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    Tough times for landlords: Declining rents, oversupply of flats, tenants with payment problems
    Finland

    Tough times for landlords: Declining rents, oversupply of flats, tenants with payment problems

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    37 Comments

    1. Beyond_the_one on

      Tiny violin. They could always adapt to the market and lower rent, as the market dictates.

    2. Jpahoda on

      Personally I hope the rent market collapses. I don’t believe it’s a sign of a healthy system where private entities can profiteer from housing.

      Probably not a popular opinion. Probably I will get called a communist. But what do I care. What is see is that housing needs a lot of controls or the haves and the have-nots keep drifting apart uncontrollably, until you have a generation of highly educated white collar professionals where couples can’t afford family housing.

      Oh, wait. That’s already Finland. Well played.

    4. InsulatorDisk on

      If you can’t sell something the price isn’t right. To get rid of s*it you might have to be the one paying.

    6. Pandabirdy on

      Landlords work maybe ten hours a week on average if you stretch out their work schedule over an entire year.

      So tough, poor poor landlords.

    7. Wetrapordie on

      Supply and demand, if the demands not there, then price needs to drop. You’re not entitled to profit holding real estate. It’s an investment which means there’s risk. If you cannot handle a cashflow issue then you’ shouldn’t be a landlord.

    9. Von_Lehmann on

      This isnt the case everywhere. Lapland is struggling with rent because people can buy a flat and make more with short term rentals over the winter than long term rentals.

      But on the upside, I get to buy a house for like 30k under asking in our little town

    11. YourShowerCompanion on

      Fuck em. They also use various tactics to hold your security deposit. 

      womp womp.

    13. yksvaan on

      It’s strange to see the amount of hate against landlords on reddit and few other places. If any of those had their own apartments they wouldn’t out those on rent for cheaper prices or accept everyone as tenant. 

      Some prefer to keep the apartment empty and wait for tenant who will A) live decently B ) pay what’s asked. Yeah, prices need to drop, for many it’s just hard to admit and accept it. 

      Also since getting rid of troublesome tenants is way too hard in Finland, if it was made much easier renting apartments would be much easier. It’s hard to even evict junkies who annoy and bother all neighbours 24/7, it takes months. Should be a few weeks at most in obvious cases, preferably less. 

    14. Brrdock on

      Oh no! Maybe these landlords should get a job, instead of just leeching on the fruit of other people’s labour?

    16. Old-Perception-3668 on

      I think one problem is that housing companies montly costs (asunto-osakeyhtiö hoitovastikkeet) are ridicusly high. You can often see 1000 € hoitovastike for an 80 m2 apartment. Sometimes it doesn’t even include the heating if electric. If you are poor a detached house is much more cost effective if the buying price is not too high. The goverment really need to look into what makes these costs so expensive. Land rent, property taxes, water, garbadge disposal, etc. All of the tiny streams added together?

    17. Far-Youth-3166 on

      Too many studios and micro-sized one bedroom apartments were built for investors, as they technically give the best rental yields. Turns out that the market collectively forgot that the demand for these shoeboxes is not infinite.

    18. Jaripsi on

      I am an landlord of a single apartment in a city that is not Helsinki. I ended up renting my old apartment I was living in when I had to change cities.

      But I am not really making any money from the apartment, all the money I get from the tenant goes to pay for the running costs of owning the apartment and the leftover mortgage I still have on the apartment. At some point I will try to sell it and hopefully get some money back.

      But either way, anyone who buys an apartment to rent and thinks its an investment without a risk is a fool.

    19. anileakinna on

      Somehow I don’t feel sorry. They still never lower the rent, just ask for more.

    20. mombi on

      Really? Where I live rent up twice around 10% just before Christmas two years in a row.

    21. TinyAd1126 on

      People are too negative in Finland in these issues. In Finland people love to build things, usually Finns build two times more per inhabitant than other Nordics for example. They don’t buy a Rolex, but rather a new summer cottage for example. That building culture makes it possible that 1,5 million singles can rent or even buy homes in a country of 5,7 million people. There are enough homes in most places. 

    22. maddog2271 on

      I am sure there is plenty of demand in nicer areas of the cities but because prices have gone so whacked out the past 15 years the ”market rate” you need to charge to make the investment make sense is now so high you can’t find tenants to pay that much. They could find tenants at 10-20 percent less rent, give or take, but they cant afford to do that because of what they paid for the apartment. So now they are trapped because they also can’t sell the place for what they paid.

      The economics is pretty simple but that doesn’t mean the market will tolerate endless increases in rent. Small flats in the city center of Helsinki now at 400k means you need to clear 20k a year after vastike to make 5% on the investment, assuming you don’t factor in appreciation. and no way are those flats worth 2k a month in rent. That’s the problem with speculation: sometimes you freaking lose.

    23. wearethafuture on

      I rarely feel any empathy for landlords saying ”oh it’s so difficult for me”, but if the other option is multinational investment firms owning the apartments, it’s the lesser of two annoyances.

    26. Alseids on

      Oh no more people can find housing at prices they can afford! What will we do if this continues?! 

    27. Menithal on

      Its the tenant’s market.

      I could have rented an apartment to live in, but instead took a loan and bought one for my self and dont have to be beholden to anyone but the housing coop.

      Sure my mortages and maintenance fees total to 1200€ a month (especially recently lvis renovated), but if i pay equal or more for something similar in the same area why bother paying someone elses mortage when I can later sell this and recoup at-least some of the value back. (I’m in no illusion ill get more money out of it, even living in Helsinki)

    28. Salt-Composer-1472 on

      *Cut cut cut cut*

      “Huh, why are so many having issues with being able to afford anything? Weird… must be a sign that people are just too lazy to work. Well, if people aren’t buying that means we gotta cut cut cut cut some more. It has never worked before but maybe it will work now.”

      Seriously speaking the problems vary depending on the area but here there’s certainly lots of apartments available, which causes rents to rise at least in the city’s own apartments. There has been raise in rent every single year for at least 5 years in a row and the rent is starting to get out of hands compared to the conditions of said apartments. 

      Every year the city promises to figure something for the empty large apartments so they’d get rented out and the rents would stop rising and every year they do absolutely nothing because they can just keep raising the rents. Obviously people are starting to move out, trying their luck on the private market I guess. It is sometimes just bad management causing issues. I feel like that’s the thing locally with the city. Like they dont have any issues renting to addicts that trash the apartments and then the rents raise because the apartments need to be fixed, and apparently the city hadnt been taking any money from the tenants that trashed the apartments in the first place. We tenants seem to be cash-cows for bad management of the apartments. Don’t matter what happens, the bills get sent to us.

    33. Such_Housing_6850 on

      imagine my shock. Rents are absurd, especially considering nothing is included in the rent in Finland (not water, not insurance, not parking space, not electricity, not sauna, not internet, not anything, you literally only pay for the walls you live between). So on top of the rent there are also a bunch of costs that push many people over their salaries or, relevant for these times, unemployment benefits.

      I really don’t think landlords are the ones suffering here. Over many years they just pushed the rent so damn high people are starting to be unable to afford it. This isn’t the tenants’ problem. Chill with the real estate bubbles

    36. oMcYriL on

      Well, maybe it’s because the rents are too high or people are simply struggling (record high unemployment and government reducing unemployment allowances), I don’t know.

      But I’m not going to drop a tear for landlords, I don’t think they the one struggling there.

    37. Atheistmantide on

      How do these people dare to complain when they live off passive incomes, while other people actually struggle to put together the money necessary to live decently?