What I find interesting about this is that someone can still afford it because the market sets the price. We know that housing costs have increased immensely due to limited supply and because housing is a need, but someone can still afford it. Otherwise, they’d lower the price to whatever someone can pay. So if a lawyer cannot afford the rent, who can??
The old adage used to be that an empty rental was costing you money. Landlords would work for around 75+% occupancy, and to achieve that the price would also stay lower, to keep it occupied.
Then the price fixing of airlines happened, and the guy responsible (whose name I can’t recall at the moment - maybe someone else does?) went into real estate with the same software approach. The theory? If you can charge enough off of a few to pay for all the others, then occupancy doesn’t matter.
Let’s use the numbers from the OP - $700 and $3600, with a 20 year gap. The post is from several years back, but let’s use 2004 and 2024 for inflation calcs. $700 in 2004 is just a hair under $1200 today, so with a cost of $3600 - triple - that would mean one tenant has the same value to them as three. So if you have 6 units and have 3 tenants, you’re now making a LOT more money overall, as those two tenants provided the same as six under the older model.
TL;DR: Shitty people and shitty companies trying to get the most money they can, with zero regard for the impact of these decisions.
3 lawyers and 1 teacher (who can only afford a corner in the kitchen) as roommates.
Rental prices are very possibly not determined by the market these days. RealPage and other companies like it may be colluding to fix prices at artificially high levels.
This ProPublica article covers the practice fairly well: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
EDIT: apologies, that was the wrong article. This is the one I wanted to link: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-lawmakers-collusion
Yeah, well, you know… those landlords need more money for working so hard.
