For years, being a landlord in a major city has been a great business to be in. Laws were favorable to owners, not renters, and we’ve had a general multi-decade boom in the price of financial assets. But at least some people think that is beginning to change. On this episode of the podcast, we speak with NYC landlord Ben Carlos Thypin who argues that thanks to a series of macro and political shifts, the golden age of being a landlord is over. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key insights from the pod:
Has it really been a golden age for being a landlord? — 5:05
How do landlords actually make money? — 10:29
What are the demographics of the tenant class? — 13:46
What are the politics of housing? — 15:03
What risks do landlords take? — 17:04
The rise of the YIMBY movement — 23:38
Why developers keep pouring money into apartments — 29:57
How to get your rent reduced — 37:26
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Joe Weisenthal: (00:10)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy Alloway: (00:16)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe: (00:17)
Tracy, I'm not sure if you remember, but we did an episode recently and in the outro someone tweeted about this. I think your final line was, "It's pretty good to be a landlord." We were talking about rent and you said, "eh, it seems good to be a landlord."
Tracy: (00:30)
I stand by it. Yeah, I can't believe I'm getting criticized throwing out these truth bombs. It's good to be a landlord.
Joe: (00:36)
No, I don't think it's even a criticism. It's like sometimes the truest things are the obvious things that no one says directly. And like rent prices, as we've been discussing, they never seem to go down. There are all kinds of tax advantages, it seems to owning real estate. It's hard to build more of it. It seems pretty good.
Tracy: (01:00)
It seems good. 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?
Joe: (01:33)
I guess there are two questions to my mind about sort of whether it's good to be a landlord.
One is, okay, we do know that probably rent growth is going to slow. And we talked to the guy from Apartment List, Chris Salviati, several weeks ago, and he was like, okay, probably rents are going to come down a bit, maybe, or be flat or maybe not grow, but that's just a cycle thing.
Then there's the question of is there something deeper that's not just about the macroeconomic cycle, but is something going to change about the business? You know, one thing that I still kind of believe in markets is that if there's alpha somewhere, if there's above market returns, it can’t stay forever. Eventually it's got to get eroded away, right?
Tracy: (02:19)
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.
Joe: (02:27)
Yeah, no, I mean, I agree. It's just there can't be some business that just permanently benefits all the other businesses, right? It's not how markets or capitalism are supposed to work. 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 on a vol-adjusted basis or something like that.
Tracy (2:51)
Well, I guess this is where we start talking about real-world constraints and policy constraints again, but yes, in theory, it should change.
Joe: (02:59)
Right. And so we have been talking about real estate quite a lot, and I do think that in this pandemic/post-pandemic environment, there's lots of anxiety about real estate — not just high costs but also availability, the types of real estate that people want. And so it's a good question to ask, how good has the landlord market been? And if we're in a period where a lot of things are changing, rates are reversing, can the golden age of being a landlord persist if many other macro and political things are changing?
Tracy: (03:30)
Yeah, I was about to say, I think interest rates are gonna be the big factor here. Leverage is a huge aspect of the real estate business. Can the golden age of being a landlord persist if many other macro and political things are changing?
Joe: (03:44)
Is it still good to be a landlord? All right. Well, I'm very excited about our guest. We're going to be speaking with Ben Carlos Thypin. He is a real estate investor and broker in New York City, and he has a lot of views 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.
Ben Carlos Thypin: (04:07)
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Joe: (04:09)
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?
Ben: (04:35)
Yeah, so I mean, I think it's important to make a distinction between different types of real estate owners. Okay. So there's residential rental landlords and commercial landlords, and even homeowners. I'm going to talk today mostly about residential landlords and homeowners.
Joe: (04:50)
And you are a residential landlord?
Ben: (04:51)
I'm a residential landlord in addition to being a commercial landlord. And I'm also a broker that deals with a lot of other residential landlords and investors on a daily basis.
Joe: (05:00)
So establish for us that there, in fact, has been a golden age.
Ben: (05:05)
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 Professor Katharina Knoll that looks at housing prices over time from 1870 to the present, and she studies 14 countries, including the United States. What she found is that up until around 1950, depending on the country, in the United States it was probably the late '60s, housing prices were relatively flat. And then after that, they've exploded.
Housing data, including rent, is notoriously difficult to capture because it's such a disparate market. But that backs up with qualitative observations as well. There's this great book that I recommend everyone read about the history of New York City real estate families called Skyscraper Dreams, and there's a recurring theme in this book of the families that specialize in apartment buildings complaining about not getting as rich as quickly as the office developers or the office landlords because of rent control.
What changed in the mid-20th century is a couple of different things. We are all familiar, I imagine, with the story of the subsidization of homeowners and single-family homes in the suburbs. Simultaneously, as that was occurring in terms of the public's investment in the apartment business and rental housing, it shifted from public housing to private sector solutions, whether it's Freddie Mac subsidizing multifamily developers or even nonprofit developers.
Simultaneously with that, land use controls were implemented to protect the investments of homeowners. In the late '70s, after all this had happened for a decade or two, what you had is this coalition formed of homeowners and conservative interests, both business and otherwise, teaming up to pare back rent regulations where they existed, ban them where they didn't exist, and generally implement a 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 some sort of marginalized status.
So before I get to the more specific consequences, let's talk about what that actually created from a market structure perspective. Homeowners become this very powerful political block. Their relative permanence increases their propensity to vote, and they team up with conservative interests to weaken the state. The idea that everyone becomes a homeowner becomes gospel and homes become used as investments. But this was always sort of a Ponzi scheme because you're protecting the investments by putting up barriers to entry.
One generation buys in, gets 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 on much more vulnerable terms because they have higher loan-to-values and the values themselves are arguably inflated. So, all this leaves the rental market as a market with essentially unlimited demand, a growing pool of participants on the demand side, and unlike other utility markets, which is basically what housing is, it's vastly and wildly unregulated. So, it would be like Enron in the early 2000s and late '90s that was just going wild on deregulated energy markets, except we've been doing it all over the country for decades.
Tracy: (10:05)
Can I just ask a really basic question, but if you are 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? 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?
Ben: (10:29)
Sure. So partly that depends on the business model of the landlord, but also depends on the market.
So New York City is much more of an appreciation based market than a yield market. Whereas, you know, someplace in the Sunbelt might be more yield-focused than appreciation-focused. In New York City, you typically make your money selling or refinancing, or by generating scale, scale obviously helps in every market. Whereas, in other less core markets, more of the return is in the yield.
And this is a good segue into the other dynamic that produced this situation is that we have this vast unregulated rental market, and simultaneously we have an institutionalization of the business of multifamily. This is kind of a broader economic trend that happened with corporations in the latter half of the 20th century, and even with other sectors of real estate.
So 20 years ago or 30 years ago, the self-storage business was a very mom and pop business. But now it's this hugely 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.
Joe: (11:29)
Well, I was going to say too, I mean, if there is this inherent challenge of creating new units and we talk about the barriers to entry, 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 get there's a difference between developer and landlord, but it just feels like with all of these things, there must be quite a few advantages to scale on this type of stuff.
Ben: (11:58)
Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a difference between landlords and developers. But I think to your broader point is correct, which is this has been particularly enabled by technology. This used to be a very inefficient business, and the institutionalization has sucked all of the inefficiency out of this business through technology that has been implemented to price rents more efficiently, the disaggregation of functions.
So historically, the apartment owners were everyone was 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 become a business where everyone is getting their cut, and scale puts you in the best position to reap the benefits of economies of scale.
Tracy: (13:24)
So, your argument is that a process beginning in the 1950s of 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 today?
Ben: (13:46)
It's really demographic-driven. You know, it was designed to serve this growing class of homeowners, a growing class of college graduates enters the real estate business. Historically, it was a business that a lot of people without that much education could have gotten into. They start applying modern business processes to pricing units more efficiently, operating the buildings more efficiently, just picking at every possible part of the business to extract profit out of it.
That has served the industry very well, but it has not served the greater public very well. And I think that's 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.
Joe: (14:41)
So, I wanted to obviously talk about this flip and some of the demographics and all that, but before we do, can you just expand, you made one point about disparate property tax treatment that you said put renters at a disadvantage. Can you clarify what is in the code that is so advantageous to landlords?
Ben: (15:03)
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, particularly the increases in their property taxes. So, municipalities really have very few levers for generating revenue in this country. So they typically need someplace to make up the revenue.
As a result, apartment buildings start taking on a larger and larger share of the burden. This works different ways in different jurisdictions, but in New York City, for instance, buildings over 11 units make up an increasing share of the revenue for taxes. This also applies to commercial properties, whereas buildings of one to three units have artificial caps on the amount that their assessment can grow every year.
Even buildings of four to 11 units also have caps, 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 policymakers believe own these small apartment buildings are closer to a voter. It's sort of your yin 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 tax treatment.
Tracy: (16:40)
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.
Ben: (17:04)
Right. Dealing with problematic tenants and also operational increases. So let's talk about the tenant side, the tenant side varies widely from landlord to landlord. Our tenants generally speaking are pretty wealthy. I have never had to evict someone. And we rarely have issues. Whereas there are lots of landlords that have tenants that have a more marginalized socioeconomic status, and that's trickier.
However, the demand for that is very high, and the yields that those properties trade for are generally higher. So those landlords are compensated for that risk. Furthermore, with the institution and the growth of Section 8 rental subsidies, a lot of the rents being paid by marginalized tenants are effectively underwritten by the government.
So how much risk is a landlord really taking on in a Section 8 building from a tenancy perspective? From the perspective of operating expenses, as we talked about, property taxes are being constrained in some cases, but in other cases they're not. And that's where operational efficiency comes in. Operational costs are the most important cost for landlords to control, and in some ways they're in their least amount of control. So at least with financing costs, you have some decision over when you incur that cost. But for fuel and maintenance, you really don't. Maintenance to a lesser extent a bit, but for fuel and other more recurring costs, you don't have as much control.
Joe: (18:53)
So I want to ask about financing, because of course, we sort of talked about in the intro, lots of things are shifting, and one thing that seems to be shifting is maybe this 40-year steady decline in interest rates. Can you talk a little bit about, from your experience, your mix of equity borrowing, etc., and if there is a sustained reversal, what does that do to your economics?
Ben: (19:23)
Well, it doesn't do that much, or it won't do that much to my economics because I'm gonna get out of this business. I'm gonna stop being a landlord altogether. 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 gonna make above-average returns, and the rest will make utility or bond-like returns. And if I'm going to buy a bond, I'd rather buy TIPS. And if I'm going to invest, I'd rather invest in real estate that is less management-intensive than residential facilities.
Joe: (20:01)
Well, okay. Just before we get to that, because this is the heart of the question why you want to get out, but before we get to that, can you talk a bit more about the financing side of the business?
Ben: (20:09)
A little bit about financing. You know, I think, as you pointed out, we've been coming out of this 40-year period where interest rates have been very low, and a lot of business models have been built on very cheap capital. As a result, yields have become very low in certain markets, really most markets. I think that's a particular challenge in markets that were depending on one of two things, regulatory arbitrage, and appreciation.
So we talked about the difference between markets in which the main component of the return is yield versus appreciation. The yield markets, they're not going to be as challenged from a sort of 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 5% return and you finance that at a 3.5% return, and you're assuming that you're going to be able to sell that at a 4.5%, or you were when you bought it four years ago, that's not a realistic assumption anymore.
Tracy: (21:49)
Can you talk a little bit more about what you see changing now, other than the higher interest rates? What is the mix that is going to pressure the rental business?
Ben: (21:59)
Sure. So we have this demographic-driven policy decisions that were made in the mid to late 20th century are now coming home to roost. You have this growing class of renters. You have increasing rent burdens. Evictions are destroying lives just like foreclosures are. And most crucially, this crisis is now including people from that very powerful political block, insofar as people of my generation, who would have been homeowners 30 years ago, are now not going to be homeowners or if they are, they're going to pay much more for it.
They become homeowners much later in life and view it more as a housing cost stability vehicle. There's this joke about the 30-year mortgage being a homeowner rent control. And I think that logic is now seeping into the homeownership market and it's slowly becoming a gambling market. So you now have this big demographic of people that are concerned with rental costs.
Joe: (23:02)
So this seems really key, which is that politicians have this idea of what a good voter is, what a good citizen is. For years, that person was a homeowner. 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 30 years ago. And so the political winds are over time. It's like, oh, the voters, these ideal voters are not necessarily a homeowner.
Ben: (23:38)
Right. And that sort of new renter 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 politicians could sort of ignore them because they're of a marginalized background or because they are perceived to 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 YIMBY movement, which for those who are not familiar, is 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 late 20th century. I was one of the founders of the biggest group that does this in New York City called Open New York.
In parallel, we have seen a resurgence of the rent regulation movement and a broad tenant protection movement. It's important to keep in mind that America is pretty unique in having a vastly unregulated rental market among developed countries. We have an unusually low homeownership rate, contrary to what people think. Unlike countries with similarly low homeownership rates, we typically don't have rent controls.
Germany, for example, has comparably low homeownership rates, but they have rent controls. France also has comparably low homeownership rates, and Paris just reinstated rent controls. We've seen the resurgence of rent regulation not just in places like New York and California, but also in Minnesota and even Orlando, where they had something on the ballot last year.
This is a good segue into the consequences of institutionalization, as institutionalization has created real estate entities that are much better targets for organizing from a political perspective. Blackstone might not be as vulnerable as your mom and pop landlord for organizing an individual building, but in terms of getting policy passed and creating a political coalition, it's much more compelling.
Joe: (25:53)
This is interesting. You hear labor people talk about how it's kind of good that Amazon is becoming a huge employer because if you can get unions into Amazon warehouses, you can radically change the American labor market. At least you have one identifiable entity to target.
Tracy: (26:06)
Right. And if you have these big institutional landlords, then you have a thing to organize against.
Joe: (26:09)
I hadn't thought about that. You have a thing to organize against.
Tracy: (26:18)
It's already happening because you hear so much nowadays about institutional investors buying up single-family houses for rent or for flipping purposes. It's not like single-family landlords didn't exist before, but now we're talking about it because it's Wall Street.
Ben: (26:27)
This is also a function of technology. The same technologies that made it easier for institutions to be created and organize themselves are now making it easier to organize among tenants. Historically, if a bunch of people in different buildings all over the city lived under the same landlord, how are they going to find each other?
But now, there's all this public data, there's the internet, and there are all different ways for people to get together and build coalitions that didn't exist before.
Joe: (27:16)
Can I ask you about the YIMBY movement? We talked about some of this on a recent episode, and you're a part of an organization. I see all the tweets and stuff. Can you talk specifically about how it's moving the dial beyond the tweets and how it's actually affecting the economics of the situation?
Ben: (27:34)
In terms of the politics, in California, they've passed a bunch of huge laws. They've banned single-family zoning and upzoned commercial quarters all over the state.
In New York state, the governor recently came out with proposals to build 800,000 new homes over the next decade, which is over double the amount built in the last decade. In terms of the economics of the business, what it's mainly changed so far is where developers are willing to take chances on trying to rezone. It hasn't changed the economics of the typical day-to-day development. It's mainly changing the political environment for participants in the real estate industry involved in development.
The actual economics of being a landlord haven't changed directly. It's been more disparate. Rents have fallen over the country because so much supply is coming online. The YIMBY movement can take some credit for that, but it's also developers responding to market signals that there's not enough supply.
Tracy: (29:57)
It feels like there's still a lot of institutional capital flowing into this business. The industry still sees the rental market as a profitable one. Why does the industry still see this as a profitable opportunity?
Ben: (29:57)
The demand is insatiable. There are controls on how much supply can be added, and it's a very capital-intensive business. It's a good way to deploy capital. Institutionalization will continue at pace because institutions have a lower cost of capital than mom and pops, and they have economies of scale and the ability to execute, so they can make money in this environment.
The people that can actually add value are the ones that will make money in this new environment. The people that are going to be the relative losers in this scenario are landlords that have been riding rents and not adding much value.
Joe: (31:19)
Can you talk about the return of tenants' rights and what that looks like in 2023? Is it rent control, eviction restrictions? What does that look like?
Tracy: (31:31)
I have a question just to tack onto that, but you mentioned the tax code and how there are tax benefits meant to incentivize homeownership. Why don't renters get tax breaks, especially considering that paying rent is not optional?
Ben: (31:49)
I completely agree, Tracy. The biggest expenditure of the federal government on housing is the homeowner's interest deduction or mortgage deduction. There are various ways that could be replicated for renters, such as a universal Section 8 or a renter's tax credit. As this demographic shift portends political coalitions and change, that is certainly on the menu of things.
In New York state, the big push right now is for good cause eviction, which is a very light touch rent regulation that passed in California in 2018 and has passed in Oregon, DC, and a few other places. That sort of soft rent regulation is going to become more prevalent, and there are many different ways that tenant's rights can be increased, whether it's through some form of rent control, council to Universal Section 8, or vouchers. The point is that there is a growing political coalition to agitate for these measures, whatever they may be in a given political environment.
Joe: (32:59)
Sorry, what is a good cause eviction?
Ben: (33:00)
Good cause eviction is basically a defense in an eviction case. If a tenant defaults on the lease and the landlord has raised their rent by an unconscionable amount (this is defined differently in different places), the tenant can use that as a defense for not being evicted. This is particularly valuable theoretically in instances where the conditions in the building are really bad.
A tenant complains and then the landlord says, "I'm just not going to renew your lease, or I'm going to give you a huge rent increase so that you don't renew your lease." That is a de facto eviction.
So, that sort of soft rent regulation is interesting, and I think it's going to become more prevalent. The Supreme Court could certainly change some of this, but I think in the main there are different ways that tenant rights can be increased, whether it's some form of rent control or vouchers or the right to counsel. The point is that there's a growing political coalition to agitate for these measures, whatever they may be in a given political environment.
Tracy: (34:19)
So, if you're no longer a landlord, first of all, how serious are you about that statement? And secondly, what do you do instead?
Ben: (34:29)
I am still a landlord. This is not going to be a fire sale, and I will always be a landlord because we are still commercial landlords. But it's going to be an orderly liquidation because this is really a secular shift. It's not going to happen overnight, and plenty of people disagree with me. So they're welcome to buy my properties.
Joe (34:50)
I think we inadvertently turned this episode into "Call Ben. He has properties for sale."
Ben (34:56)
But from a brokerage perspective, I'll continue to work with players that I think either want to get out as a result of this dynamic or institutions that I think will benefit or developers. But what I'm most interested in and working on right now is trying to figure out ways to bet on this dynamic. Shorting the real estate business generally and apartments, in particular, has historically been very challenging because maybe you can short REIT stock, but it's not that liquid of a market. We're working on what we think are very creative ways to bet on this dynamic.
Joe: (35:38)
Let me ask you, you know, you said okay, you're not necessarily expecting a crash, but on the other hand, you know, we talked about this in an episode several weeks ago with Conor Sen. This idea that everyone just assumed it's always a winner for some of the reasons you described is just like this secular shift. People moving to the cities, it's always one.
Even the Great Financial Crisis didn't hit rent. If you think about what the short case is, how much of it is groupthink essentially within the renter class or the landlord class just refusing to see the writing on the wall? And is there a bubble in the thinking through that something could actually change in a way that we haven't seen in decades?
Ben: (36:26)
Well, I never want to underestimate the ability of flows to impact a market.
Joe: (36:32)
You're speaking Tracy's language.
Ben: (36:34)
That said, I think it's a question of who this is a winner for, and I don't mean tenants versus landlords. I mean within the investment market. So if you're in the capital allocation business and you want to be a bond investor or a fixed-income investor, I think multifamily is going to continue to be a great business. But if you want to earn these sort of bonkers returns 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 you or other sectors entirely.
Tracy: (37:10)
I just have one question, and it sort of connects this conversation with the one we had with Chris Salvati 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.
Ben: (37:26)
Every situation 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 if you leave a landlord, they probably lose a month of rent. So at the very least, you should factor in that month of lost rent and maybe even a broker fee into what you're negotiating for.
Joe: (37:55)
All right. Ben Carlos Thypin, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots. Good luck in your new endeavors, and I hope you timed the market well with this episode.
Ben: (38:06)
Thanks.
Joe: (38:19)
I thought that was really fascinating. And you know, just this idea, it's like, yes, there's obviously certain market changes, supply and demand, interest rates, and all that, but also this idea of political changes seem really important here. Maybe not something that investors are really thinking about that much.
Tracy: (38:36)
Well, a couple of things there. So one, I think it's always a bit difficult to call a secular shift in something, but if you're going to do it, the post-pandemic environment when there does seem to be a lot of momentum behind the labor class versus the capitalists, that seems to be the time to do it.
Joe: (38:57)
And also, you know, you and I rent in New York City, and we probably know a lot of people, friends who are professionals and have good salaries, etc., and who rent and who feel that buying is very risky or unattainable or they can't save up for a down payment or for whatever reason. And this idea that there's the traditional marginalized renter class, more professionalized, and so this coming together seems like a very potentially powerful macro secular trend.
Tracy: (39:33)
But the key thing I think is always going to be the policy and whether or not you do start to see those institutional protections for renters like you do in some other countries. And I know, I think we've spoken about Germany and Austria — we're going to have to do the Austrian rental market episode, aren't we?
Joe: (39:49)
Oh yeah. Gotta see why the Austrian rental market is so different from the US. Let's do that.
Tracy: (39:54)
And also that point about how there is a big institutional face of landlords. I thought it was super fascinating. And so the way that Amazon becomes a target of labor organizing, you start to have this similar dynamics with tenant organizing.
Tracy: (40:14)
All right. Shall we leave it there?
Joe: (40:16)
Let's leave it there.
You can follow Ben Carlos Thypin on Twitter at @sobendito.