I are in a financial position to buy either a home for ourselves or a rental property we could use as an investment. We enjoy the convenience of an apartment in the city with lots of amenities, which we could easily walk away from if work or other circumstances took us away. But we could afford the rent on our current place plus a mortgage on another place so long as we had a tenant paying us rent. If we hit any snags, though, we could be in trouble. It galls me a little to think we could be building equity instead of flushing money down the rent portal. But then I hear from homeowners how their water heater broke or their basement flooded and it was unbelievably expensive to fix, or from landlords how their tenants destroyed things and ran off owing months of back rent, and I think, I’m not wasting money. I’m paying for the privilege of not having to deal with those things.
That’s the risk you take by renting: that you can’t make the next payment and get thrown out. What justifies you (the general you) thinking you can stay for free when you are not paying? That’s the risk you take when things go sideways.
Under normal circumstances, sure. The tenant signs a contract, and is expected to live up to the terms of the contract, or suffer the consequences specified in the contract. Today, have some compassion.