View Full Version : My rent is going up
After 8 years, that is! I've been in the same rented condo since Sept 2008. Rent has been $800/month that entire time. Bargain! I'm in a nice suburb. It's going up to $860 on Sept. 1. I can deal with that. I've been very fortunate with these landlords (unit owner). They've been pretty good about maintenance (guy is very handy) and such. All the original mid-1980s appliances were replaced within 8 months of when I moved in.
Sounds as though you have the perfect spot to rent.
After 8 years, that is! I've been in the same rented condo since Sept 2008. Rent has been $800/month that entire time. Bargain! I'm in a nice suburb. It's going up to $860 on Sept. 1. I can deal with that. I've been very fortunate with these landlords (unit owner). They've been pretty good about maintenance (guy is very handy) and such. All the original mid-1980s appliances were replaced within 8 months of when I moved in.
Where I live all rentals are going up town wide. In fact vacancies are at an all time low.
We're seeing rents go up in Phoenix too.
Tradd: did you ever get rid of your noisy neighbors?
Rentals are going up everywhere since investors have decided that's where to put their money. $860 here would be an absolute bargain. We are renting a temporary place here for one month - $1495 and it is bare bones.
Ultralight
7-18-16, 1:42pm
I pay $860 for a 350 sq. ft. apt. -- one bedroom.
Tradd: did you ever get rid of your noisy neighbors?
Well, the same woman still lives upstairs, but she apparently got rid of the very noisy boyfriend and the dogs which must have been his. It's very quiet up there now. She still lives there, but the noise level is so much less. I wonder if she was threatened with fines or something from the condo association.
Damn, that's a great deal! Do you need a roommate?
Nope, sorry. It's a one bedroom. And I swore years ago that I would live by myself unless I got married.
A co-worker said his adult daughter moved to Seattle and is paying $1235/month for a 375 sq. ft. apartment.
Just found out that a friend who is paying $850 for a 2 bed/2 bath in north central Phoenix is having her rent increased to $1,250. Apparently the new owners are going to come in and do some cosmetic remodeling, and then declare these as "luxury" apartments which will justify the increase.
According to her she's been expanding her search for a new place across metro Phoenix and is finding the same thing - in a decent area it's hard to find even a 1 bedroom for less than $1,000. This is new - Phoenix has always bragged about its affordable housing, so I'm wondering how this is going to play out. She's currently looking in mobile home parks.
Teacher Terry
8-5-16, 1:47pm
REnts are skyrocketing here and we have a shortage of rentals so the perfect storm. Some people are paying half their income for a place to live.
iris lilies
8-5-16, 2:08pm
My friend who is a professional landlord amoung other busness ventures says that it is a landlord's market dor small houses with fenced yarmds that accept dogs.
My friend who is a professional landlord amoung other busness ventures says that it is a landlord's market dor small houses with fenced yarmds that accept dogs.
My friend just bought a house like that in Portland--also a very hot rental market. We're watching it appreciate on Zillow at hundreds per day. She jokes (maybe not) that she can support herself by buying undervalued properties, selling, and moving to the next up and coming location.
REnts are skyrocketing here and we have a shortage of rentals so the perfect storm. Some people are paying half their income for a place to live.
Has Nevada recovered from the 2008 Great Recession? I know that real estate in Las Vegas and Phoenix were hit especially hard but now I can't tell if it's another r.e. bubble, or what's going on...
There was just an article I read about the number of people still underwater in Las Vegas. Problems were increased by abandoned properties, those turned into rentals, failure to stabilize properties, etc.
There was just an article I read about the number of people still underwater in Las Vegas. Problems were increased by abandoned properties, those turned into rentals, failure to stabilize properties, etc.
That's why I was puzzled by Teacher Terry's comment on having a shortage of rentals there. Seems like there were tons of abandoned/foreclosed properties even just a few years ago.
Teacher Terry
8-7-16, 4:11pm
I live in Northern Nevada and the price of homes and rent is skyrocketing because of the shortage. I don't know what is happening in Las Vegas. They quit building here and have just started again.
organictex
9-15-16, 9:27am
our duplex is for sale and we're hopeful the new landlords don't jack up the rent (we are fortunate and
have been paying $600 for a very large 2 bedroom for the last 9 years) but our main concern is that they
will have a "no dogs" policy. this period has really made clear the sorry state of affordable housing in this
country...you either pay through the nose or live in a ghetto :(
We have been looking for another house to lease while we search for a house to buy out of state. Had we known how brutal the market has become in so many places, we would not have sold our house when we did.
All we can find here locally as far as a small house are 1000 sf bungalows for $1600 and up. And they are dumps. Also as long time home owners, we had no clue about how the property management business works. Large application fees with absolutely no guarantee of acceptance so one can only do that so many times. And if you're retired without pay stubs, qualifying is very unlikely even if in reality once has the funds to outright purchase the house. It really is kind of shameful what is going on in this country where real estate is concerned. Basically, a lot of greed. Just finding shelter should not be so difficult.
We have been looking for another house to lease while we search for a house to buy out of state. Had we known how brutal the market has become in so many places, we would not have sold our house when we did.
All we can find here locally as far as a small house are 1000 sf bungalows for $1600 and up. And they are dumps. Also as long time home owners, we had no clue about how the property management business works. Large application fees with absolutely no guarantee of acceptance so one can only do that so many times. And if you're retired without pay stubs, qualifying is very unlikely even if in reality once has the funds to outright purchase the house. It really is kind of shameful what is going on in this country where real estate is concerned. Basically, a lot of greed. Just finding shelter should not be so difficult.
I am so, so sorry you are having to go through this, Pinkytoe. What an incredible bummer. It sure feels like the 2007 market leading into 2008 bubble, but I am always kind of an alarmist.
It really is an unsustainable situation as there are just so many average (and lower) income folk who cannot afford to pay the rents being asked. And so it will topple eventually.
Another thing we've figured out is that many of the smaller homes in popular cities have been purchased to be used as short term rentals. And then they sit empty during slow periods. But at $150 a night and up, the owners can make up the difference.
catherine
9-15-16, 11:18am
Rents are very high. I've been considering a "try before I buy" experiment by renting in Burlington for several months to a year. It's a very popular city, and you can't get anything decent for under $1000. And that's for the dumps they rent to the college kids. For more mature people with higher standards, you have to pay $1400-1600 and up for a 1 bedroom.
Teacher Terry
9-15-16, 2:53pm
Here there are only 4 months of housing on the market for sale which is not healthy. So it is a sellers market with prices going up fast. However, experts are predicting that the prices will fall again and the plunge will be worse then the last time. I have a hard time believing that as some new homes are being built but the builders are not going crazy like before. Also we have created a bunch of good paying jobs so people will be coming in. Since we have 4 dogs we always buy the home we want and then sell our old home after we have moved out. It is too risky trying to rent with 4 dogs.
Another thing we've figured out is that many of the smaller homes in popular cities have been purchased to be used as short term rentals. And then they sit empty during slow periods. But at $150 a night and up, the owners can make up the difference.
In my community, half the housing stock is unavailable for year-round rental. Owners can make more money with less fuss simply renting out by-the-day during our 3 month long tourist season than they can by renting it year-round. We also have some of the highest property values, and lowest wages, in the state, which is a perfect combination to create a lack of affordable housing for "normal" working folks. Furthermore, you can't easily commute here from anywhere, and the county has adopted programs which make new construction very expensive and time-consuming. Also, there's an excise tax of ~1% of each real estate transaction which goes to purchasing land for conservation, taking more land out of the developable pool.
The end game will be problematic.
freshstart
9-15-16, 3:31pm
Rents are very high. I've been considering a "try before I buy" experiment by renting in Burlington for several months to a year. It's a very popular city, and you can't get anything decent for under $1000. And that's for the dumps they rent to the college kids. For more mature people with higher standards, you have to pay $1400-1600 and up for a 1 bedroom.
Burlington is my fav city but the housing is high. My ex and I were thinking of moving there but then we had kids and couldn't move them that far away without breaking my mother's heart. I wouldn't mind trying to end up there when I am alone.
ApatheticNoMore
9-15-16, 3:39pm
It really is an unsustainable situation as there are just so many average (and lower) income folk who cannot afford to pay the rents being asked. And so it will topple eventually.
or not. I mean there are other alternatives to it toppling, 5 people living in apartments meant for one or two people, homelessness and people living in cars etc.. That's how it is now. And we will envy Europe where few can afford a home but at least people can afford a rental. It's unsustainable when landlords can't get enough people to pay rent to make money off it pretty much, but until then it's not really unsustainable (however there may have been investors in rentals betting on stuff that doesn't pan out - yea that will all come out in the recession).
Everyone said the housing market would correct after 2008, only briefly did it, it's as crazy as ever now, but it's much worse when the rental market is crazy too, it maybe a bit of a blow not to buy but it's much worse barely being able to have shelter at all. But the rental market might never really correct either. Yes of course both are somewhat of a manipulated market but ... it can continue to be as well.
Teacher Terry
9-15-16, 3:46pm
Rents have really gotten crazy here too. I really feel sorry for people tht don;t make a lot of $. A builder just built a expensive subdivision that are rentals with leases only. He is banking on the people that are moving in for the newly created good paying jobs.
In my community, half the housing stock is unavailable for year-round rental. Owners can make more money with less fuss simply renting out by-the-day during our 3 month long tourist season than they can by renting it year-round. We also have some of the highest property values, and lowest wages, in the state, which is a perfect combination to create a lack of affordable housing for "normal" working folks. Furthermore, you can't easily commute here from anywhere, and the county has adopted programs which make new construction very expensive and time-consuming. Also, there's an excise tax of ~1% of each real estate transaction which goes to purchasing land for conservation, taking more land out of the developable pool.
The end game will be problematic.
You see that problem writ large in places like San Francisco. Restrict the housing supply for any number of high-minded environmental, social or aesthetic reasons long enough, and you become an enclave of wealthy liberals sitting in expensive real estate lecturing the country at large about inequality and the lack of decent restaurants.
Another oddity here is AirBnB and similar services.
Some local activists claim that AirBnB is sucking up all the housing. Yet when I look at the AirBnB catalog for the area, I see homes that have been rented out daily/weekly for many years now, that have been managed by our local property management firms, that all rake off a substantial percentage of the take in exchange for their management services. I see a *few* other units, but not enough to indicate to me that it is more than the normal turnover of year round -> vacation rental -> year round status that happens as homes change hands here and owners have different goals. Some of the local management firms clearly have simply dumped their entire portfolio into AirBnB as just another advertising channel - they are the same units, same prices, same contact numbers.
Some of the less-successful management firms complain about AirBnB - my suspicion is that they are losing business to homeowners who realize they can use the AirBnB platform to cut out the middleman.
And the County is hearing complaints that "AirBnB people aren't paying their taxes!" Well, to get a vacation rental permit here requires a 6-month-long process that costs ~$5000, to get a piece of paper that is always granted and that is essentially just robbery by the County. Each rental is supposed to pay not only business/income/lodging tax, but, get this, a *special* lodging tax to go to a fund to deal with the effects of tourism on the community. Except, the County always gives those funds to the tourism promotion board, so the tax simply produces....more tourists, and more impact, and more demand on our housing, but not a *dime* of it usually goes to the purported purpose of the tax...
It's sort of fun watching the battle between the traditional rental/real estate concerns here, who have hijacked our regulatory apparatus, and the new rebels trying to skirt the system.
We have the same issue with food trucks. Not allowed. Because, well, they "aren't fair" to the other businesses that have to rent real estate to operate their restaurants in...
No nice things for us.
It's sort of fun watching the battle between the traditional rental/real estate concerns here, who have hijacked our regulatory apparatus, and the new rebels trying to skirt the system.
We have the same issue with food trucks. Not allowed. Because, well, they "aren't fair" to the other businesses that have to rent real estate to operate their restaurants in...
No nice things for us.
Uber seems to run into similar issues in many places where entrenched interests are protected "for the public good".
You see that problem writ large in places like San Francisco. Restrict the housing supply for any number of high-minded environmental, social or aesthetic reasons long enough, and you become an enclave of wealthy liberals sitting in expensive real estate lecturing the country at large about inequality and the lack of decent restaurants.
And if you have no restrictions, or you wantonly let any old builder do what they want for the highest bid without any cohesive urban planning you wind up with Newark NJ.
And if you have no restrictions, or you wantonly let any old builder do what they want for the highest bid without any cohesive urban planning you wind up with Newark NJ.
No, you end up with North Caldwell, NJ, lol.
catherine
9-16-16, 10:29am
No, you end up with North Caldwell, NJ, lol.
That, too, but I was thinking of a story my son told me. He went to Rutgers Law School at Newark, and someone there told him that as both Manhattan and Newark developed, they started on the same foot more or less but took different paths from a planning perspective and therefore Manhattan wound up being a vibrant place, and Newark wound up dead more or less.
People say one reason is that Manhattan chose to preserve a huge open space (Central Park). It wasn't in the original plan for the city, but several people started advocating for it:
Between 1821 and 1855, New York City nearly quadrupled in population. As the city expanded northward up Manhattan, people were drawn to the few existing open spaces, mainly cemeteries, to get away from the noise and chaotic life in the city. Since Central Park was not part of the original Commissioners' Plan of 1811, John Randel, Jr., surveyed the grounds. The only remaining surveying bolt from his survey is still visible; it is embedded in a rock just north of the present Dairy and the 65th Street Transverse, and south of Center Drive.[7]
New York City's need for a great public park was resounded by the famed poet and editor of the Evening Post (now the New York Post), William Cullen Bryant, as well as by the first American landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing, who predicted and began to publicize the city's need for a public park in 1844. A stylish place for open-air driving, similar to Paris' Bois de Boulogne or London's Hyde Park, was felt to be needed by many influential New Yorkers, and, after an abortive attempt in 1850–1851 to designate Jones's Wood, in 1853 the New York legislature settled upon a 700-acre (280 ha) area from 59th to 106th Streets for the creation of the Park, at a cost of more than US$5 million for the land alone.[8][9][10]
OTOH, Newark thought about preserving open spaces but then opted for the cash. And look what happened.
Sanitary conditions were bad throughout urban America in the 19th century, but Newark had an especially bad reputation because of the accumulation of human and horse waste built up on the city streets, its inadequate sewage systems, and the dubious quality of its water supply.[18]
Problems existed underneath the industrial hum. In 1930, a city commissioner told the Optimists, a local booster club:
“ Newark is not like the city of old. The old, quiet residential community is a thing of the past, and in its place has come a city teeming with activity. With the change has come something unfortunate—the large number of outstanding citizens who used to live within the community's boundaries has dwindled. Many of them have moved to the suburbs and their home interests are there.[20]
So, it has been theorized that lack of any natural oasis like Central Park drove the middle class out of the city, and led to the development of lots of substandard housing.
Thank God for the high-minded environmental, social and aesthetic considerations made by the wise people in 19th century Manhattan.
So, it has been theorized that lack of any natural oasis like Central Park drove the middle class out of the city, and led to the development of lots of substandard housing.
Thank God for the high-minded environmental, social and aesthetic considerations made by the wise people in 19th century Manhattan.
I never thought of places like Central Park West as middle class havens.
ApatheticNoMore
9-16-16, 11:23am
Thank God for the high-minded environmental, social and aesthetic considerations made by the wise people in 19th century Manhattan.
the thing is if you do stuff like that you build a city that people actually WANT to live in and it tends to cost more (not that NYC is everyone's cup of tea, but many do want to live there). Because people will pay more to live somewhere nice and interesting and so on. If on the other hand they create a sh*tty heck hole, that noone in their right mind would choose to live in, but many do for practical reasons (jobs, family etc.), if might be cheaper just because noone would choose to live there, because it's not nice, the quality of life is nothing to write home about.
And this is why we can't have nice things!
You can definitely tell the difference between places that did some planning and didn't even just locally, the one's that did are much nicer though not cheaper. Of course some places just have enough natural beauty that it overwhelms all such considerations and are considered desirable for that reason alone. It helps to preserve it (they do in some of the the larger bay area, in San Fran itself there is just no physical land period), even then it's hard to destroy a beach town say and it's why a beach town may stay quirky. But without such natural advantages, planning makes the difference.
catherine
9-16-16, 12:32pm
I never thought of places like Central Park West as middle class havens.
No, I'm talking about Central Park, the place where any one of the 8 million inhabitants of NY can go to for nature and recreation. Doesn't matter if you live in Trump Tower or above a bodega in Harlem. As a matter of fact, even I can go to Central Park any time I want to, even though I live in NJ. It's an equal opportunity Eden. It's probably natural that people with money can scarf up the adjacent neighborhoods, but they can't keep anyone out of Central Park no matter how much money they have.
Because people will pay more to live somewhere nice and interesting and so on.
I think there are tons of places that have paid attention to having pleasant common areas and they don't necessarily cost a lot. Heck, look at all the towns across America that have town greens. My own town has several parks (I live on one of them--couldn't afford Central Park West). The town next door was one of Money Magazines top places to live a couple of years back, partially based on the amount of Open Space they purchased from retiring farmers. And the housing there is a bargain compared to some other surrounding towns.
Daniel Burnham did much the same with his plan for Chicago. He said that everyone should be within walking distance of a park. The Chicago lakefront is gorgeous, regardless of the mess the city is in (financially, politically, etc.)
Miss Cellane
9-16-16, 12:54pm
Daniel Burnham did much the same with his plan for Chicago. He said that everyone should be within walking distance of a park. The Chicago lakefront is gorgeous, regardless of the mess the city is in (financially, politically, etc.)
Frederick Law Olmsted did something similar with Boston and its "Emerald Necklace," a series of parks and greenways that stretches across the city and links several neighborhoods with Boston Common and the Public Garden. And now the city is working on opening up the waterfront, which used to be closed off by elevated highways and some horrific traffic patterns.
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