Nowadays too they often require renter’s insurance so they can get money from the insurance company if you leave too many peasant droppings on the floor during your stay.
If you didn’t have insurance, they’d just need more insurance themselves and they’ll pass that buck on to you.
I honestly think they should be prevented from just transparently passing every single cost of ownership (as well as most of their responsibilities) onto renters, but I’m also American so I understand what you’re saying here.
They don’t do that at all anyway, but hey at least the professional landlord class gets to inflict upon you one more indignity for some imagined benefit.
The park adjacent to those buildings has so much dog turd in it you’d think they were purposely producing low quality fertilizer over there.
Nobody’s DNA testing dog stool. They can’t be bothered to even do routine move out cleanings in those apartments. The whole thing is a giant farcical pretendy power game played out by managers far away designing a system for the benefit of their rentier owners to simultaneously rob renters of their last scraps of dignity and every remaining dime they have in the form of bullshit fees.
It’s true that they have to make more in profit than expenses, but margins aren’t set in stone, except in this country where everyone thinks that not only does already work that way, but that it should.
In a reasonably regulated industry additional costs may have to be absorbed out of the business’s margin instead of immediately being passed onto the customers.
The margins are fucking fat in this country, but that won’t stop them from passing every single additional cost onto you again instead of adjusting their margin.
EDIT: And all of this leaves out the discussion of not only every cost being passed directly onto you, but the responsibilities as well.
I’m aware that the apartment people aren’t running the DNA database themselves. They have some weirdo company that does it. I’m also aware that that weirdo company (or companies) is capable of putting together a website.
I’m saying I live in the same neighborhood (I bought a place). Nobody is going through that park and picking up the dozens of available dog stool and sending it off to some lab to be tested. They just aren’t. The whole fucking thing is a wet dream had by some awful corporate bureaucrat that only succeeds in making renters lives a little more miserable and pads the pockets of some other random, doggy DNA database building weirdo somewhere else.
I’m going to briefly go on a related rant here that you can feel free to ignore.
rantPeople in America have this perspective that if somehow you devise a theoretical solution to a problem (especially if it’s fancy and requires “tech” and “DNA” and labcoats) that you will magically have solved the problem. This isn’t actually the case, and it’s shown to not be the case over and over and over again in this country and everyone still seems purposely ignorant to that simple concept. Things have unintended effects. Systems can have effectiveness issues. System costs (of all types, not just monetary) on all parties involved in the administration of those systems are often left unconsidered because it’s not part of the problem solver’s business model. Convoluted systems will not be fully understood by the agents who are supposed to implement them. Modern, technical solutions to problems are not magically better or more effective than the alternatives that are very often never even considered, simply because it wouldn’t give you a reason to strap on a lab coat, or start up a new SaSS company.
I took a few minutes to select a few ginormous American megacorps in various industries and asked chatgpt to help select the best non-US analogs to compare to.
LOL
I looked at Verizon and Vodafone, and then GM and Toyota, before I decided to actually do some real work on this and put some real data together. My results were inconclusive: verizon is kicking vodafone’s ass, but then again telecom is absolutely fucked in this country so no big surprise there. GM and toyota split the metrics pretty evenly; one better in one area, the other better somewhere else.
What the fuck does any of this have to do with the margins in rental apartments?
So I’m not convinced yet profit margins are abnormally fat in this country compared to international business. It’ll take a lot of data points from a lot of companies over a lot of years to really get a satisfactory picture of whether your point is truly accurate.
There’s hardly a more friendly business environment to stage your multi-national from than the United States…and that’s not only because we have people like yourself trying to thoroughly research how good they have it in order to prove a boot-licking point to some random stranger on the Internet, but also because here, unlike in all other countries, if you don’t like the regulatory environment you can quickly and easily buy yourself a congressman (or two)…oh and you can just send any manufacturing costs such as labor out of the country.
I think you’re missing the forest for the weeds here truly. I’m talking about a specific area and you’re trying to extrapolate it to the entirety of the world. I’m sure that there are some industries where the margins in the US are a bit thinner than they are elsewhere (especially when it’s not possible to move your labor too far from your business such as in retail), but what’s truly unique is how defeated and broken and used to giving it up to business we are in this country. Or to add one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes for color:
semi-related Vonnegut quote___ America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. ___
On the specific point about rental rates and margin, and I’ll go even more specific into the locality…there’s scarcely a better margin business than taking a large complex full of 550 SQ FT apartments in southern california and charging an ever increasing amount of rent, pet rent, shit fees, and requiring more and more other things from renters every year (deposits, pet deposits, etc.).
California, “liberal” state that it is, managed to pass a huge restriction on this though…you can’t raise someone’s rent more than 10% year-over-year without giving the renter in the unit 90 days notice much to the horror of the landlord class who roused every rabble they could in protest.
Rent requirements in the US are nuts (i.imgur.com)