Is buying to rent immoral?

renting itself is not the immoral thing here. landlords taking advantage of the tenants is immoral, you could argue landlords creating a chain of houses by buying all the remaining houses is immoral, but system of letting others live in your house for a charge is not immoral.

firstly, the item itself is irrelevant....the point was that they were not ripping you off, you just couldnt afford the more expensive bulk at the time (despite it technically being cheaper e.g. £5 for 10 sweets) but you could afford the £1 for 1 sweet at the time. theyre happy to give sell you the '£1 for 1' sweets but they arent obliged to give you 5 for free after your bought the 5th one for example. if you come in everyday with £1.50, youre not getting that bulk. they arent obliged to do anything.

secondly, not all houses have the same rent, you could look for cheaper while you live in your current house. this doesnt necessarily make it more dangerous or mean living in the middle of nowhere.

On top of that, £50pm is nothing compared to what one has to pay in rent.

Finally, the landlord gets to keep the house that their tenants have paid for at the end of it all, and continue to take money from them when the house is fully paid for -

there isn't a start up cost because you can always sell it to get your cash back,

and now we know there isn't even a risk because the government will step in to prop up the banks and house prices. The landlord can then take up more properties and profit from even more homeless people at a time.

I find it extremely ironic that many of the people who benefited from the buying council houses scheme now seem to be lefties whinging about there not being enough houses - didn't mind when it gave them the chance to own a house though, did they? Everyone wants to own a house. There are not enough houses and too many people. Save from building houses on the remaining green parts of this country, what is the solution? Landlords buying houses barely features in the grand scheme of the problem, to them it's almost like a job.

So? The principle is exactly the same. It's a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference. If phone, TV and internet cost £500 instead of £50 due to low supply or high demand, it wouldn't make that immoral as well. That's just what the market price of the service is.

The tenants haven't paid for the house though. They have paid (and continue to pay) for the right to live in someone else's house. Just like when I pay for a gym membership, I'm paying for the right to use it, not the actual gym itself. I don't expect to own the gym after many years of doing this.

A "start-up cost" is the cost of setting up the service provision in the first place - not the difference between the cost of setting it up, and the cost of selling it. It costs money to buy a house. The fact that you can get your money back by the end of it doesn't change that.

The relevant point is the fact that there are initial costs - meaning that the service being provided is in low supply, because not everyone can afford the initial costs. When someone gives you something that not many other people can, the principle of supply and demand dictates that you should be remunerated more highly for it.

If there was no start-up cost, everyone would be buying houses.

Making homeless people into non-homeless people is a good thing to do. The landlord ought to profit from it.

Combined with the previous, it is immoral. Don't you see the effects of it on the large scale?

Again, look at what's happening on a larger scale. Individually, each agreement is legal and makes sense, if somewhat in favour of the landlord whose costs in the agreement (repairs, replacements etc) are easily covered by the tenant's rent, but on a large scale it's very damaging. Look who ends up with more money and more properties, and who ends up with less money and further from a first property.

It means there's no risk, is only open to the rich, and will transfer money from the poor to the rich just for the basic need of a home. Of course it matters that you get your money back, the landlord hasn't actually done anything of value.

The landlord is causing the homelessness problem in the first place by taking the house that the homeless person would have bought had they not been outbid anyway. Put simply, if there's a house for sale, person A needs a house and can pay £10 (per month/whatever), and person B already has one and can pay £15, person B gets the house. But then since A still needs somewhere to live, B charges A £10. B is not doing good.