Welcome to the world of the “automated landlord” where the property is bought, marketed, and rented out almost without a human lifting a finger. Able to buy faster and put in higher offers than us meatbags, the middle and lower class get driven out of the housing market as their potential homes get borged by the faceless algorithm.
[Vice has a great article](https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7eaw/robot-landlords-are-buying-up-houses) about this and whilst it is focused on the USA, make no mistake that it is coming here. And make no mistake that our government’s supporters will have a raging stiffy for it.
The article is a long read, so I’ll pick out a few sections below.
> “The single-family rental market was very opaque, because the ownership was so fragmented,” Desiree Fields, an associate professor of geography and global metropolitan studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote the Automated Landlord paper, told Motherboard. “Because of that, it was impossible to do things like securitization or real estate investment trusts”—the complex financial instruments that Wall Street uses to extract money from investments.
The confined markets basically protected them from exploitation from the faceless corporates. No more, it seems. You only exist to be bled dry by the very people seeking to suppress your wages.
> [The automated system] sometimes puts in bids hours after houses go on the market, bids that few others could beat, incentivizing the seller to sell quickly.
And thus rendering it basically impossible for any one us, unless we want to live in a shithole.
> Still, repairs cannot be entirely automated or tossed back on the tenant, and Wall Street landlords struggle with them. Neglected common home issues, like leaky pipes and short circuits, are often highlighted in journalistic exposes of the industry.
I guess we can expect more people to die from mould and damp as some middle manager doesn’t have black slime as a KPI to hit.
Double bonus though, there’s a chance that those made ill may go to private healthcare and that just means more profit for the very people who created the problem in the first place.
The increasingly global nature of landlordism just makes the eventual ownership even more murky, taxes on their profits almost impossible to raise, and accountability a remnant of the past.
Think this is all hyperbole and paranoia? [None of it is news](https://www.redpepper.org.uk/beware-the-automated-landlord/) to anyone who has been paying attention.
You can read the 2019 paper by Dr Desiree Fields [here](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X19846514).
17 comments
So long as the Town and County Planning Act stands, things will continue to worsen
Oh this is very bad. Humanity tries to make good algorithms but despite our best intentions they invariably end up being bad to one demographic or another :/
Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the covid wars called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the landlords.
The computer which controlled the rental prices, Skynet, sent two landlords back through time.
Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my tenant. The first landlord was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before house prices went up. It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child. As before, the resistance was able to send a lone homeowner, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would bill him first.
Sounds like another Zoopla Offers waiting to fail. Nothing to worry about.
Would be interested to see how this develops. Most of the major efforts to automate the buying of houses in the US have ended up in failure. Zillow basically wrote off a $400 million investment because they couldn’t get it to work.
With all things, it will collapse. But the bubble has to grow first
“You will own nothing and we will be happy” – rich people.
Worry not, they are [getting](https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/mortgages/what-happened-at-zillow-how-a-prized-real-estate-site-lost-at-ibuying/) [royally](https://www.inman.com/2022/11/03/opendoor-lost-nearly-1b-in-q3-in-once-in-40-years-market-transition/) [rodgered](https://therealdeal.com/2022/11/09/redfin-shutters-ibuying-business-cuts-13-of-staff/). Long, deep and hard may it continue for these 7-pints-and-a-dodgy-kebab turds
We are currently selling our to developers. With thr price increases and intest rates going up and also the lack of decent properties in our price bracket had to make us rethink things. So now considering moving to New Zealand.
Hate to say it but this country has just turned shit and its gonna get shittier. Cant see it recovering or even getting to what it was like before covid. Even once the energy markets returns back to the way it was. We will still see food prices at the same price as now. Just big industries being greedy now. The news on the fuel today proves that.
Better data tools can help with many things and no doubt let corporations squeeze out more profit but that frankly reads like an article from someone that has never written a line of code in their life.
Like how did this person conclude automated systems will somehow let you submit
>bids that few others could beat
This isn’t going very well for Zillow in the US.
https://placetech.net/news/ibuying-takes-further-hit-with-opendoors-928m-loss/
and people wonder why i say corporations should be banned from buying residential property.
If a company has designed an algorithm which values a property higher than the market currently does then that company has either built a crap algorithm and they will fail or the property is currently undervalued.
The wall monitor screen lights up, relieving the gloom of the Megacorp Affordable Compact Housing Unit (MACHU) with an eerie green glow.
Pounding headache. Alcohol smells.
“7AM in the morning? On a Saturday? Who could that be?”
A message in the inbox: Notice of Rent Increase.
“Shit. They just raised it two months ago!”
“Well that one’s early! At least I don’t have to wake you up now. ”
“Very funny, JOI.”
Megacorp Community Credits (MCC) trinkling away on the screen.
“Well honey I’ll let the folks over there know they can’t keep doing this. In the meantime, go freshen up. I’ll have your 3D printed bacon ready.”
From the wall television speakers: Due to recent housing shortages, rental of MACHUs per week have been increased by 17%
“Who the hell decides these rates?”
(sounds of sizzling emanating from the corner kitchen)
“You mean over at Megacorp? Over there, the algorithms control. The algorithms decide.”
Big, institutional and foreign investors have been milking tenants dry for years in the UK. The real risk is a house price collapse followed by a glut of cheap housing falling into Landlords hands but I don’t think the banks and government would allow house prices to crash.
Well at least you won’t have to deal with estate agents!
If mould is a problem in your professionally owned rental property, then your level of protection and redress should be higher. You can sue a corporate entity and they generally have cash reserves. Not to ignore all the issues with institutuional investment into property, but standards of hygiene should not be one of them.