“If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you
owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.”
(John Paul Getty)
“I love payin’ rent when the rent is due…”
(from “Dear Mama” by 2Pac)
I remember years ago when I was coming out of college and my
first job was in New York City (NYC). A
friend of mine had an extra bedroom in the Lower East Side of Manhattan that I
was able to rent. I was about to become
a “real” New Yorker and ride the subway into work every day. It was an exciting time!
But, truthfully, it was also a scary time. I grew up in NJ watching television shows (NYPD
Blue and Law & Order) and the news channels depicting rough city
life. I rarely went into NYC as a youth
and wasn’t really comfortable with life out of the suburbs. When I did go into NYC, there were homeless
people begging for money, people urinating openly in the alleys, and throw up
on the pavement. The subways were dirty
and crowded and everything was so expensive.
I was lost when I ventured out of the streets and avenues in the lower
area of Manhattan and would ride the subways going the wrong way (Uptown? Downtown?).
The whole environment was disconcerting.
However, when I started living in NYC and settling in, it
took me a few weeks to realize that the people there were actually not scary. Now some were definitely strange, but most non-tourists
were just like me. Every day, they were
just trying to get to and from work and enjoy the time they had off when we
weren’t working. Very few were trying to
cause trouble or be threatening; they were just trying to make it.
From a rental home perspective, there seems to be a
parallel from “scary New Yorkers” to “scary tenants”. The news is rife with tales of woe deriving
from revolutionarily, disruptive tenants.
Tenants that destroy a rental house, break all the windows, and don’t
pay for six months. Or those that
professionally squat in a rental home, live there rent-free for 2 years, and
brazenly berate the owners when they stop by the house they own. Crazy stuff.
In my experience, most tenants are agreeable people who pay
their rent regularly. And the late
paying tenants who were on the brink of eviction? Most were not scary or even trying to be
scary. They actually wanted to pay. Some lost jobs. Some tenants made poor choices and were
irresponsible. But very few were maliciously
trying to swindle the owner. At the end,
almost all were trying to do their best to make things work- and sometimes they
couldn’t pull it off. Life is a tough
teacher sometimes.
Eviction is tough.
Really, it is a game of losers, played by losers. The tenant loses out on their home, feeling
of security, and usually most of their personal belongings. The owner loses a lot of money: marketing,
repair, and legal costs, as well as the incoming rent. The property manager
looks bad and may lose his job. No one
is winning.
Leases are a partnership.
The owner fixes major things and pays the macro property bills. The tenant lives there, pays rent, and takes
care of the micro bills and fixes. And
they should live happily ever after (or until the lease is up and one side
decides to end it).
It can be scary when the partnership starts to break down. The best solution is to do everything
possible to make it work. The
tenant-landlord relationship is contractually intertwined. If the tenant has a problem, the landlord
also has a problem. If the tenant loses,
the landlord typically loses.
Smart landlords view tenants as such and and try to
(cautiously) do what they can to keep them in the house (payment plans,
extensions, etc.). Or, if that’s not
possible, they work with the tenants to create a solution to offboard them as respectfully
as possible.
(Most) tenants are not scary! They are like us or any regular New Yorker;
they’re just trying to make it.
Happy Landlording!
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