Burden Of Being A Landlord

The title does not refer to the troubles of the owner of inherited land in an ancestral village he/she never visits. Meaning, the owner is an absentee landlord in this context and he does not even know if he is really the owner or someone else has appropriated the land in his prolonged absence. Most often, he is not,  because some scheming local farmer who leased the land fifty years ago and had never paid the lease value, has now taken over fully, whether the actual owner likes it or not.  Why this long-winded explanation?   Just to say that this kind of `ownership' is not a burden because there is nothing weighing down on the owner, he knows who legally the owner is, reality is different, that the land is gone.  I am referring the burden or owning a residential property somewhere, renting it out for the paltry compensation received every month and in the bargain, facing constantly irritable problems arising from the quirky demands of the renter.

If one is lucky, one gets a good company, which happily signs successive leases for its officers, with a routine increment of some pittance.  So long as the accommodation in question is well maintained, this just requires the landlord to tolerate a couple of visits by the prospective tenant for inspection and approval.  Sometimes you do get those nose-in-the-air parties, who will not get any place for the next few years since they are looking for something close to Utopia. But mostly they are reasonable because the previous occupier has done the good job of explaining the pros and cons of the apartment/villa. Such a corporate lease is a blessing because it saves the landlord the draining experience of having to identify a new renter every 2-3 years. That exercise brings in a horde of brokers, who are circling the properties like vultures all the time and want to bring in somebody every two days to earn their brokerage, even when they know most of those people are not the right fit. Every client of theirs they usher in as if a presidential summit has been organized with you.  Then follow prolonged negotiations, which make one wonder if the party of the second part is buying out the entire apartment or villa complex in a multi billion dollar deal, rather than entering into a lease agreement for a single unit.  You heave a few long sighs of relief when the deal is done, you see the broker's back and the new tenant arrives.

Every new tenant, especially expatriate - even from Vietnam or Mexico,  pretends that the landlord is a poor serf waiting to do his bidding and he is royalty, who can demand and get what he wants.  One will ask you to relocate the guest bathroom or the study room to a location of his preference, which is always a no-brainer.  Another will ask for supply all the furniture etc for the whole apartment, because he did not ship anything from his country, knowing the short term nature of his assignment. Fair enough. But, the landlord has to be wary of this because if he makes the mistake of buying all the required items for this tenant, he is likely to be doomed, when the lease expires and the next kingly tenant walks in. This one will probably say he does not need any furniture since he has brought his own and the landlord has to take out all the timber already there.  The latter will now have to scurry around to either store the extra furniture and pay storage charges for the near future at least or sell the whole stuff and incur a loss.  One gets wiser with experience and bluntly declines any initial request for additional stuff and asks the tenant to rent the required items himself.  There is a likelihood that the deal falls through because of this, sometimes.  

The landlord should know better than to gleefully imagine that now that the tenant has moved in, he can be relaxed.  What he does not realise is that it was not the end, but rather the beginning of a string of issues which pop up with alarming regularity during the lease period,  which need resolutions forthwith. Even if some door creaks a bit, these foreigner tenants feign lack of understanding about local support and come after you.  This despite the lease clearly indicating that all ongoing maintenance should be the responsibility of the tenant.  Once or twice the landlord can help initially but should firmly put his foot down sooner or later and point the tenant towards the maintenance team in place, for future help.  Otherwise every second week he gets woken up in the middle of the night for one reason or the other, just because the tenant has chronic insomnia. 

One tenant called me at 2 am and said he is unable to sleep because the airconditioning had conked off. When told that he should contact the AC support team in the morning, he innocently queried how he was supposed to sleep without airconiditioning.  When told that there were 3 other rooms with working ACs where he can go, he seemed surprised!!  By some strange coincidence, those tenants who tend to be overly fussy and complaining non-stop seem to get all the hitherto-unknown problems cropping up during their stay.  An electrical burn-out, a gas leak, water seepage, being locked out of the apartment due to loss of keys -- all these are par for the course and the landlord should be on his toes to provide relief in a jiffy as the household comes to a standstill with the members standing bemused, wringing their hands in despair.      

Some belligerent tenants are bent upon a course of non-coperation with the apartment's association, cutting corners or blatanly violating rules all the time.  Such ongoing friction causes headaches for the landlords long after these tenants vacate and vanish.  One such tenant persistenly had raucous parties well into the night, with loud music, punctuated with high-decibel shrieks at least twice a month.  He just refused to back down, even when association members warned him repeatedly.  He almost demanded this as his right, saying in him home-country he did not face any problem.  Finally the landlord got a notice and had to seek the intervention of the company to stop the orgies and calm the neighbours down. 

Finally when the tenant leaves, one more test awaits the landlord.  The lease provides for the tenant to put everything back in the same condition as it was when first taken over, except for normal wear and tear.  One tenant's kids had damaged most of the walls by using non-erasable markers to sketch all kindds of pictures.  Even the ceilings had some spray paint in many places.  When told that some repainnting had to be done and the costs will have to be paid by the tenant, he revolted.  His point was that with small kids in the house, all these should be considered normal wear and tear!! Nice try. He held back the keys even after the company agreed to settle everything and close the deal.  It took a lot of persuasion by the company and the broker before the matter was resolved. Another tenant tried to say that all broken appliances were given to him in the same pitiable condition, so he would not pay up.  With every such experience, the landlord gets aged faster.

The perennial dilemma is this - does the measly compensation of 3% of yield on the capital as rental good enough for the landlord to take all this angst in his stride??  But as usual, my dear wife has the answer and the last word.  What is the alternative, she asks.  Do we want to keep the apartment locked up for years together?  Then the cost of restoration due to disrepair and non-maintenance will be much higher with zero returns in the meantime,  she correctly points out.  So, for one more time, in such an august presence, I just shut up as is customary and prepare for another re-run!