Jasmine Naylor Enterprise

When people ask me why I got into real estate, I tell them it’s because I never wanted to be homeless and I figured the sure way to prevent that was by becoming a landlord in an owner occupied multi-family. This would allow me to have help paying the mortgage while also housing other families. My first tenants rented a 2 bedroom from me for $750 a month and for 7 years, until they vacated, I never raised their rent because Landlord’s love community stability contrary to what the media says. Small Landlords aren’t greedy, they’re human, with families like me, trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents except we take on crazy amounts of risk, sweat equity, believing in the generational wealth dream we are all sold. We take the calls, we manage the good with the bad and the devastatingly ugly. We absorb every financial hit.

Today I sat on a panel presenting to legislators and staff in Massachusetts telling the hard truth about the proposed bill on rent control. We don’t tell barbers what to charge for a haircut, we don’t tell restaurants what to charge for food, we don’t tell car dealerships what to charge for cars, we don’t tell clothing stores what to charge for clothes, we don’t tell banks what to charge for interest rates and we don’t tell Starbucks what to charge for coffee but we want to tell landlords what to charge for rent? We want to squeeze 60% of small landlords into losing their properties because of the most restrictive proposed rent control bill in the entire United States of America. That’s insane and anti-American.

We should be building more housing.

AND

We should be allowing each community to choose rent control for themselves based on existing laws instead of force feeding the state into crippling its own housing supply.

The studies don’t lie. Rent control doesn’t work.
History shows it didn’t work 50 years ago in Mass. Yet here we are. Ready to go around the mulberry bush one more time because we are tricked into believing something like this is better than nothing…

Let’s focus on what works… build more housing.