Some Chinese people can also be cheap. I can see some people renting a tiny little home for themselves and lease out their mansions… great way to save money! 
Who hasn’t heard of folks living in their inlaws while renting out the upstairs and rest of home out?
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With rent control in place there won’t be any nice landlords anymore. I don’t know if this has been posted on the forum before:
Tenants should appreciate the goodwill of the landlord if the rent is below market. If someone sells you goods at below market price out of the kindness of his heart, you should thank him for that, even if the seller is still making a decent profit at the lower price. They are really the same thing. Rent control policy will only make tenant-landlord relationship worse.
Before rent control policy is established, if a landlord willingly rents out units at below market rates, he must be feeling good that he is helping people (presumably who needs help). Now there is rent control, if a landlord is stuck with a below market tenant, he will feel ripped off.
With the rent control in place, we can buy some vacant apartments in Santa Cruz and exclusively rent to students. Students will move after a few years.
In the future, students will enjoy a very high rent since most other units will be occupied by long time local residents at very low rent who may never move again.
What’s the popular neighborhood with students?
hahaha
you think that exists?
basically the West-side, where the university is. “Upper Westside” - many SFR are rented room by room.
Do they have rent control on room rental?
Berkeley has restrictions on room rentals, hope Santa Cruz won’t crack down on room rentals. Seems that Berkeley students are weak and they can’t even force the city to allow room rental freely to students
Or they could be doing it to get better tenants. Someone who won’t call them for any nit picky thing and will pay the rent on time every time.
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People have zero gratitude and only entitlement. In a country where 20% are paying 87% of the tax bill, you’d think the 80% would be grateful that they don’t have to pay more. They are essentially getting a free dinner and only paying for the tip. Instead, they bitch that the free dinner is only Outback Steakhouse and not Morton’s.
That actually has been my strategy since I bought my first SF property. The house is between SFSU and CCSF so there are lots of students renting in the area. Students will eventually turn over after graduation, so you avoid getting stuck with a lifetime tenant. Once remodel finished and we posted it on CL, a few student groups showed interest and we did open house and picked a boy group (since the area was, and still is, a little sketchy). Most of them were from LA area (looks like the norm is for NorCal students to go to college in SoCal, and vice versa), and they all looked like they were from good families. One of them, as I later found out, was the son of a prominent star writer.
After they moved in, neighbors started calling. Music was too loud, people constantly smoking and drinking in the backyard into the wee hours, careless parking blocking driveways, etc. Neighbor on one side is Chinese and even they complained (I could tell they’ve been trying to tolerate the kids for a while). So I visited the boys a few times. They were polite, kept the house clean and in order, and did change light bulbs and minor repairs themselves. So I told them to talk to neighbors and try to resolve the conflicts themselves. They did and things went quiet for a while but came back up again. I think it’s a lifestyle thing that putting these young boys in the middle of a family-oriented neighborhood was not a good idea (but what can you do). So one year later they moved out. This time we really emphasized in the ad that new tenants must fit into the neighborhood well. Again a group of boys became our tenants and they were much better (not without issues), but after one year they moved out because the boys didn’t really bond well so the group fell apart. At this point we were a little tired of changing tenants every year even though the rent was good (increase at every turnover), so we emphasized in the ad that we prefer groups who can stay longer than one year. This time we got a girls group and we are very happy with them. They are still there after 3 years but should be graduating by this summer. I think at least 2 boyfriends also live there but since they’ve been behaving well I leave them alone. One of the boyfriends works part-time at home depot and is quite a people person so he became the house manager. One day I got a text from a neighbor telling me that they are happy to have this boyfriend be their neighbor. I still don’t know what he did to the neighbors but if neighbor is happy I am happy.
My main point is renting to students has its challenges, especially for an semi-absentee landlord. After the experience from the first SF property we re-thought our strategy and we will probably not rent to students anymore after the current group moves out.
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So someone needs to convince them that rent control means higher prices for them because landlords have to raise the rent initially to recoup the loss for later. Shouldn’t be that hard for them to understand.
Thanks for sharing maluka. Very interesting!
Sounds like you hit the jackpot there. Hope it stays a good situation.
Fair enough, but without implicating myself, that is why I especially like graduate female students. For some reason, their applications seem to land on the top of my pile every time. I am regretting one such tenant since she has graduated and is now making a lot of money at a drug company. Lady, don’t you want your own home instead of wasting money on rent?
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Is it ok to rent to women only? Does it violate the fair housing law?
Well, in my book, yes to the first question and yes to the second question…
And people wonder why I use a black 8 ball as my avatar and I don’t want to meet up…
No wonder most homeless people are men 
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Most murderers and rapists are men too. They only have themselves to blame.
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I need to update my warning:
Friends don’t let friends buy multi-family in all of California.
Rent control will come and eat landlords alive.
Rent control per-se is not that bad (i am in @ptiemann camp). It’s JCE that is galling. and if you look at what is happening, JCE is being passed for all properties. So you should revise to say, friends don’t let friends be landlords in CA. So @manch you should change this to an investing forum 
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JCE is really the son of Rent Control.
One way to get around JCE is renting only to the upward mobile upper middle class. The stereotypical techie families in South Bay for example. These people will never give you trouble, won’t pay their rent late, and in 99% of the case reasonable upstanding people. And these families don’t usually live in multi-family apartment buildings.
That is, only rent to people who aspire to be homeowners, not deadbeat.
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