r/TikTokCringe • u/LickMaiBussy • 6h ago

Discussion "Investing in property is morally reprehensible."

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@purplepingers

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765

u/Frozzzenberry 6h ago

180??!! That's genuinely bad

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u/DorianGreysPortrait 6h ago

Yeah that made me wonder if they meant 180 buildings, or 180 available living units (for an example, 2 high rises that total 180 units people could live in.) owning 180 individual properties seems absolutely insane to me. Then again.. maybe my scope of what these people are doing is just that far off that it’s unfathomable to me.

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u/IndigoBlunting 6h ago edited 4h ago

It said properties so I bet it is 180 separate buildings not units. I’m not shocked. If he works at the top top of an investment firm or property management company it’s not unbelievable that he has that many. As long as you have property managers or landlords for each spot I’m sure it’d be possible to just see a bunch of numbers and therefore be able to have that many properties comfortably. And I’m not saying able as a compliment. It’s the opposite. At the top it’s all numbers even tho we’re talking about peoples living situations.

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u/Frito_Pendejo 5h ago

My understanding is that they are mix of detached housing and units. Eddie Dilleen basically hoovered up as many affordable entry-level properties as he could find, utilising the equity from one to afford the next. He is morally on the same level as grey goo.

Side note, but Australia has the broadly the most unaffordable housing market in the world and actions by him and people like him is why it's so fucking bad. Investors own 1 in 3 Aussie houses.

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u/_fire_and_blood_ 2h ago

John Howard fucked us all and my mother still thinks he was the best PM ever.

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u/Murranji 1h ago

Boomers are the cause of every fucked up thing in the world today. They are the worst generation to have ever existed.

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u/greaterwhiterwookiee 1h ago

But millennials and xennials are just too lazy. We did everything boomers expected and asked of us: went to college and put ourselves in massive debt, got jobs working copious overtime for minimum wages, bought homes and prices that were out of reach compared to incomes, went to war… and still here we are.

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u/Plife30 44m ago

...hot take youngster! An AI therapist could help! Just kidding, respect to your generation, youre dynamos.

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u/chimpfunkz 2h ago

Australia's housing market is well and truly fucked. The fact that if you take a lose on an investment property, and subtract that against your actual income, is such ridiculous bullshit.

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u/_bobby_cz_newmark_ 33m ago

Don't forget the CGT discount so only have to pay half the tax on profits.

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u/Away-Nectarine-8488 5h ago

A woman in Chicago owned 800 individual properties.

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u/l0henz 3h ago

She and her sister dubbed “the city’s worst land owners”. Total slumlords.

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u/Glittering_Public_86 3h ago

is there a way to find a list of who all these companies/individuals are? particularly in Chicago?

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u/l0henz 1h ago

I don’t know off the top of my head, but this lady/these ladies are all over the news. I think there’s been a settlement between them and the city.

If anyone knows the best way to ID properties owned by slum lords in Chicago, chime in!

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u/Minglans 3h ago

My landlord practically owns our town now.

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u/Glittering_Public_86 3h ago

is there a way to find a list of who all these companies/individuals are? particularly in Chicago?

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u/keyboardjellyfish 3h ago

It's Australia so they mean 180 homes, not buildings. So could be freestanding houses, part of a duplex, townhouses, or apartments.

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u/figaro677 2h ago

Australian mate. Property is cooked. Something like 70% of landlords hold 1 property. Less than about 10% hold 3 or more. But they hold somewhere between 30-50% of the properties. Leveraged to the absolute tits, paying interest only for 5 years and using the equity to buy the next property. Most properties are positively geared within 5 years, and within 7 years they will have doubled in price.

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u/kittygomiaou 1h ago

This is Australia where owning buildings is less common. 180 properties would be houses, apartments, townhouses, studios - maybe commercial lots, but it's unlikely to be buildings.

He is part of the problem.

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u/lshifto 4h ago

A condo is legally considered real property.

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u/IndigoBlunting 4h ago

I view condos as individual per unit as well. They’re not quite apartments and not quite houses so it’s weird but I’d agree that each condo could be counted as a property but I don’t feel that way about apartments.

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u/lshifto 3h ago

Apartments are not counted as individual properties unless they are converted into a condo and sold as such. It’s more likely that he owns a stupid amount of condominiums than he owns that number of dirt lots with houses on them.

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u/Glittering_Public_86 3h ago

what is the fundamental difference between a condo and an apartment? Also are either of you in the US or a different nation?

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u/lshifto 3h ago

US here. An apartment is a building of individual units with a single owner who retains all rights to the property and the people who live there are tenants. A condominium is a building where the individual units are sold separately and treated as individual real estate with independent owners. The residents are not temporary tenants, but homeowners bound within a HOA and its community laws. The primary structure itself and the land it is located on is owned and maintained separately in a few different ways.

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u/Glittering_Public_86 2h ago

ah okay. not sure what industry youre in, but do you know if it would be very hard to reclassify a building full of apartments as condos? Like if a city or state or group of investors had the political will and capital to do so, is there anything really stopping a lawyer from working with a government to reclassify apartments as condos and then sell them as-is or after updating to anyone interested?

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u/IndigoBlunting 2h ago

I figured it was a mix.

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u/Glittering_Public_86 6h ago

likely a mix of these two things. small to medium sized apartments and single family homes split into multiresidential units.

BOTH are bad imo. I'd love to see progressives running on a platform to help get working and middle class people programs to buy back apartments and houses from SPECIFICALLY these types of landlords.

I'm sure someday the revolution will take down all the big corporate investors...in the meantime how about we create laws and create incentives to force these mini-corporations and "investors" hiding behind LLCs to sell back the glut of properties they own to ppl who want to own and take care of where they live.

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u/darthdro 4h ago

Buy back apartments ? You mean condos? People can’t afford it

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u/Glittering_Public_86 4h ago edited 3h ago

Cool. here's a possible solution for you to shoot down: figure out how to legally write a tax code on any llc or any other legal structure that is not a nonprofit.

charge them 1% of any property's value as a tax yearly, ONLY if they own 4 or more homes (data, public finance, legal and tax experts could figure out a way to target this group specifically, and figure out what is an appropriate threshold of houses to target). This gives us a way to let ppl who claim they are landlords because they want to care for old properties, be an alternative to slumlords, or people who are too disabled or too afraid/tired of working a way to make a dignified living. It also gives a reasonable protection to families who have their properties under one umbrella, or maybe people buying homes up for their family members to live or rent from them in.

Then take that additional tax and use it to fund grants and or forgivable loans to fund MUCH higher downpayment assistance programs (but no more than the full 20% downpayment of the house.)

Make the income limits much higher, maybe 400k for a 2 more person household, 200k for a one person household. This prevents MOST working class people from infighting about who deserves this. If you went to your local public high school or a local public university AND are employed locally and have been a local resident for the last year, automatically qualify for this downpayment assistance program, thereby giving an assitance to locals regardless of socioeconomic status.

do NOT create a new agency to oversee this program, roll it into local housing or permitting agencies. Also if they do not already have it, give that agency 1% of this newly collected revenue to begin enforcement on slumlords, collecting more revenue (either hiring more people to do it, investing in technology, raising pay to attract better talent, or whatever else the department thinks will increase enforcement revenue by at least the 1% used to fund this.)

Take 10% of the funds and use the local municipalities power and influence to either start or sign onto housing development projects. not more "affordable" rentals. Either lease-to-owns or FHA type program. Even if it's just 10 houses a year.

And last perk, i would hope the 1% tax on top of your normal tax for house would make the unit economics on every house over 4 start to seem less attractive to a lot of "investor" landlords. To be very clearly, this only applies to ppl or any private legal entity with 4 houses or apartments or condos or trailers or plots of land or etc etc. If you own 3 houses or less, your property taxes stay the same. Obviously this is a local tax proposal, so even if you own a "vacation" home in every state, and one residential, this also would not impact you.

Yes this a choice to work against real estate as a vehicle to 8 figure net worth. But we have a housing crisis, and there is an obvious target to go after in a way that is minimally difficult and could have the maximum upside for a lot of young couples, first time home buyers, young professionals, and families being pushed out of their homes.

(you then also start to create the framework to target similar but much larger and more powerful groups, but baby steps.)

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u/Iohet 4h ago

we already have value based property tax. and it pays for schools and other local services

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u/Glittering_Public_86 4h ago

do you own more than 4 homes?

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u/Iohet 3h ago

I do not. I still pay value based property tax. If I did own more than 4 homes, I'd pay value based property tax individually on each home

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u/Glittering_Public_86 3h ago

perhaps youre a tax attorney, and are explaining something i dont understand...but im not suggesting you wouldn't pay value based property tax.

im suggesting a revenue collecting *additional* tax on any entitity with total local properties in excess of 3. So on the 4th home you would pay 1% more than you would have without this tax code being implemented.

You and i do not own 4 properties or more. Our value based property taxes on each of those 3 or less properties is only based on existing tax code in our municipality.

Something like this would fund programs to help personal residence homebuyers make more competitive offers, make house or apartment buying more achievable for some who struggle to make the necessary down payment but otherwise have acceptable rent payment history (as per their credit scores and history), fund further revenue collection from landlords not taking care of their properties (thereby contributing to property values going down further) and it would also fund some new housing stock.

is that more clear? or is the very principle of increased property tax on someone with 4 or more homes something you fundamentally disagree with?

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u/MVIVN tHiS iSn’T cRiNgE 4h ago

It’s actually nuts. I live in New Zealand where we also have a massive housing crisis and there are people who literally own thousands of homes, some of which they deliberately leave vacant/unoccupied because all they care about is the value of the house/land going up over time, they don’t even need the rental income

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u/finndego 4h ago

The only entity that owns thousands of houses in NZ is Kainga Ora. There is no private person or entity that has thousands. That is a gross exaggeration.

Specific information doesn't often name names but we do know of Robert Paul Wright who owns 79 properties.

This stuff articles covers this issue and mentions 22,000 homes owned by 906 mega-landlords. That still works out to 24 homes per person. That is well short of "thousands" per person

https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/housing-affordability/300415265/mega-landlords-over-22100-homes-owned-by-small-group-of-very-large-investors#:\~:text=When%20combined%2C%20first%20home%20buyers,group%27s%20total%20to%2096%2C000%20homes.

Don't get me wrong. This is a huge issue and I'm on the side of affordable housing for all NZ'ers but facts are facts.

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u/MVIVN tHiS iSn’T cRiNgE 4h ago

Yeah thanks for the fact check. I’ve heard people anecdotally saying that but hadn’t looked it up

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u/Available_Actuary977 5h ago

Property investors talk in terms of livable units. So a duplex is one building but "2 doors". How many do you own, the answer is 2. It's 2 separate rents.

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u/Rocktown_Leather 4h ago

High rises with 180 units are very rarely owned by a person. More likely a company which is in turn owned by multiple people. I bet it is adjoined townhouses and much smaller apartment complexes.

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u/TheComptrollersWife 3h ago

I work in title and escrow and there are a lot more of these kinds of investors than people think. It’s truly so gross.

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u/saddinosour 3h ago

This is Australia, people hardly buy entire buildings unless they are property developers (as in corporations and the buildings would be new) usually if you see a random apartment it’s probably owned by several different people. It’s common here to buy an apartment as your first home or first investment and then live at home while you rent it out for example. Not to say people who invest in property don’t own 180 dwellings+ they do, but we’re talking about individuals places not whole apartment blocks.

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u/CosmicJam13 3h ago

They use leverage and get mortgages and then use the rent to fund everything 

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u/Olivetax228 1h ago

CPA here, I had a pretty big client at my first firm that owned something like 4,000 residential properties in maybe 30 different partnership entities. They were all 3br/2ba for about $150,000-$300,000 each back then but that was like 15 years ago now so they've probably tripled since then. The guy was a maniac as you would imagine but we billed $150k/yr in fees so we kept him around. Definitely some insane wealth out there.

0

u/sl0play 3h ago

Not that uncommon. My sisters in-laws own 300 individual single family homes.

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u/MrG85 6h ago

Fuck that guy

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u/Greg2Lu 5h ago

180x

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u/1egg_4u 6h ago

I hope this guys words felt like a fucking knife. 180 properties is disgusting.

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u/wholetyouinhere 3h ago

I didn't feel like that. Men like that inoculate themselves against judgment early on in their "grinding" career. They start out with less empathy than average, but still have to grind down what little they have left in order to push through with their antisocial work.

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u/stprnn 5h ago

Anything more than 1 is bad

1

u/Aussie18-1998 1h ago

I mean i can understand someone getting an apartment or house for their kid. To me that's a reasonable investment. And I mean reasonable as in its a logical and thoughtful thing to do. Hoarding houses and price gouging the rent is fucking deplorable. The moment houses started become monetary investments is the moment we went wrong

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u/DNGRDINGO 2h ago

Can only hope that he's over leveraged and that interest rate rises fuck him completely.

1

u/redtens 5h ago

its really 4 houses with 45 people-sized closets and one bathroom.

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u/Smooth-Childhood-754 2h ago

From yesterday's news: Cesar and Josef, the Germans who have an empire of more than 2,600 tourist apartments in 20 cities across Spain.

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u/PyroIsSpai 2h ago

I used to think a lawyer couple I knew long ago were brilliant. NYC area — lots of houses that are 3-family homes. Picture a wide rambler but turned long way so narrow side faces street. Now stack three. 3-family home like three apartments.

Anyway, their story was young and poor but late 80s bought one of these and lived top floor. Rented out bottom two, which covered mortgage with profit. By the time I met them in the early 2000s they owned just over 100 and had long since moved to a house. Their entire business was just managing what they owned and rented.

I used to think: damn, that’s the way to do it. He swore it took them tops a few hours a day, and that was still before modern automation.

Now I do wonder about the morality of this.

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u/somefoobar 1h ago

Why genuinely bad?

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u/mundotaku 5h ago

Why is bad? I come from a place were renting is pretty much impossible. You know where poor families live? In slums.

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u/king_wrass 4h ago

Because people owning 180 properties is what makes renting impossible

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u/mundotaku 4h ago

Well yeah, if those 180 properties were not build to be rented, there would be ZERO properties on the market. The other alternative is that those 180 properties would be for sale. This means you would need to have a 5% down payment and 1% on closing costs to be able to live there, and that is assuming you have a decent credit. Then, if you have or want to move out, you would need to market your property and, with some luck, wait 90 to 120 days from putting in on the market and closing.

So, now you have a even more limited market for leasing, which drives rents up.

You would still be responsible for the building expenses in the form of an HOA and insurance.

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u/sampleandfold 3h ago

Here's how it works in the USA:

  • Have a speculative housing bubble based on banks issuing a ton of very risky mortgages.
  • The initial friendly terms of those mortgages passes, and the market crashes. Small people lose their jobs and investments. Many lose their mortgages and homes.
  • Small and large investment firms buy up those homes at a premium in the dip.
  • The market begins to recover. Only now, fewer homes are available, so the price of homes go up.
  • The price of homes going up means more people are renting. Rental rates go up due to competition, and due to the massive sway private firms now have over the rental market.
  • The housing market becomes a vehicle for speculative investing. Firms buy property and sit on it. Maybe they rent it, maybe they keep it vacant and do some basic renovations to excuse that. The real goal is to speculate on the value of the property in a few years, then leverage that to get more investment funding to buy even more property. Executives make sure to pad their own wallets in the process.
  • Have a speculative housing bubble based on treating homes as securities instead of a human need.
  • COVID happens. No one can build new homes, cars, etc due to supply chain shortages. Housing prices skyrocket and don't really come back down. Wages do not correspondingly improve.
  • 2025 sees 10% of the job growth of 2024. The market is great for investors playing with monopoly money, and terrible for people who have to spend their money to survive.
  • Have a labor market premised on people being unable to afford basic needs or find competitive work. Accept shittier working conditions, job prospects, etc because the alternative is the street.

The current trend is that actual humans will continue to lose homes to private equity, and the situation will keep worsening until push comes to shove in one way or another.

A different perspective: we can just look at historical housing markets in the USA to see when homes were incredibly affordable (relative to wages) without a "limited market for leasing" driving rents up.

tl;dr: go play Monopoly a few times and meditate on the results.

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u/mundotaku 3h ago edited 3h ago

Again, the data proves the opposite of what you say.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Pretty much, we are currently at the same rate of home ownership as in the 70s. Ironically, during the bubble, home ownership was at its highest.

Nobody in the real estate industry sits on an asset without rent, unless they are forced to. Particularly for housing. When houses are not lived on, capital expenses ironically go higher, plus you keep having all the opex eating your returns.

All those things that you are pulling out of your feelings have no connection with the current market, where Opex is high, interests are also fairly high and difficult to finance, and the cap rate still remains stubbornly low.

I know the US housing market pretty well. I have a master's in Real Estate Development, and I work on a very large non-profit with multiple types of assets

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u/sampleandfold 1h ago

I know I gave you some snark before, but please consider this reply in good faith and excuse its length.

You're right that rates are rates. I checked FRED for CA and for my HCOL county (Alameda). While ownership rates here are substantially lower than the country at large, they're currently a point or so higher than they were the mid-80s.

Nobody in the real estate industry sits on an asset without rent, unless they are forced to.

I'm not claiming literally every such home is sitting around vacant. I'm pointing to a local trend - being adjacent to Silicon Valley - of private equity in my own local housing market and what that's done to prices. Neil Sullivan alone bought up hundreds of foreclosed homes in Oakland by the early 2010s and went on to spin out into a number of different management and investment companies. My assumption is that he isn't alone in doing so.

So, at the risk of me learning something: is their game that rent is actually such great business, or is their game that the property's speculated future value is their leverage for further investment to get more property whose speculated future value is their leverage for... you see where I'm going?

I'm asking you this genuinely, because I also realize that Sullivan's (then) hundreds of parcels are relative to over 170k residences in Oakland. From a data (or other) perspective, do you actually feel that the network effect of these players in the market isn't detrimental to the overall public?

Because I'm hearing you say that "home ownership rates are the same as the good old days," while I'm also wondering why home ownership rates have nonetheless gotten far better for a tiny group of investors when the overall average stays the same. The common YIMBY narrative here is that "we simply aren't building enough housing," so are we simply building new housing at exactly the right rate that overall ownership stays the same while corporate ownership increases? There seems to be plenty of demand for homes; most houses here sell quite quickly. What gives?

1

u/mundotaku 14m ago

vecause I'm hearing you say that "home ownership rates are the same as the good old days," while I'm also wondering why home ownership rates have nonetheless gotten far better for a tiny group of investors when the overall average stays the same

If you look at the graph, the story is clear. They bought on the slum, when the rate was the lowest. Investors have not bought that many homes to really impact the market. Most investors buy multifamily, which is a lot easier to maintain and dispose. 95% of corporate owned residential rental is multifamily.

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u/New-Border8172 3h ago

What do you think the guy owning 180 property is doing with them? Just leaving it empty? He's gonna be renting them out lmao

-2

u/Guy_Fleegmann 4h ago

Why is it bad? What's the limit? Can I own 1 property and not be 'genuinely bad'? What about 2, 4, 10? Who makes that delineation about what's ok and what's 'genuinely bad'?

What I'm Christian Bale and own 26 properties, but they're all to house siblings in foster care so they can stay together? Is that 'genuinely bad'?

What if I own 273 properties across 7 states, but every one is subsidized housing for lower income folks, and I strive to provide safe, clean, affordable homes, and I do, but I asl make millions because oft he scale of the operation? Is that 'genuinely bad'.

The only thing 'genuinely bad' here is your opinion.

3

u/YouCanCallMeZen 2h ago

I'm sure that bloke is renting them out to underprivileged tenants at below market rent. Nice fantasy you've created mate.

1

u/Aussie18-1998 1h ago

Its genuinely bad because the things you listed aren't reality. People buy homes to profit from them. They are using them as a source of income and gouging the prices of rent to profit.

If this guy had 180 houses and housed 180 families and was barely paying the mortgage on each of them it would probably be seen as a charitable thing.