NYTimes Speaks to SPOA President About Impact of Inflation on Small Property Owners
On Tuesday, September 27, the New York Times published an article that finally shed light on some of the difficulties faced by small property owners. Among them were the impact of the pandemic and, more recently, the months of inflation in the cost of goods and service. A Times reporter spoke to SPOA President, Allison Drescher, who emphasized the fact that small housing providers are being hit with escalations of energy and other costs up to four or five times their original amount, greatly outpacing the modest rent increases of less than 10% put in place by most small landlords. Contrast this with an average rent increase of 17% in portfolio-owned rental housing. The article makes another point desperately needing to be made: small landlords generally recouped less rental income lost during the pandemic relative to large operators.
The link we provided above makes the article available to you without a paywall. Please share it with your friends. It is significant that the leading newspaper in the country included SPOA in this story, which helped shape a pro-landlord narrative! It certainly helps when a media outlet actually gets our story right.
Proponents of rent control and other anti-landlord legislation make the argument that all landlords seek to maximize their profits without any regard for their tenants, and that ineffective and disproven policies are the only answer to the housing affordability question. SPOA is getting the message out there that small landlords have attempted to maintain market rate rental housing as affordable as possible, despite constricting financial pressures to raise rents. Rather than punishing the virtuous actors in the economy and impeding the supply of affordably priced market-rate housing, we should be encouraging the ownership of small rental property by families and individuals as part of the American dream, rather than making it more difficult. The vacuum created when small housing providers give up and sell their properties is filled by large operators -- to the detriment of all renters in our state.
To that end, SPOA is forming an affordable market-rate housing committee to join bright minds and industry experts from around Massachusetts to create workable market-based alternatives to price regulation and governmental control of the housing sector. Stay tuned for more news about this exciting development throughout this fall and winter.
SPOA needs your financial support to keep doing the work we do. We are a group of volunteers with our own businesses trying to support SPOA's lobbying efforts. If we are going to win this fight, we need across-the-board participation. We are all in this together and landlords need to financially participate in recognition of the threats our industry is facing as a whole. Please donate to our efforts.
