[HN Gopher] When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord
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When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord
Author : jbegley
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-02-09 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.propublica.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.propublica.org)
| bearjaws wrote:
| Same experience here in Central Florida, a large chunk of
| independent complexes were bought up by Greystar, and promptly
| driven into the ground. Of course since the whole area is growing
| they still run profitably, but the complexes are barely kept up,
| maintenance is slow and QoL is overall poor.
|
| You can even see they rebrand them every 3-4 years to get rid of
| bad reviews...
| herval wrote:
| Building I live on has clearly fake reviews on their official
| site and loads of 5 star reviews with no comments on
| google/yelp/etc, offsetting all the resident reviews (1-2
| stars). It's quite difficult to realize that, unless you go
| through each review carefully. I fell for it, and had that
| conversation w/ multiple neighbors.
| salawat wrote:
| This seems pathological. I'm wondering if we need to look at
| doing a better job in terms of requiring/tracking corporate
| lineage.
|
| The "Name on the building", as it were, represents a valuable
| lever for the public to identify and hold to account the
| management that makes their lives hell. Whipping up a new legal
| fiction, changing faces, but keeping the same people at the top
| needs to not be as trivial as it seems to have become,
| especially if the Courts are treating these entities as
| distinct instead of as a wrapper or veneer on the same rotten
| core.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| the black pill is that corporations are designed to separate
| liability from people and profits, and this includes
| repetitional liability. the only solution is to attach the
| behavior to the actual individuals responsible.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| This would be some real utility of a social credit score.
| herval wrote:
| I currently rent in a building from a big Private Equity/rental
| corporation (Equity Residential). Everything is purposefully low
| quality, common areas are terribly maintained (except for the
| areas they take prospect residents for a tour around), and it's
| clearly organized to squeeze every penny and force people out on
| regular schedules. It's depressing.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I would advocate for more free market as solution to this. Allow
| more construction, allow more competition. Thus force these
| companies to provide either better service or cheaper prices. If
| they or everyone else were allowed oversupply market lot of
| issues would correct. Maybe some control tools like forcing them
| to supply market in reasonable time period from lot allotment or
| face massive taxes.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > Thus force these companies to provide either better service
| or cheaper prices.
|
| Let's be honest here, it will all come down to cheaper costs,
| which inevitably will impact quality.
|
| But because the alternatives are clear - either have a roof
| over your head or go homeless - there is no incentive to
| maintain quality at the expense of larger margins.
|
| This is essentially what happens with healthcare. You cannot
| just opt-out of it if, thus terrible but cheap practices will
| always exist, and people will die as a consequence of this.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| This will eventually regulate itself even without any action.
| People have already started to move away from these areas.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I think eventually we'll get to a point in the US where it's
| illegal for corporations to buy residential housing.
| wcarron wrote:
| I dearly hope so. Housing is for people, not corporations. I
| would like to see the introduction of zoning laws that
| accomplish this.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| I dont see private ownership of apartment buildings happening
| anytime soon.
|
| I worry we might see the opposite. Someone will be convinced
| the "solution" to the housing crisis is to just remove citizen
| ownership of housing to begin with.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Nobody is going to be willing to fork over the building
| maintenance fees (which will continue to increase over the
| years) after their mortgages are paid off.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is a cultural thing. Some countries have private
| ownership of apartment buildings to be very common. One way
| is a LLC where stock grants rights to single apartment.
| Then LLC charges monthly fee. Or even loans for larger
| renovations/maintenance to owners.
| EliRivers wrote:
| Honestly can't see that happening; there's an enormous profit
| to be made in having most of the population rent. People will
| pay every penny they have for food, healthcare and somewhere to
| sleep. Letting ordinary people own houses instead of harvesting
| from them for their entire lives is just not profitable.
|
| The people could get together and make laws to protect
| themselves, and there's some whispering of this with recent
| attempts to form unions and so on, but against the political
| might of the rich, the people don't look to have much of a
| chance.
| salawat wrote:
| This is actually why Andrew Jackson was dead set on killing the
| National Bank.
|
| As soon as you have groups pooling money to snatch up land to
| rent, you sort of destroy one of the big draws of the American
| dream, because in the end, the market will adjust to the whims
| of the conglomerates instead of the lone citizen.
|
| This is exactly the outcome he was trying to avoid.
| elipsey wrote:
| Yep. I recently lived in a Greystar property in San Rafael. The
| garage gate broke and was tied open with a rope for several
| months. The front security gate latch broke and my key card
| didn't work on half of the doors. The mailboxes' latch broke and
| post office repeatedly notified management and stopped delivering
| mail for weeks at a time on several separate occasions. Same with
| the package room. There was no on site security -- you can guess
| how that turned out in the bay area.
|
| When I moved in, the place was riddled with broken stuff. The
| toilet, sink, dish washer, and washing machine were broken. It
| took months of email and "support tickets", to get that stuff
| fixed, I fixed the toilet myself, and let the small stuff slide.
| Management was almost unreachable and seemed disorganized at the
| local level. It was totally surreal.
|
| All for the bargain price of 3400/mo. Luckily it was a short
| lease. This was mid 2020, so I was happy not to be downtown for
| while, and San Rafael was wonderful, but I was out of that place
| as soon as the short lease was up. It took them six months to
| figure out how to cash my final check.
|
| When looking for my next rental, Greystar managament was an
| instant deal breaker, and I would recommend avoiding at all cost.
| johnebgd wrote:
| I lived in a Greystar building starting in 2013 for three years
| in Chicago and one year in Sacramento before moving into a
| different rental company building in San Francisco. They were
| excellent, extremely attentive to problems. The buildings were
| well maintained. Not saying your experience wasn't valid just
| that mine was very different.
| mimikatz wrote:
| I can 2nd this. I lived at a Greystar building for a couple
| years and it was a much better experience than the one I
| moved to afterwards.
| onphonenow wrote:
| It can be heavily dependent on area etc. Rent control areas /
| for-cause eviction areas - you can get some pretty horrific
| maintenance situations. San Rafael I think is now for cause,
| required mediation on rent increases and "bad faith" means
| that the increase is not valid.
|
| That said, these guys look like scum - but I've seen
| nongreystar crap properties as well.
|
| One thing - I wish review sites would not let them change
| names and start fresh on reviews for a property at a given
| address.
| elipsey wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if there were considerable variation
| between properties. My observation was that there seemed to
| be a remote higher level management office that was out of
| state, and out of touch with local conditions, but still
| trying to control costs aggressively. So the one local
| property manager was grossly overworked and under-resourced.
| She actually seemed quite pitiably desperate (and there was
| turnover in that role).
|
| Also, maybe in lower COL areas than SF bay it might be easier
| for them to source labor and services at a cost they were
| willing to pay. They kept saying it was because of covid, but
| my previous and following landlords both managed to provide
| basic essential services like legal mailboxes and working
| toilets. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Wow. Sorry to have this takeaway from your story, but HCOL
| areas really don't make sense anymore. I recently calculated
| mortgage for a really, really nice house in coastal Spain. 5
| bedrooms, 3200 sqft, pool, garage the whole shebang. The
| mortgage came to 1300/month if you put down the minimum.
| elipsey wrote:
| Agree. I just bought a house outside of the bay area. :)
| OTHO, if I didn't live there I probably couldn't have saved
| for the house...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| What's interesting is the company on the list that is not private
| equity: Irvine Co.
|
| I have been I have been in many of their apartments and know
| friends who live there. They always seemed very nice, well-
| maintained, with very helpful staff.
|
| I wonder how much their not being a private equity company
| contributes to that.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I was told my apartment complex is owned by JP Morgan directly
| and managed by a California company Sares Regis. They've done a
| respectable job with upkeep in the 20 year old buildings and
| grounds. Maintenance, security, cleaning, utilities have worked
| fine or been taken care of in a reasonable timeframe. The
| apartments are a little cookie-cutter generic but that's fine
| with me.
| chaorace wrote:
| This happened to me last year. They fired most of the management
| staff and replaced them with half as many soulless middle
| managers. Office hours were cut down to the bare minimum and they
| started cheaping out on maintenance throughout the complex.
|
| The "solution" that I found was to move into a highrise with
| ludicrously high profit margins. At that point, the incentives
| flip back over, because property managers are afraid of killing
| the golden goose. Sure... _tripling_ my rent isn 't exactly the
| smartest decision that I've ever made, but it sure as hell solved
| the problem!
| onemoresoop wrote:
| This is so depressing and it is only getting worse.
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