“Automated landlords” are buying many single-family homes in some still affordable markets like Pittsburgh and Minneapolis, then flipping them into rental properties, many accessible to roommates . . . from afar, say many local students.
Since no landlord is anywhere nearby, all necessary info, documentation, passcodes, are provided entirely remotely. There’s no one to interact with in person that will ever be responsible for anything at all, ever. If repair requests are actually honored, they’re outsourced to local contractors.
Virtually no tenant with a remote landlord ever thought any repair happened on time, and even attempting to complain will send you down a rabbithole of absolutely no one willing to take responsibility for anything other than charging rent.
The remote landlords control you and their properties using apps and algorithms developed to assist Wall Street investment firms and real estate developers. So that helps them make money without having to actually show up to the property.
But it’s a lot less helpful to anyone looking for affordable housing. Long distance real estate investing always raises prices for anyone still local actually looking to live a life right there. The remotely run apps and algorithms also allow real estate developers to charge all the fees but now with next to none of the employees.
Housing advocates say long distance real estate run remotely from afar “//push lower and middle-income Americans out of homeownership by buying up the kind of older, 1,000-square-foot-ish houses once affordable to first-time homeowners and inflating the market with investors.”
Or roommates. Many of those might have previously been purchased by someone with enough money to put a down payment on a house, but perhaps not comfortably make all the monthly payments by themselves. That person might choose to have roommates, and could charge them less while still paying their own bills without the third party absentee landlord taking too much profit for themselves out of the roommate situation instead.
(When they don’t even live there.)
Do you need to find a roommate in Minneapolis?