The point is that this yes/no datum is going to be interpreted as a black stain, regardless of what it means.
A landlord reviewing 50 applications for a place isn't going to go into the particulars. Depending on the landlord's approach, anything with a yes won't make the short list.
Credit reports should not have suspicious stains whose meaning could be that there is in fact nothing wrong (there was a dispute which was caused by someone else, and resolved in the applicant's favor).
The obvious solution is the one I've long advocated in this forum and elsewhere: a housing market where landlords can pick and choose tenants should not be permitted to exist. Build housing until the median number of applicants for a vacant home becomes 1 or 0. Make landlords desperate again.
You can make the exact symmetrical argument if tenants are not allowed to pick landlords (which is what happen in practice). Well, except about rent increase that happens anyways.
What market are you in where tenents can't pick landlords? With mom and pop landlords, it can be a crapshoot. But I have rented from coorporate landlords twice. Each time, I was able to research them, and I avoided several with bad reputations. I've never had problems with the landlords I did rent from.
> a housing market where landlords can pick and choose tenants should not be permitted to exist
1. That implies that home owners would not be permitted to rent only to family members (or friends), because that constitutes picking and choosing tenants.
2. Not being able to pick and choose tenants literally means you cannot evict existing tenants for any reason, like years of non-payment of rent, or damage to the unit or whatever. Such a move can be interpreted as trying to replace tenants with a better choice of tenants; i.e. picking and choosing tenants.
3. Only a complete fool or someone desperate would rent their home out under such a rule. (Even in a housing market in which you can screen tenants, you can still get awful tenants. Imagine if you had tenants foisted upon you by some rules. Yikes!) The result would be fewer rental units on the market.
4. But, in this imaginary world, banks would likewise not be allowed to pick and choose to whom they give money to buy a house, so there would be a lot less renting.
You should expect that the market would build enough units that there were about as many homes as applicants in the absence of regulation. Getting to more than that should be doable with only minor incentives.
Why don't you ask people in any nation where this is already national policy, such as Austria? Don't just imply that it is not possible, when there are existence proofs.
For that matter, just ask your parents. It was national policy of the U.S. to build an overabundance of housing for the 50 years after the Great Depression, which is why landlords' income as a fraction of the national economy hit an all-time low in the mid 1980s. It has since rebounded to all-time highs, which is why nobody can find a place to live.
>Why don't you ask people in any nation where this is already national policy, such as Austria? Don't just imply that it is not possible, when there are existence proofs.
What? How? Real estate prices to income ratio in Austria is one of the worst in the EU. Few people can afford to buy without inheritance. Austrian real estate market is broken AF.
Growing by less than 40% in 100 years is slow. Austrians hardly had to scramble to provide housing for themselves.
(Now this line of reasoning is simplified quite a bit, because housing is area dependent. Even if the population in some country remains constant, say that everyone suddenly decides that a very tiny area of the country is the only worthwhile place to live. They all concentrate there and now there is a housing problem now. Well, not everywhere, just in that spot! In other spots there are empty, cheap houses.)
Make being a landlord too onerous and people will stop being landlords. Take Sweden for example, landlords are selling off their rental apartments at an increased rate as the profits of renting are decreasing and the risks increasing. The end result is that there is almost nothing available to rent at any price and it can take 5-10 years of standing in line to get a halfway decent rental apartment.
Having a liquid supply of decent rental apartments on the market is important for a dynamic economy.
Wouldn't that increase the rents even further? Specially if we were go below 1 on long term. As the existing renters must also cover the building and maintenance cost for the empty units...
General prices would drop, but renters would end up paying for something they are not using or even have access to...
> The obvious solution is the one I've long advocated in this forum and elsewhere: a housing market where landlords can pick and choose tenants should not be permitted to exist.
Do you leave your domicile unlocked for anyone to visit, while you are elsewhere? No? A landlord doesn't want to do that, either.
A landlord reviewing 50 applications for a place isn't going to go into the particulars. Depending on the landlord's approach, anything with a yes won't make the short list.
Credit reports should not have suspicious stains whose meaning could be that there is in fact nothing wrong (there was a dispute which was caused by someone else, and resolved in the applicant's favor).