Anglosphere countries are very bad at housing.
Source: https://cps.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/How-Many-Homes-Does-the-UK-Need-.pdf
Anglosphere countries are very bad at housing.
Source: https://cps.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/How-Many-Homes-Does-the-UK-Need-.pdf
I don’t know how’s the market situation in France right now, but in Poland we have a surplus of housing over populace needs, yet housing crisis here is still almost inhumane.
It’s not because we don’t have space to fit our people. No, it’s not that we’re picky either. It’s because this space is not being used at all, because landlords find it often more profitable this way.
Exactly. It’s greedy landlords who withhold living space for €€€. It wouldn’t surprise me if most countries actually have a landlord problem and aren’t missing space to live in.
Could you explain? Why would it be profitable not to rent and generate cashflow? Because they speculate on rising building prices? That may only be true in a very few high value areas.
Probably I’m really, really dumb, but I still do not understand where the landlords would get their money from, even with your second text. If they don’t rent, but just sit on their unrented property, they loose money imho. Even if its only threough property taxes, and other cost. So could you clarify your thesis?
They do get their money from rentals but not the empty ones. It’s called a speculative vacancy.
For example, if you own a whole apartment building, you could rent out all the apartments and make a bunch of money. Alternately, you could deliberately leave eg. 10% of them vacant to artificially throttle supply. Because people need housing they’ll compete for the remaining ones, allowing the magic of market economics to increase rents higher than you would make from leasing out the vacancies (costs and taxes included. In some places you can even claim those losses for a tax break).
The purpose of owning them at all is to allow the landlord to easily adjust the amount of supply based on what makes them the most money. If rents drop too much from low demand, they can kick out a few tenants to try and drive prices back up. If the market gets to the point where it’s worth it to have more apartments, they can just lease more without having to build or buy anything new.
If there’s more demand for the property, its value will increase empty or not, allowing it to still be worth owning because it increases their net worth and they can sell it for more later or use it as collateral on loans.
In the short term it’s always worth more to have tenants but as a longer term strategy, empty housing lets you try to price fix. Only works if you control enough housing and/or can collude with other landlords in an area.
Kinda like De Beers did with diamonds, except with people’s homes and ability to live.
In video game/card game logic it’s “sacrifice a house to gain +1/+1 on your other houses.”
Disclaimer: not a landlord or property expert, just my layman’s understanding of how it works.
Thank you. Understood. Was not thinking in a scale that would impact market value, and still think this would not generally apply here (Germany), where - in my bubble - only small scale landlords exist.
It really depends on situation.
Rentiers that possess tens, hundreds or even thousands of estate absolutely do rent some of them, but they still keep some (if not most) of them empty. By keeping the market unsaturated, they keep their rent high. If they just let out all their estates, prices would go lower due to lesser demand. They are not penalized for abusing the market, instead they are actually being rewarded by the fact that their unrented properties’ value is constantly increasing due to appreciation.
There are also minor landlords that have some additional rentable estate, but they often choose not to be bothered, and they just sit on it for years until their offspring grows up and decide to live there. Or they just sell it in the meantime and get lots of profit for nothing.
TY. Someone needs to do the math on this, because I assume it would net more to rent all if you own >100 properties, and would not make a difference if less, depending on the city size ofc, especially when you leave the majority empty.
I assure you the math has been done
It’'s really not all about raw profit, it’s also about risk assessment. There is always a risk of significant damage to the property which would cost more to repair than it brought from rent. There’s also a risk of not being able to evict the non-paying tenant, which basically locks you out of your property for years.
We all hate landlords, I hate them with burning passion, but we gotta be honest here - the tenant is a hardcore-tier client type.