No Stupid Questions

The problem in Ireland is when big American moguls go and buy up properties in Dublin to rent out en masse, effectively just sucking money out of the country. We always need people to lend out property on rent free cheaper than a mortgage. Landlords are vital for those who cannot afford a mortgage. But these landlords are the smaller ones - like your aunt.

Ideally as well economically, the tenants should be people who are starting off or not intending to live permanently - like holidaymakers or students

both are parasites.

if you have one for any longer than a year or two after moving from your rental property to your current home, yeah that's parasitic. if you don't need it sell it and give someone a chance to buy instead of rent.

Renting allows those without the needed capital to access a resource.

Backing out from that, one should question why shelter is a resource that someone cannot access on a minimum wage salary.

So, fundamentally, landlording isn't inherently evil, but it's presentation in the system is inherently corrupting. As in, at any moment that someone retains an excess of shelter they do not need, and instead rent it out, they are constraining the market for their own gain, at the detriment of others who in need shelter.

Next consider degrees of influence: large corporations buy up tons of units and exert inordinate power on the system. They systemically unbalance the purchasing ability of normal folk, due to process or sheer wealth. Fine, that's the high water of corruption. From there it's only shades of difference down to the mom and pop landlord. It's up to you to decide where they land on the scale.

Depends on the person. There are people that mean every landlord. Their reasoning isn't as bad as you might think either. The main issues are that they still exert control over property, a form of private governance; they're denying the same financial stability through housing equity to another family; and they can artificially raise the price of housing.

That happens at every level of being a landlord. Of course the systemic problems only get worse as the number of owned or managed units goes up.

Most people are thinking about the giant corporations holding thousands of units.

I can see the evil in what these large corporations are doing but I have rented in the past when I was neither prepared for the burden of home ownership nor planning to stay in that location for a long time. If I couldn't have rented what would I have done? I would have been essentially FORCED into owning a home or what, living in the streets? And what if you wish to move but no one wants to buy your house? More you are forced to stay out turn evil by buying two houses.

It's ok to love your aunt. She didn't make the rules she's just living by them. If there's a problem with the system, start at the top.

A couple of a house as an investment is already a lot, and way more than the average person can afford. If you go from a leftist perspective, the fact that they make money without workings sucks. These people who own a couple of house for investment are also the one complaining about "public retirement system is too expensive, so we should cut-down retirement benefit for everyone"

More seriously, I understand that you want to play by the rule in today's capitalist world. The problem is that in many places the rule are skewed. In some countries income from rent are less taxed than income from work, and the power-balance between tenant and landlord is favouring the landlord (and people see implementing stuff like rent-control and shorter notice for tenant as leftists policies). While it's fun to say eat the rich including the landlord, you need to build a reasonable political program if you want to stand a chance.

Another big issue, is the lack of affordable rental properties managed by the government/municipality. It's basically massively promoting either homelessness or bad housing

Lots of good answers here, so here’s a fact that might help you understand why people have these positions:

Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.