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Subjective. When I used to rent, I never saw my landlord after signing the lease. I was renting a house and taking care of small maintenance issues myself. I'd
by rapind 5y ago
Subjective. When I used to rent, I never saw my landlord after signing the lease. I was renting a house and taking care of small maintenance issues myself. I'd say it was far less effort to rent to me, then it would have been to live there himself.
Of course there are bad tenants, but I suspect, like most things, we focus on those negatives and ignore all the low maintenance tenants when thinking about it.
- boredumb 5y agoa new roof is over 20,000$ a new floor in a modest home is over 10,000$ a burst pipe will be over 1,000$ interest payments are thousands a year property taxes are thousands of dollars a year all are guarantees even with the lowest maintenance tenants.
- rapind 5y agoAgreed. Home maintenance, property tax, mortgage interest, is a cost of owning regardless of whether you are renting or living in it. So that needs to always be part of your calculation, and I would hope most landlords are considering that. I was just hypothesizing that the "Bad Tenant tax" is potentially overblown. Sure it can be an absolute nightmare if you're unlucky (or bad at screening), but on average I suspect it's pretty minor. I honestly don't have anything but anecdotal data to back that up though. I just suspect, like a lot of things where exceptional horror stories are propagated, we could be over-weighting the negatives.
- bombcar 5y agoThe problem with small landlords is they can't average bad tenants over a large number of units. They have one or two units, and even one just sitting empty for a few months destroys years of cash flow. Let alone actually getting a bad tenant. It may be a low chance, but if it comes up, you can be hosed out of the entire value of the house (usually you can still sell the land, but in the absolute worst cases where the property was turned into a meth factory, you may be out more than the entire value).