Landlords talk about impacts of inflation, rising prices

Rent across the country has continued to soar over the last five years, with Missouri rentals increasing over 8% from 2021-2022. Maryville is no exception to this.

For those renting in town, many rentals have raised prices across the board due to increasing prices of utilities, property taxes and overall cost of living.

Southview Apartments in

Maryville is a low-income housing, tax credit property unit that bases rental prices off of the median income in the community. Southview Apartments Property Manager Christina Villegas said there was an increase for all of the units based on new rates.

She said that many Southview tenants depend on their social security income, so even with the slight increase in those funds, it doesn’t help them cover other costs of living.

“Even with the little boost that they get for the cost of living, I don’t really feel it helps them a whole lot,” Villegas said. “I mean, rent goes up when cost of living goes up as well. And so basically, when anything they get goes up, it’s not paying for it, you know what I mean?”

These apartments include water, trash and sewer in rent, but with the rising rates of everything across the board, sometimes people aren’t able to come up with the money to pay rent on top of all other costs.

“I mean, I have some of my residents that … live paycheck to paycheck,” Villegas said. “... We’re a family property, and we’re trying to help them the best that we can and not just the rent rate, but everything else. The grocery cost of everything has gone up and so the struggle has been real for quite a few of us. It comes with sometimes they are late on their rent.”

President of Stagner Rental Properties Todd Stagner has been in real estate for about 20 years and has only seen price increases like this in the last two years. He said some of the biggest impacts on rent increase is utilities and property tax.

“It’s the past two years because our property taxes and our insurance have all gone up, as well as utilities — if the landlord pays the utilities — I’m not quite sure the actual property tax rate increase, but insurance has gone up, depending on the property 10 to 12%,” he said.

Hersh’s Rentals Owner Allen Hersh has been in the business for over 20 years and owns many properties on Fourth Street. He said he hasn’t seen something like this before the last couple of years, and he thinks the rising costs come from a “trickledown” effect that starts with delivering products, but ends with the consumers having to pay the price.

As he does his own maintenance on his properties, he said everything, down to small parts have doubled in price over recent years.

“We go in there to repair stuff, stuff that I used to buy for $5 like a toilet float, now it’s $14,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.” He said he has seen tenants that are concerned with the pric- es, too. Hersh recently had to replace a water heater, and during repairs, he had to drain the water, causing an increase in the tenants water bill.

“I had to drain the hot water heater two or three times, and I made it right,” he said. “But the mother was concerned. Yes, I can see when it jumps as we run a lot of water, and it costs like 75 bucks.”

When it comes to replacing parts and maintenance on buildings, Hersh said these prices have been outrageous. With costs continuing to rise, he said it doesn’t only affect property managers and landlords.

“It’s affected everybody,” Hersh said. “The young families that have young kids and stuff.”