are all montana cities rental market controlled my property management companies (solution)
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Ever notice how Missoula malcontents always point to some unknown higer power (maybe it's still George Bush) that's keeping them down?! It's either the property mangaement people (whom you can avoid) or those who criticize their illogic. Should you, Der Strudel, opt to purchase your own property (and join the property taxpayer rolls) you won't have to spend time checking listings twice a day! Of course, as a non property tax payer you can always vote to increase mine. Isn't this a great country or what??!!
Whoa, hold your horses! I was replying to OP, trying to help with his or her rental search. If my post wasn't helpful, I apologize to OP. I have no idea what I said that indicated I was a "malcontent" (was it the part about being a happy renter?), and I'm really baffled about what I might have said that was critical of Bush... but I must complement you on knowing the correct gender of "strudel!"
Why am I seeing this invective toward renters? We choose to rent and we choose from whom to rent. Of course there are good and bad landlords, PM or not. Renting can be a roll of the dice and we understand that, but it's a choice we have made. I have owned homes in the past. Just don't want that whole "homeowner" lifestyle right now.
Last edited by strudel42; 05-22-2010 at 04:33 PM..
I'm really baffled about what I might have said that was critical of Bush... but I must complement you on knowing the correct gender of "strudel!"
I thought everybody knows that everything today is George Bush's fault!!
As for my German, two years in college; an immersion course at the Presidio of Monterrey and 7 years living in Deutschland plus several trips back there over the years. BTW, you really should capitalize the S in Strudel as it is a noun.
Having been both a renter and an owner/landlord (I like to joke that since I bought some acreage with two old houses on it, I've become both a land baron and a slum lord!) -- I have to agree that owning ain't for everyone, and being a landlord isn't necessarily so great either. I only have one rental house and it's right next door. If I were so unfortunate as to be making my living from an apartment building, and didn't want to become or didn't have the talents for being a fulltime manager -- I'd hire a management company too. The trouble is there's often no real oversight, they just skim their 10% or whatever it is these days and no one gets any value from it except themselves. That's always a hazard when a business uses a middleman. And too many renters won't take care of the place, even to picking up after themselves. I've been lucky and had two decent tenants, but you shoulda seen the crowd of losers that I turned down.
I think in a college town with a tight rental market, I might look at houses that are billed as roommate situations, and see if the owner would be amenable to a single-family rent (likely less money than they'd get from several students) in return for having a stable tenant with regular income.
Last edited by Reziac; 05-23-2010 at 11:00 AM..
Reason: surplus words
I was curious so I just looked up the stats on CD. Fifty percent of the homes in Missoula are occupied by renters versus 36 percent in Billings. I would be interested to see how many of these are "managed" by PM companies. The guy who owns the house next to us uses PM and we have a constant stream of college-aged neighbors who don't give a hoot for his property. Seems to me that the PM rents to anyone who has the money (or in this case, whose parents have the money) and the landlord is agreeable to that. Everyone wants the cash; landlord wants his rent and PM wants their cut and to heck with the property or value thereof. Also to heck with the neighbors who have to listen to their parties and clean beer bottles off the lawn the next morning.
We lived in a real hole-in-the-wall apartment building, PM managed, when we first got to town. It LOOKED great (or so we thought) but simply had not been maintained or updated at all for probably fifty years. There was ONE outlet in the kitchen besides the big one for the stove. When you were using the microwave, or even the coffee maker, and the refrigerator kicked on, it flipped the breaker. Real safe. A couple years ago the building was sold and went "condo." I think only three or four of the fifteen units have been sold but this is beside the point, and I do have one, and it is... (wait for it)...
Count the outlets before you rent a place!
Or maybe the point is this: To me, PMs seem designed to maximize profit while not necessarily protecting the interests of the landlord or the tenants. If a landlord manages his own place, it's probably because he has an interest in keeping his property in good repair. But it seems like many landlords go for the moolah at the expense of their rentals and renters.
Grizzfan -- You got me on the Bush thing. I'm currently trying to figure out how I can blame him for the dandelions in my yard. It IS convenient!
Haha... and invest in one of those little $3 outlet testers, too. Some stuff, like a surge protector (your computer is on one, right?? RIGHT??) really needs a proper ground to work correctly.
One problem is that older places (very prevalent in Montana!) just weren't wired for modern life -- when those houses were built, chances are the only electrical devices in the whole house were the fridge and a clock-radio and maybe a TV and a single table lamp. So one or two outlets per room was plenty. Now we plug in everything imaginable, and 4 outlets per room is "skimpy". But rewiring a house can be hideously expensive, far more than its profit margin, so it just doesn't get done.
My grandmother lived in a place that was so old it only had one socket in the entire apartment (the entire top floor of an old house in Great Falls) and it had pushbutton light switches, too. I'd guess the house dated from the 1890s or so.
I used to rent a house that the first owner had built himself from scrap leftover from building his feedlot, back about 1958. It was a very strange house (tho nifty inside, all solid wood). It had multiple outlets on some walls, because at some point someone had rewired it but didn't know what they were doing, so it wound up with what amounted to two systems randomly attached to the same set of breakers. Everything worked but if you needed to mess with a socket, you had to turn the whole place off, cuz there was no determining which circuit went where.
One problem is that older places (very prevalent in Montana!) just weren't wired for modern life -- when those houses were built, chances are the only electrical devices in the whole house were the fridge and a clock-radio and maybe a TV and a single table lamp. So one or two outlets per room was plenty. Now we plug in everything imaginable, and 4 outlets per room is "skimpy". But rewiring a house can be hideously expensive, far more than its profit margin, so it just doesn't get done.
I hear you, but it's my opinion that the owner of the property assumes the responsibility to provide a habitable arrangement for his tenants. One outlet in a kitchen (or in an entire apartment! Good Lord! ) is, in my opinion, not a habitable situation. If you're not inclined to bring it up to date, don't buy it. I thought building codes were a joke when I was a homeowner, but now that I've rented my last three places I understand why they exist! I don't know what the building regulations are for rentals here, but I do know there is no official inspection process, and so I think landlords can get away with a lot of shady stuff.
I think the "I own it, you deal with it" mentality is, when taken to the extreme, a sad and pathetic way of looking at things. I mean, if you're a landlord, and you WOULD NOT want to live in the places you're renting, something is wrong.
I don't know what the building regulations are for rentals here, but I do know there is no official inspection process, and so I think landlords can get away with a lot of shady stuff.
Trust me, you don't want to go there. They did locally (mainly as a money grab for the city), and it wound up being several situations worse than before:
1) Every landlord had to cough up a business license and inspection fee, even if they only have one rental. This of course ultimately gets added to the tenant's rent, since no one can stay in business if they eat all the expenses. It also results in a nice round of fines levied on single-property landlords who had no idea they were now required to do all this.
2) Inspectors are frequently arbitrary and capricious, because to justify their jobs, they MUST find something wrong with every place they inspect (it winds up being a quota system). So a perfect house gets written up just as often as a dump, and if they've already got their quota for the day, why waste time on the dump?
3) Owners of a bunch of low-income housing decided it wasn't worth the hassle, and now that housing is gone, was rapidly replaced with strip malls or new apartment buildings, and the former occupants are on the street, since they can't afford the newly higher rent. I don't see how this is progress, at least for those tenants.
I strongly suspect the whole mess gets much worse whenever there is a large section-8 contingent, because there's no incentive to either be a good tenant or a responsive landlord. The money is the same either way.
While "would you want to live in your own rental?" is probably a good metric, the flipside also holds true: "Do you have any 'pride of ownership' in the place you rent?"
My observation is no one moves into an existing dump, unless they don't care about keeping it up to begin with, or their actual intent is to default on the rent and they figure a landlord who doesn't care for the property will take longer to evict them (yes, I've known people who live like this). Rather, it becomes a dump when bad tenants initiate the problem through sheer carelessness of what's not theirs, yet the landlord is expected to keep up with the tenant's ongoing carelessness. After a while the landlord gives up and hands the problem to a management company, or sells the place to someone who doesn't care from the gitgo and inherits the tenants along with the dump.
When we were renters, we always kept the place like it belonged to us. And I expect that's true of most folks here. But there are enough of the other kind to sour it for everyone.
Trust me, you don't want to go there. They did locally (mainly as a money grab for the city), and it wound up being several situations worse than before:
1) Every landlord had to cough up a business license and inspection fee, even if they only have one rental. This of course ultimately gets added to the tenant's rent, since no one can stay in business if they eat all the expenses. It also results in a nice round of fines levied on single-property landlords who had no idea they were now required to do all this.
2) Inspectors are frequently arbitrary and capricious, because to justify their jobs, they MUST find something wrong with every place they inspect (it winds up being a quota system). So a perfect house gets written up just as often as a dump, and if they've already got their quota for the day, why waste time on the dump?
3) Owners of a bunch of low-income housing decided it wasn't worth the hassle, and now that housing is gone, was rapidly replaced with strip malls or new apartment buildings, and the former occupants are on the street, since they can't afford the newly higher rent. I don't see how this is progress, at least for those tenants.
I strongly suspect the whole mess gets much worse whenever there is a large section-8 contingent, because there's no incentive to either be a good tenant or a responsive landlord. The money is the same either way.
I remember a couple of years ago Missoula instituted (and I'm gonna show off my malcontent here) a voluntary inspection process which, like most things proposed by our city government, is both totemic and impotent. A landlord could volunteer to have a property inspected for a small fee ($10-15) and get a sticker to put on the window stating that it has been inspected... However as I remember it, it had no teeth to make people fix anything (besides fines)... I haven't heard anything about that program since council passed it.
There is no universal inspection for rentals in Missoula. A tenant can make a complaint to the city if living conditions are unsafe, but still, beyond a possible fine the city doesn't actually enforce anything.
And if owners of "low-income housing" decide inspections are too much of a hassle, well, that's because they're renting slums and they know it. There are many, many low-income apartments in Missoula -- several newer complexes have been built since I moved here. (Unfortunately it's still not enough to keep up with demand, but this isn't a socioeconomic discussion. ) Landlords whose properties were replaced by strip malls etc. are those who took advantage of the real-estate bubble a few years ago (and honestly, you can't blame them for that). Some buildings have also been turned into condos. This was publicized with the Wilma apartments where long-term tenants were turned out so their residences could be "sold" to yuppies who want to tell people they live at the Wilma.
As I understand it, if you're renting under Section 8 you HAVE to have your property inspected -- since it's a federal program there are strict livability standards enforced.
BUT ULTIMATELY, you're absolutely right -- once we rid the world of both scummy landlords and scummy tenants, all these problems will be solved.
As I understand it, if you're renting under Section 8 you HAVE to have your property inspected -- since it's a federal program there are strict livability standards enforced.
BUT ULTIMATELY, you're absolutely right -- once we rid the world of both scummy landlords and scummy tenants, all these problems will be solved.
But the same thing applies re inspectors... they gotta find something wrong to keep their jobs, and have to pass N-many to keep the Sec-8 guys happy. Upshot -- arbitrary and capricious inspection results. Methinks the other issue is that now the landlord has someone else to blame -- "that is not either broken, the inspector said it was fine!" (OTOH, it's also evidence that something WAS fine and then the tenant broke it. Works both ways.)
IF it was just scummy landlords renting to scummy tenants, I'd say let 'em have each other... problem is it tends to spread out and infect the whole neighborhood.
Yep, I like your solution.
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Isn't this a great country or what??!!
And too many renters won't take care of the place, even to picking up after themselves. I've been lucky and had two decent tenants, but you shoulda seen the crowd of losers that I turned down.
It IS convenient!
) Landlords whose properties were replaced by strip malls etc. are those who took advantage of the real-estate bubble a few years ago (and honestly, you can't blame them for that). Some buildings have also been turned into condos. This was publicized with the Wilma apartments where long-term tenants were turned out so their residences could be "sold" to yuppies who want to tell people they live at the Wilma.
