Page 101 - AAGLA-APR 2022

Member Update
Talking Trash? Government Continues WAntagonizing Us with More Fees and Bad Services!
By George Kandon, Rental Property Owner
ell, I can see why you think that the back up to true market rates under Beverly Hills’ local rent “powers that be” are trying to screw us stabilization ordinance. With no rent increases permitted for over - it is because they are. Only cruel the past 2 years and reduced rent at the same time the owner people would kick someone when is experiencing increasing expenses, this once very stable they are down, and our government is building is now facing financial ruin. This building is the kicking us as hard as they can in the only income of an owner who retired from a small printing
ribs while we are literally begging for help on the ground. business.
Likely every landlord in the city has been struggling with rents going down during 2020 and being locked into these lower rents with no way to bring them back up to market because of the freeze on rent increases and even when rent increases are eventually allowed, they are way too low to bring a unit to going market rates in any reasonable amount of time. Add to this those unpaid rents be-cause of COVID-19 eviction moratoriums in place as well as rapidly rising costs or inflation of about 7%, and it will be a miracle if the housing industry can survive it. Nearly 80% of landlords in the Greater Los Angeles Area are small business, “moms and pops.” The sad, unintended conse-quence of all this overbearing government regulation and one-sided response to a pandemic will be government-owned housing which we already know is how you end up with often crime-ridden and poorly maintained structures known as “the Projects.”
One of my friends and fellow rental property owner has an 8-unit building in Beverly Hills. Coinci-dently between March 1st and March 15th he had 3 units vacate completely unrelated to COVID-19. Unfortunately, those units sat vacant for months because no one went anywhere or did anything for several months. After the initial shock of the pandemic settled, it was surprising that these gorgeous units were not renting, but more than likely, this occurred because of uncertain economic times and reluctance of renters to run to and “shop” the most expensive area to rent a new apartment. Accord-ingly, to get the units rented, we responded to the lack of demand by lowering the price reluctantly when everyone else did, knowing that it would be very difficult to get the rents
Going back to the city and their maniacally stupid plan to remove small building owners from competing with big building owners by financially crippling them, we must ask ourselves – why? It is not like government entities have ever done a good job or even a decent job managing public housing. They are making it so that eventually only the very big constitutional companies control the entire market which will result in higher rents overall and rental housing product that all look the same. Maybe our city mayors, county supervisors and Governor are buying small, crippled properties for themselves as Mike Bonin had suggested. They seemingly just keep on kicking us while we are down, and then try stealing our properties in a fire sale.
There are many ways rental housing providers are being adversely impacted. Let me count some of the ways for you.
First, during the pandemic, while already dealing with a labor shortage and lack of employees, it has become a separate, full- time job just to “jump through all the hoops” to collect money to cov-er unpaid rent. In its wisdom, our government told tenants they did not need to pay their rent and that we could not evict them. Some of those tenants do not even qualify for free rent and are still getting it, or worse, they know they do not qualify for free rent but also know they do not have to pay rent because we cannot evict them. Non-paying tenants who are NOT COVID-19 impacted DO NOT HAVE TO PAY RENT and are literally gaming the system created by our government. Why not? Our government owes us an explanation for that. Under market tenants not affected by COVID-19 – no rent
APARTMENT AGE • APRIL 2022 101