The NYC Landlord Who Says the "Golden Age" of Being a Landlord Is Over

a criticism. It's like, sometimes the truest things are the obvious things that no one says directly, and that someone just says it's like, it seems pretty good. And like rent prices as we've been discussing, like they never seemed to go down. They're all kinds of tax advantages. It seems like to owning real estate, it's hard to build more of. It seems pretty good. It seems good. I guess my question is was it always this good? And

will it always be this good? Because I mean, the reason we're talking about it is because it does feel like there is a backlash at the moment or more of a backlash. I guess landlords are never an especially beloved social class, but with prices being what they are at the moment, with rents going up, particularly in places like New York City, it does feel like there is this question of whether or not maybe the government, the state could do something to attenuate those higher rent prices.

I guess there's like two questions to my mind about the sort of like whether it's good to be a landlord. And one is like, Okay, we do know that like probably like rent growth there's going to slow. And we talked to the guy from Apartment List, Chris Selvia Obvious, several weeks ago, and it's like, Okay, probably like rents are going to come down a bit maybe or flat or maybe not grow. But like there's just a cycle thing, right.

And then there's the question of like is there something deeper that's not just about like the macroeconomic cycle, but is something can like change about the business. And you know, like one thing that I sort of still kind of believe in markets is that like if there's like elpha somewhere, if there's above market returns, it can't stay forever. Eventually, like it's got to get arbed away, right. I think

maybe I'm a little bit more cynical than you. I think people will try to hang on to their price advantage as long as they possibly can. Yeah, No, I mean I agree, it's just like they can't be like some business there's just like permanently benefit all the other businesses, right, Like, it's not how markets, their capitalism are supposed to work.

Like capital is supposed to flood in or supply is supposed to come on, and eventually the returns from asset A on a risk adjusted basis should equal the returns from asset B. Also you know, on a vol adjusted basis or something that. Well, I guess this is where we start talking about real world constraints and policy constraints again. But yes, in theory it should change. Right. So we have been you know, talking about you know, real estate

quite a lot. And I do think that in this sort of like pandemic slash post pandemic environment, lots of anxiety about real estate, not just like high you know,

high costs are a huge aspect of it. Availability the types of real estate that people want, and so it's like a good question to like how good has the landlord market been, and if we're at a period where a lot of things are changing, rates are reversing, it's about to say I think interest rates are going to be the big factor here, leverage, huge aspect of the real estate business reversing. Can the golden age of being a landlord persist? If many other macro things in political

things are changing? Is it still good to be a landlord? Is it's still good to be a landlord? All right, Well, I'm very excited about about our gift. We're going to be speaking with Ben Carlos type in. He is a real estate investor and broker in New York City and he has a lot of use on this question and why maybe the golden age is coming to an end? Or will so? Ben, thank you so much for coming on odd lots, glad to be here, thanks for having

me so. Before we can even ask the question is the golden age of being a landlord coming to an end? We have to first establish was there really a golden age? And I guess the question the way I think about that. Is it true that real estate owners, landlords, people who rented out their units enjoyed a period of unusually high

and stable returns. Yeah, So I mean, first, I think it's important to make a distinction between different types of real estate owners, residential rental landlords and commercial landlords, and even homeowners. I'm going to talk today mostly about residential landlords and homeowners. And you are a residential I am a residential landlord in addition to me a commercial landlord, and I'm also also a broker that deals with a lot of other residential landlords and investors, okay, on daily basis.

So what is this goal tell Us established for us? The third, in fact, has been a golden age. So I think in order to understand there's a golden age,

you have to understand the history that preceded it. So you know, there's this great paper by this professor Katerina Nolf from the University of bond that looks at the house housing prices over time from eighteen seventy to present, and she studies fourteen countries, including the United States, and what she found is that up until around nineteen fifty depends on the country. In the United States is probably the late sixties, housing prices are relatively flat, and then

after that they've exploded. And that's housing housing data rent and otherwise is notoriously difficult to capture because it's a such a disparate distributed market. But you know, that backs up with qualitative observations as well. So like, there's this great book that I recommend everyone read about the history of these New York City real estate families called Skyscaper Dreams.

And there's a recurring theme in this book of sort of the residential the families that specialized in department buildings complaining about not being at getting as rich as quickly as the office developers or the office landlords because you know, partly because of rent control. But it was just a sleep er business. So what changed in the mid twentieth century A couple of different things we were all familiar, imagine with the story of like the subsidization of homeowners

and single family homes and the suburbs. And simultaneously as that was occurring, in terms of the public's investment in the apartment business, in rental housing, it's shifted from public housing to private sextra solutions, whether it's you know, Freddie Mack subsidizing multi family developers or even you know, nonprofit developers. Simultaneously with that, land news controls were implemented to protect the investments of homeowners. That would that's sort of the best,

the most generous way to describe it. It also did things like enforced defective segregation and school segregation and all

sorts of other less less noble things. So in the late seventies, after all this had happened for a decade or two, what you had is this coalition form of homeowners and conservative interests, both you know, business and otherwise teaming up to pair back rent regulations where they existed, banned them where they didn't exist, and generally implement set of policies that discriminated against renters, either directly via things like property tax policy or indirectly because most renters at

that time were of you know, some sort of marginalized status socio economically, so um, you know, they also paired back the state's ability to regulate landlords, both in practice but um i'd say more usually in terms of state

capacity to you know, actually effectively punish landlords from misbehavior. So, for instance, in the original UM rent stabilization program in New York City, there was a way for the buildings UM if they were violating certain standards UM to be uh, you know, their rents to be you know, paired back, and the state could take to take control of these buildings in a more assertive way. That that was then

that was then removed. So let's, you know, before I get to like the more specific consequences, let's talk about like what that actually created from a markets structure perspective. Homeowners become this very powerful political block. Their relative permanence increased their propensity to vote. Uh, and they team up with conservative interest to weaken the state. The idea that everyone becomes a homeowner becomes gospel, and homeowner homes become

used as investments. But this was always sort of a Ponzi scheme because you know, the you're protecting the investments by putting up barriers to entry. Uh. So you know, one generation buysing rich off of it, and then housing prices get too expensive so that the next generation can't buy in, or if they do, they're buying in a much more vulnerable terms persons. Yeah, you know, they're higher

higher loaned values. The values themselves are arguably inflated. Um. So all this leaves the rental market as a market with essentially unlimited demand, a growing pool of um of participants on on the demand side. Uh. And you know, unlike other utility markets, which is basically what housing is,

it's vastly and wildly on regulator. So it would be like you know, Enron in the in the early two thousands and late nineties that was just going wild on deregulated energy markets, except we've been doing it all over the country for decades. Can I just ask a really basic question, but like, if you're a landlord, how are you making most of your money? Is it by getting the monthly rent? Or is it by building up a real estate portfolio and then selling it or flipping it

at some point in time? Like what is the mix? And I know you made the point about the difference between mom and pop landlords versus the big corporations. Can you just talk a little bit more about the different business models? Sure? So, Partly that depends on the business model of the landlord, but also depends on the market.

So in New York City is much more of an appreciation based market than a than a rent than a yield market, Whereas you know someplace in you know, the Sound Belt might be more yield focused than appreciation focus. So in New York City. You typically make your money selling or refinancing or by generating scale. Scale obviously helps in every market, whereas uh, you know, in other less core markets, the more of the return is in the yield.

And this is a good segue into sort of the other dynamic that that produced this situation is that, you know, we have this vast unregulated rental market and simultaneously we have an institutionalization of the business a multifamily and this is kind of a you know, this is a broader economic trend. You know that happened with with corporations in the latter half of the twentieth century, and even with

other sectors of real estate. So like twenty years ago or thirty years ago, the self storage business was a very mom and pop business, but now it's this usually institutionalized business. So this has happened in a particular acute way in multifamily because of just how big of a market it is, how long standing of a business it is,

and how relatively homogeneous the product is. Well, I was gonna say too, I mean, I know, like if there is this inherent challenge of creating new units and everyone and we talked about like the you know, the sort of barrier is to enter. I have to imagine that scale becomes a very big advantage in knowing how to navigate these permitting certain like how do you do construction

in New York City? The entities that have done it over and over and over again have to have a pretty significant advantage over a smaller or less institutionalized I mean, I guess there's a difference between developer and yeah, landlord, but it just feels like, well, all of these things, there must be quite quite a few advantages to scale on this type of stuff. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely

a difference between landlords and developers. But I think to your your broader point is correct, which is this has been particularly enabled by by technology. This used to be a very inefficient business, and the institutionalization has sucked all of the inefficiency out of this business through you know, technology that has been implemented to you know, price rents

more efficiently, the disaggregation of functions. So you know, historically, um, you know, the apartment owners where you know, everyone's sort of in the same company, and now all these different roles have been distributed into other companies. They're specialists that provide third party services. It's it's become a business where everyone is getting their cut. Uh. And scale UM puts you in the best position to um, you know, reap

the benefits of economies of scale. So your argument is that, um, you know, a process beginning I guess in the nineteen fifties of deregul deregulation combined with institutionalization of the rental market starts to change the profit dynamics for landlords. Can you talk a little bit more about exactly how that happens and how it sort of develops up until UM, I guess today it's really demographic driven. Uh. You know,

it's designed to serve UM. This you know, growing class of homeowners, UM, A growing class of college graduates enters the real estate business. UM. You know historically was you know, a business that a lot of people without that much education could get into. And they start applying modern business processes to pricing units more effect efficiently, to operating the buildings more efficiently, just picking it every possible part of

the business to extract a profit out of it. That has served the industry very well, but it has not served I arguably the greater public very well. And I think that's sort of where these dynamics that these twin dynamics of demographic change prompting policy and technology prompting institutionalization are now going to flip back the other way. And we're starting to see the beginnings of that. So I want to obviously like talk about this flip and some

of the demographics and all that. But before you do, can you just expand you made one point about disperse property tax treatment that you said like put renters at a disadvantage? Can you clarify, like what is in the code that is so advantage or advantageous to landlords? Sure? So, as a general matter, around the United States, homeowners are viewed as the most important political block in any jurisdiction, and their property taxes are kept low, and particularly the

increases in their property taxes. So municipalities really have very few levers for generating revenue in this country, so they typically they need someplace to make up the revenue. So as a result, apartment buildings start taking on a larger and larger share of the bird. This works different ways in different jurisdictions, but in New York City, for instance, buildings over eleven units make up and increasing share of

the revenue for taxes. This also applies to commercial properties, whereas buildings of one to three units have artificial or caps on the amount that their assessment can grow every year, and even buildings of four to eleven units excuse me, four to ten units also have caps, although albeit not as good as the one to three families, which is sort of a reflection of the same political dynamic in that the people that at least policymakers believed own these

small apartment buildings are closer to a voter. It's sort of your your yeoman, your landlord, not the big bad landlord. So these groups have been given preferential property tax treatment and the apartment buildings, and in turn their residents have been getting increasingly unfavorable property tex treatment. So the landlord business, what exactly are the risks that landlords are taking on

and how should they be compensated for that? Because when I think of a landlord, it's like, Okay, maybe you have a bad tenant who doesn't pay their rent on time. That's a little bit of a risk. But in general, it feels like there are a lot of protections around the business, and it also feels like there's a tendency for real estate prices to mostly go up, especially in New York, right, So UM, dealing with you know, problematic tenants UM. And also you know, operational increases. So let's

talk about the tenant side. The tenant side that varies widely um from landlord to landlord. So you know, our our tenants generally speaking, are pretty wealthy. UM. I have never had to evict someone um and uh, you know we we rarely have issues, UM, whereas there's lots of landlords that have uh you know, tenants that are have a more marginalized UM, so its economic status uh and

UM that's trickier. However, the demand for that is is UM very high, and the yields that those properties trade for are generally higher, so their landlords are are compensated for that risk. Furthermore, UM, with the institution and the growth of Section eight rental subsidies, a lot of these UM, the rents being marginal being paid by marginal tenants are effectively underwritten by the government. So you know, how much risk is a landlord really taking on a Section eight

building UM. From from a tendency perspective, from the respective of operating expenses US as we talked about property taxes. UM you know, are are being constrained in some cases, but in other cases they are not. Uh, And that's you know, where operational efficiency comes in. So you know, operational costs are the most important costs for landlords to UM control, and in some ways they are in their

least amount of control. So at least with finance and costs, you have some decision over when you make that when you incur that costs. But for you know, fuel maintenance, like you really don't, I mean maintenance to a lesser too, a bit fuel and another more recurring costs, you don't have as much control. I was just so I want to ask about financing because of course, you know, we sort of talked about in the intro, lots of things

are shifting. And one thing that seems to be shifting is like maybe this forty year steady decline in interest rates. Can you talk a little bit about from your experience, like your mix of like equity borrowing, etc. And if there is you know, there's like sustain reversal, what does that do to your economics? Well, it doesn't do that much or won't do that much to buy economics because I'm gonna get out of this business, but you're gonna stop being a landlord altogether. I'm gonna stop that bad.

It's not so much it's bad. We can get into the reasons why further. But like I think, going forward, certain types of players in this business are gonna make money, are going to make sort of above average returns and the rest will make you know, utility or bond like returns. And if I'm going to buy a bond, I'd rather buy tips. And if I'm gonna invest, you know, I'd rather invest in real estate that is less management intensive

than residential. Well, okay, just before we get because this is the heart of the question why you want to get out, but before we get today. Yeah, were you staying? Yeah? And can you talk so I'm financing I think you know, as you pointed out, we've been coming out of this you know, forty year period where interesting it's been very low UM and a lot of business models have been built on UM, you know, very cheap capital UH and UM. As a result, yields have become very low in certain markets,

really most markets, UM. And I think that's a particular challenge in markets that UM we're depending on one of two things, regulatory arbitrage and appreciation. So in you know, we talked about the difference between markets in which the main component of the return is yield versus the versus appreciation. The yield markets they're going to not be as challenged from a sort of you know, being able to sell

for the right price perspective. Certainly some people will, but a market like New York City that's a little more challenging because if you buy at a five percent return, and you financed that at a three and a half percent return, and you're assuming that you're gonna be able to sell that at a four and a half or you were when you bought it four years ago, that's

not a realistic assumption anymore. So, you know, depending on your leverage level, you have a different set of options to either continue on or extricate yourself in that suittion. Can you talk a little bit more about what you see changing now other than the higher interest rates, Like what is the mix that is going to pressure the

rental business? Sure, so you know, we have this the demographic decisions, a demographic driven policy decisions that were made in the mid to late twentieth century are now coming home to roost. You have this growing class or renters um. You know, you have increasing rent Burton's evictions or destroying

lives just like foreclosures are. And I think most crucially this crisis is now including people from that very powerful political block in so far as you know, people of my generation, in our generation really who would have been homeowners thirty years ago, are now not going to be homeowners, or if they are, they're going to pay much more for it and by become homeowners much later in life and view it more as a as a housing cost

stability vehicle. You know, there's this there's this joke about the thirty year mortgage being a homeowner rent control, and I think that sort of logic is now seeping into the homeownership market and it's becoming less of a um, slowly becoming a less of a gambling market. So you now have this big demographic of people that are concerned

with rental costs. So this seems really key, which is that politicians have this idea of like what a good voter, what a good citizen is like, and for years that person was a homeowner, right, And now the basic idea is that there is becoming a meaningful, voting, politically influential block that is much more likely today to be a tenant than a homeowner than they were thirty years ago.

And so the political wins are over timed. It's like, oh, the voters these like day's ideal voter is not necessarily a homeowner, right And and it's also, um, you know that that sort of new rent or block is teaming up with the old renter block, because it's not like

we didn't have renters and they weren't organized before. It's just that, you know, politicians could sort of ignore them because they are because they're of a marginalized background, or because they are perceived not vote as much, or whatever reasons they come up with. So this is manifesting itself in two and a half different ways. One is the yendi movement, which for those are who are not familiar as the Yes in my Backyard movement, which advocates for

building more housing, particularly in high demand areas. Arguably it's a successor movement to the fair housing movement from from late twentieth century. I was one of the founders of the biggest group that does is in New York City called Open New York, and in parallel, we have a resurgence of the rent regulation movement and sort of brought

tenant protection movement brought broadly. And I think it's important to keep in mind that like America is pretty unique in being a developed country and having vastly unregulated rental market, like we have, you know, an unusually low home ownership rate contrary to what people think, but unlike countries with similarly low homeownership rates, we typically don't have rent controls. So like Germany has comparably low homeownership rates, they have

rent controls. France as comparably low homeownership rates, they just parishes re institute of them. So um, you know, we've seen these resurgence of um, you know, rent regulation and even not just in places like New York and California, but um in Minnesota, in even in Orlando they had something on the ballot this last year. Uh and UM.

I think this is a good segue for both of these into how the consequences of institutionalization, because institutionalization has created um, real estate entities that are much better targets of organizing from political perspectives, you know, they might not be you know, Blackstone might not be as vulnerable as your mom pop landlord for organizing individual building, but in terms of like getting policy passed and creating a political coalition,

it's much more compelling. This is interesting, you know, like you hear like labor people talk about like, actually, it's kind of good that Amazon is becoming a huge employer, because if you can get unions into Amazon warehouse, you've radically like change the American labor market, or at least you have one identifiable identity to target, right. And so then if you have these big institutional landlords, then like you have a right. I hadn't thought about that, which

if you have a thing to organize. Again, it's also already sort of happening because you hear so much nowadays about institutional investors buying up single family houses for rent or for flipping purposes. Right, And it's not like single family landlords didn't exist before, but now we're talking about it because it's Wall Street. Yeah, and the third I'll

get into the third one in a moment. But this is also a function of technology, because the same similar technologies that made it easier for institutions to be created and organize themselves are now making it easier to organize among tenants. And historically, if you if a bunch of people in different buildings all over the city had under different or we're living under the same landlord, how are

they going to find each other? But now you know, there's all this public data, there's the you know, the Internet, there's all different ways for people to get together and build coalitions that didn't exist before. Can I ask you, you know, you mentioned the MBA movement. We talked about some of this on a recent episode. And you're a part of an organization, you know, I see all the tweets and the stuff. Can you talk specifically about like how it's moving the dial, like beyond the tweets, that

it actually is affecting the economics of the business. Sure, I'll first talk about how it's affecting the politics. Like in California, you know, they've passed a bunch of huge laws. You know, they've banned single family zoning, They've up zoned

you know, commercial quarters all over the state. In New York State, the governor recently came out with prosals to build eight hundred thousand new homes over the next decade, which is over double the amount that was built the last decade, and in terms of the economics of the business, I think what it's mainly changed so far is where developers are willing to take chances on trying to rezone.

It hasn't so much changed the economics of the um of your sort of your as of right typical day to day development, because there hasn't you know, the Indian was very young and hasn't been that much built yet.

But now a developer might be more likely to take a take a chance on a on a rezoning in a rich neighborhood which actually is going to be much more profitable that for them, but would have than than doing a poor neighborhood, but was seen as very politically challenging because like Open New York got the got Soho and NoHo rezoned for housing which people thought never would have.

So it's it's mainly changing the sort of political environment for participants in the real estate industry that are involved in development, and the actual economics of being a landlord haven't changed in a direct way. It's been more disparate.

Like you saw on the Journal recently came up with this big story that everyone was reading about how rents have fallen over the country because supplies, someone's supplies coming inlin You know, the NBA movement can take some credit for that, but you know it's also just for these developers are responding to market signals that you know, there's not enough supply. It feels to me like there's still

a lot of institutional capital flowing into this business. I mean, certainly we've talked about, you know, the big players who are snapping up single family homes, and that's been a major talking point for a couple of years now. But why is it Why does the industry presumably still see the rental market as a profitable one, Like there still seems to be a lot of interest and money flowing into the space, and presumably it's coming in at you know, the type of yields and values that we've seen in

previous decades. I think the industry sees the industry, excuse me, the multi family market for as a profitable opportunity for all the reasons we've been talking about. The demand is insatiable, there are controls on how much supply can be added, and it's a very capital intensive business, so it's a good way to deploy capital. I'm not suggesting that there's

going to be some sort of crash. In fact, I think institutionalization will continue apace because institutions have a lower cost of capital than your mom and pops, and they have the ex economies of scale and ability to execute so that they can make money in this environment. And I are in this sort of new environment that I'm positing, and they are one of groups and I think just representative of the big group more broadly that's going to make money in this environment, which is that people that

can actually add value. So institutions are adding value from scale operational effic industry developers are adding value from actually producing housing. What I'm the people that I think are going to be the losers in this scenario, or relative losers, are landlords, um you know, of which there are many, uh that are really have really just been riding rents and not really like the purest rentiers in the market.

Can you talk about the other prong when you see the return of sort of like tenants rights, whether what is it rent control? Is it? Oh yeah, fiction restrictors? Like what does that look like? You're twenty twenty three? Can I tack onto that? Which is you mentioned the tax Code, and of course there are a lot of tax tax benefits that are meant to incentivize home ownership. And I've often this might be a weird question, but I've often wondered, like, why don't renters get some tax breaks?

You know, it's not really optional to pay your rent um anyway. No, I completely agree, Tracy. And you know, the biggest, the biggest expenditure of the federal government on housing is the homeowner's interest induction or a mortgage. And you know, there's various ways that that could be replicated, um, because I doubt it's going to be paired back uh UM for renters. It could be universal Section eight, it

could be some sort of renters task credit. I don't know, but I think you know, as as this um demographic shift portends political coalitions and change, UM, that will that's certainly on the menu of things. Just like Joe mentioned, what happens in where what order is going to vary

widely based on the state. So UM in New York State, the big push right now is for good cause e fiction, which is sort of a very light touch rent regulation that past in California in twenty eighteen, past in Oregon, UM they have it in in DC, a couple other places Oitherhood of New Jersey since the nineteen seventies. UM And Uh that so I think that sort of thing

is good. Good cause eviction is basically defense in an eviction case that if a landlord, UM, if a tenant de faults on the lease A and the landlord has raised their rent by this has defined differently in different places an unconscionable amount, the tenant can use that as a defense for not being a victim. UM. And this is um you know, particularly valuable theoretically in instances in which um, A, let's say the conditions in the building

are really bad tenant complaints. Uh, and then the landlords, you know, I'm just not going to re release or I'm going to give you a huge round increase. So that right. So, UM, that sort of soft rent regulationship

I think is going to become more prevalent. UM. You know, the Supreme Court could certainly, um, you know, change some of this, but I think in the main there's different ways that many different ways that tenants rights can be increased, whether it's some form of rank control to UM right to counsel, to universal section night UM or or vouchers. Um. And the point is that there's a growing political coalition to agitate for these measures, whatever they may be in

a given political environment. So if you're no longer a landlord, UM, well, first of all, how how serious are you about that statement? And then secondly, what do you do instead? So, um, I am still landlords? Is not going to be a fire sale, and you know I will always be a landlord because we're still commercial landlords. But um, you know it's going to be an orderly liquidation because you know, I don't. This is really a secular shift. It's not

It's not going to happen overnight. And plenty of people disagree with me. Um, so they're they're walking to buy my properties, I think inadvertently, like this episode is just Ben you know he has properties for still. But I think from a brokerage perspective, you know, I'll continue to work with um. You know, players that I think are either you know, want to get out as a result of this dynamic, or institutions that you know, I think

will benefit or developers. But what I'm most interested in, and I'm working on a lot right now, is trying to figure out ways to bet on this dynamic UM and short Essentially shorting the real estate business generally and apartments in particular, is historically been very challenging because you know, maybe you can short read stock, but like it, it's not a it's not a liquid of a market. And um, we're working on what we think are very creative ways to um to bet on this dynamic. Well, let me

ask you. You know, you said, Okay, you're not really necessarily expecting a crash. But on the other hand, like you know, and we talked about this in an episode several weeks ago at Connersen. This idea that like everyone's assumed it's always a winner for some of the reasons you described as just like this secular shift people moving to the cities, it's always one. Even the great finding

entral crisis didn't hit rent. Like if you think about, like, well, what is the short case, how much of it is it that group think essentially within the sort of rentier class or the landlord class, just like refusing to see the writing on the wall, and is there just sort of I don't mean a bubble on the price sense, but a bubble in this sort of like thinking through that something could actually change in a way that we haven't seen in decades. I never want to underestimate the

ability of flows to impact the market. You're speaking Tracy's that said, I think it's a question of whether it's a who this is a winner for. And I don't mean you know, talent's first landlords. I mean within sort of the investment market. So like if you're a you know, in the capital allocation business and you want to be a bond investor or a fixed income investor. I think multi family is going to continue to be a great business.

But if you want to earn these sort of banans or turns that you've been earning for the past several decades without doing much work, then other sectors of real estate might be a better option for your or other sectors entirely. I just have one question, and it sort of connects this conversation with the one we had with Chris Salviati about rents actually moving. What advice do you have for people who are trying to negotiate their rent

with their landlord down Obviously not up. Every situation's is specific, so I'll do my best to generalize, but I think you have more leverage than you think, generally speaking, if only because a landlord, if you if you leave a landlord probably loses a month of rent. So at the very least you should factor that month of loss and rent and maybe even a brography into what you know you're negotiating for. All right, Ben Carlos Typen, thank you so much for coming on odd Lots, and good luck

in your new endeavors. And I hope, I hope you time the market well of this episode. Thanks wrapping Trazy. I thought that was really fascinating, and you know, just this idea. It's like, yes, there's obviously certain like market changes by and demand, interest rates and all that, but also this idea of like political changes seemed really important here. Yeah, maybe not something that investors are really thinking about that much. Well,

a couple of things there. So One, I think it's always like it's always a bit difficult to call a secular shift in something, but if you're going to do it the sort of post pandemic environment, when there does seem to be a lot of momentum behind, you know, the labor class versus the capitalists, that seems to be

the time to do it well. And also it's like, you know, you and I ran to New York City and we probably know a lot of people friends who are like professionals and have good salaries, et cetera, and who rent and who feel that like buying is very risky or unattainable or like put you know, they can't haven't saved up for a down payment or for whatever reason.

And it's like this idea that it's like, well, like this is like a very you know, there's the traditional like sort of like more marginalized rent or class more professionalized, and so like this coming together seems like a very like potentially like powerful macro secular trend. Yeah, but the key thing I think is always going to be the policy and whether or not you do start to see those sort of institutional protections renters like you do in

some other countries. And I know, I think we've spoken about Germany. We're gonna have to doy Austria. So why the Austrian rental market is so different to the US. Let's do that. And also that point about like there is a big institutional face of landlords. I thought it was like super fascinating. So the way that like Amazon becomes a good or Starbucks becomes a target of labor organizing, you start to have this similar dynamics with tenant organizing.

Never underestimate the power of a scapegoat. Yeah, totally, all right, shall we leave it there. Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wisntal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our guest Ben Carlos typing. He's at so Bendito slide into his DMS. Made an offer

on one of his buildings. Make but if you're listening to him making the very case, I don't really know why you'd wanted to. Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Arman and Dash Bennett at Dashbot and check out all of our podcasts under the handle at Podcasts, and for more Oddlots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Oddlots, where we post transcripts. Tracy and I blog and we have a weekly newsletter that comes out of your Thanks for listening,