Of course, if landlords paid tax solely on the value of their land — and not on values of buildings, or municipal services actually used, or rental income actually received — they wouldn’t be penalized for keeping their properties habitable and inhabited.

Further thanks to Alice for the lesson on agents’ incentives.

I have never applied cpi increases on rent and I fix things properly and dont whinge about doing so for my tenants and as a result I have never had a bad tenant and I never use agents to manage them.
The guy next door rented his house while he was working in the US and “on the agents advice” he was jacking the rent up $50 a week every 6 months a few years ago.

I counted three lots of tenants he lost with the requisite clean ups of rubbish left behind under house, overgrown gardens etc (agents dont check that before they hand back bonds) and weeks and weeks of vacancies plus damage moving in and out.

You cant trust some real estate agents to manage property I find. They have real incentives to “mismanage” rental property eg annoy tenants (by not addressing their concerns), advocating 6 monthly rent increases etc. Then they get to replace tenants. The replacement fee is usually large (two weeks rent) and it might take them more than 6 months to earn that on the weekly rental income commission rate.

#WhyIsMyPaycheckLessThisWeek So Obama can afford Big Bird and Planned Parenthood.

7:14 AM – 4 Jan 13

Obama fuck the taxes up man I should have voted for Romney smh bullshit— bitch im broke(@Made410) January 3, 2013

LOL

Crushed unicorn dreams: Why is my paycheck less turns to Obama vote regrets, ‘I should have voted Romney’

Schadenfreudalicious.

I suggest, as I have for some time, the following.

The only taxes applied, would be:

A 10% GST – but applied to everything.

A 2% LVT

A 5% royalties tax

I think it would raise less revenue – around 15% of GDP, whereas a 25% GST would raise 20% of GDP assuming no deadweight loss. The higher rate may create higher deadweight losses to see it tend towards more like 15% of GDP, but probably closer to 20% of GDP still.

Would it surprise the anti-landlord beast comrades to know that in these troubled times I often don’t apply annual CPIs,

Nor do the Hairy Ape and I on any properties we still have kept and haven’t unloaded. We lose quite a bit on our beach house, but help a struggling family with two kids there (when they leave this year for a house they are building we have another struggling family in mind for a cheap rental).

But in Melbourne we ourselves are being asked for an increased rent on the property we are renting if we want to extend our lease (HIA has just contracted another year, provided it includes stints for us both in Europe and the US. He’s off leaving me at home to go to China soon). We could just up and leave (we think our landlord is taking a bit of a risk here as we are good and secure tenants) but we do like it where we are and can’t be ass’d movin’.

So we will probably just pay up and stay. Dat’s da market. Lucky landlord.