Years ago, sitting in my 500 square foot, two-bedroom flat that my friend and I paid $2,000 [£1,480] per month to rent in downtown New York, I looked around. The kitchen was a hallway, the “living room” was just a corner, cabinets were falling apart, taps leaked and there was a lingering smell of unknown origin that permeated every room.
Inspecting the dilapidated ruin around me that I worked 10 hours a day to pay for, it struck me that being a landlord was a job that gave you money for nothing.
Throughout my twenties, I went from one mouldy box to another, spending half my salary for the pleasure of living in squalor. When things broke they were rarely fixed, and at my price point it was always shocking to find a kitchen or bathroom that had been installed before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Through all my renting years, I’ve never met any of the landlords of any of the properties I’ve lived in. They were always faceless entities hiding behind generic emails or office assistants. Getting them to fix anything was like trying to get a sugar-fuelled child to bed; a tiring uphill battle with no end in sight.
Sometimes a handyman would stop by, but only in matters of extreme emergency. I once lived through a hurricane and no one ever checked in to confirm that there hadn’t been a flood or that the windows weren’t hanging from a nearby tree. And of course, for their tireless work doing essentially nothing there were always the inevitable annual rent hikes every year, and the heart attack of moving out; that one errant nick to the wall might wipe out an entire four-figure deposit.
So, when I met my husband and the topic of his side gig as a landlord came up, I was at first scared that I was now in cahoots with the devil. What kind of murky morals did this man have? How many tenants did he have cooped up in sunless rooms with wallpaper flopping from the walls?
My righteous liberal outrage, however, soon gave way to lofty dreams of luxury upon finding out that he owned an array of houses. 10 houses. Now, visions of lobster lunches and yacht weekends sped through my mind as I pictured the extravagance awaiting me when I became the partner of a landlord; lady of the land. But alas, I was wrong on both counts.
In the seven years since I met him, I’ve learned that he is not in fact evil and that his (begrudging) tenure as a landlord has brought him far more pain than champagne.
My husband inherited the houses when his mother died in 2012, and they were the result of a long journey of scrimping and saving in an effort to develop a portfolio of properties. Her hope, ultimately, was to pass them on to her sons, and for the houses to create a financial safety net for them and their families.
When she had a stroke in 2010, my husband took over their management. He remembers leaping into action in her hospital room, juggling caring for his mother with calls from agents bearing bad news about leaks and broken appliances. Unlike the landlords I’d previously encountered, my husband panics whenever he hears of a problem with his houses, becoming immediately obsessed with resolving it lest the sheer knowledge of their existence jolt him awake at 2am.
In his time as a landlord, he’s dealt with hoarders, loft squatters and had a tenant who lied about breast cancer and left the house with £11,000 in unpaid rent. He’s had new tenants arrive and complain about a single errant grain of rice, only later to leave the house in total disarray.
One tenant put a boot through a ceiling, another left a piece of cardboard adhered to the floor after urinating on it. Which is all to say that he’s seen his fair share of weird and wild things.
Far from raking it in, any income my husband brings in stays locked within a bank account for his properties in case of emergency, as one leak, or minor disaster can easily empty the account. About £600 per month from rental income is put towards nursery costs for our children, but the rest of it remains ensconced away in a bank, waiting for something to go wrong.
And if there isn’t a drama (there usually is), then the money put aside goes towards taxes on his properties – which in a good year is low (if there’s been enough repairs to obliterate any income).
While I understand that some landlords are in the financially enviable position of owning several houses (there are, of course, many people who never even get to own one); I’ve come to realise that they often don’t live the extravagant lifestyle I once believed them to.
There is, of course, a huge variety out there when it comes to landlords; rich ones, poor ones, attentive ones, neglectful ones – but for the ones, like my husband, that try to do the job well, it’s a lot of work to navigate the red tape, evolving regulations and unending repairs. And with the rising costs of labour and materials to do any kind of improvements, the monetary incentive to manage properties is far less attractive than it once was.
Over the years, my husband’s started selling off the houses, feeling a wave of relief once each sale is completed. Between the stress of managing them and the relatively small return he makes, the properties have become an emotional and financial drain – rendering them too much hassle to keep.
There’s always a window sill to paint, gutter to clean, light to fix, or suspicious smell to investigate – and when my husband gets off the phone with an estate agent, tenant, handyman, or builder, he usually exhales deeply as the light behind his eyes softly dims.
Since I met him, he’s sold all but one house, keeping the least problematic one that helps with nursery costs. And while I still bear some grudges against my old landlords, I now have a bit of sympathy for them. Not much mind you, because they didn’t ever fix anything; but I’m sure they still had their own fair share of headaches.