from Hacker News

31% Can’t Pay the Rent: ‘It’s Only Going to Get Worse’

by Willson50 on 4/13/20, 1:47 AM with 128 comments

• by mkl on 4/13/20, 2:08 AM

  > through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants had so far failed to pay their rent, compared with 18 percent in the same period a year ago.

  If the headline had said 18%, the situation would have sounded bad to me, but apparently that's normal?

• by jacknews on 4/13/20, 2:32 AM

  Rents will have to come down or be waived.

  Almost by definition "rent" is simply extracting value from the productive economy through ownership.

  If the productive economy takes a dive or disappears, the amount you can extract must do likewise.

• by dbcurtis on 4/13/20, 3:06 AM

  Let's follow the money.

  Tenant fails to pay rent because of economic hardship. Building owner get in a cash squeeze and can't pay vendors like plumber, snow clearing, landscaping, and eventually can't make loan payments.

  Mortgage holders see a rise in troubled loans, eventually writing a large number of them off for large losses.

  REITs take losses on investments they must write off.

  Your own retirement plan or personal investment portfolio takes a hit because some portion of it is REITs.

  Everything is interconnected. I see a lot of simplistic "landlords must suck it up" comments in this thread. Really, who is so naive as to think that the typical commercial property is not leveraged?

• by shubidubi on 4/13/20, 2:37 AM

  I don't get why it's not ok to steal food from a grocery store but it is ok to not pay rent. Both are basic necessities and in both cases you hurt someone else by not paying for service (food/shelter).

• by PakG1 on 4/13/20, 3:10 AM

  130 tenants? People at that level, I would have considered them to be corporations collecting rent, not individual landlords. Well, he probably collects everything through a corporation too, I imagine. My point is that I've never put a face to a corporate landlord before. It's always been a faceless corporation, even for corporations where the founding face is famous. Reading this was weird for me. He behaves like an individual landlord too, personally answers all the emails, doesn't have a secretary? Maybe 130 tenants is too low a number to justify hiring help. Blows my mind.

• by wtvanhest on 4/13/20, 2:19 AM

  Equity residential collected 93% of rent for April 1.

  The difference in tenants is real. Equity residential tenants are higher end rentals in big to midsized cities with strong economies.

  http://investors.equityapartments.com/file/Index?KeyFile=403...

• by nerfhammer on 4/13/20, 3:03 AM

  > using security deposits as a stopgap

  wait, is that even legal? Aren't security deposits meant to be held in trust?

• by noad on 4/13/20, 3:02 AM

  Corporations are really leading the way here. If they can't preserve enough cash to last a month and plan to strike as their opening negotiating tactic then people should too. Why not?

• by aww_dang on 4/13/20, 2:57 AM

  Meanwhile gov banks have been keeping foreclosed housing off-market for over a decade to prop up the price.

• by bArray on 4/13/20, 2:18 AM

  "31% Can't Pay the Rent" != "31% Are Not Paying Rent"

  "Can't" indicates they are unable, whereas I suspect at least some are taking advantage of the current situation [1]. Any situation where it's possible to take advantage, you can almost guarantee that people will.

  This is not the way forwards - not paying rent will have a large knock-on effect for landlords (which, despite some sentiment, isn't necessarily the 1%). The US government needs to provide money if they are going to demand that people stay at home and not work.

  Ultimately they either bring the economy to a screaming halt (entirely) or trickle money to those unable to work in order to keep things going. In my opinion stalling the economy is a bad idea - it can cost a lot of time and money to get it going again.

  [1] https://news.yahoo.com/rent-strike-idea-gaining-steam-170345...