[zeroonetwothree]

There’s also a psychological benefit of not having to worry about most problems. Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix. And so on. You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

And while I agree that it’s nice to customize things to your preferences, this has a downside in that it’s easy to get carried away and overspend. Might as well get the nicer finishes when you are remodeling, right? After all you’re paying so much for labor anyway. And you can’t have just your kitchen nice, now you need to upgrade the flooring in the whole house. And soon your small $30k improvement is $150k

[waffleiron]

> Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix

Most landlords I've dealt with are an absolute pain to deal with when something breaks. It's often not that easy, maybe in high-cost / luxury rentals. Arguing over what is normal wear-and-tear, while knowing you cannot afford decent legal advice, and you also can't pay for the "unexpected repair" is just as bad.

> And you can’t have just your kitchen nice, now you need to upgrade the flooring

Yes you can. There is no need to have everything perfect...

Edit:

> You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

If this was even close to coming even with the added cost on rent, no one would be a landlord. It's obviously a lot less than rental overhead. So people could just set that aside (or get insurance).

[saalweachter]

I've dealt with two kinds of landlords.

The good one(s) acted like their job was providing the service of housing. They had a budget and paid themselves a salary, and if there was money left in the repair budget at the end of the year they used it for improvements to the properties.

The bad ones treated it as an investment. My rent money went into their own pocket, and any expenses -- repairs, taxes, mortgage payments -- had to come out of their own pockets, and they did their best to not pay for any of them.

[nerdralph]

My wife and I have a few rental properties that I manage. They are investments, chosen based on return on investment and equity (ROI/ROE). Maintenance costs were factored into those calculations. We take care of repairs not because our job is "providing the service of housing", but because we are honest and would not sign a lease (or any contract) in bad faith. When the lease says the property includes appliances, then we ensure broken appliances are fixed or replaced promptly. If/when we can't make a reasonable ROE on a rental property, we don't cut corners to squeeze a bit more profit out of it, we sell it and invest the money elsewhere.

[zamadatix]

Sounds like two different ways of saying the same thing. Each is planning on certain expected return which will have allocated costs for maintenance accounted for as part of the agreement to provide the housing service (which is what the contract will describe in detail).

[jjice]

I've found that it's pretty much split between if I have a landlord that's just a guy with a few houses vs a property management company. When I lived in a complex (cheaper than my current rent by a mile because it was in NC), maintenance would be over in a matter of hours. When I've had a single guy, it's often days (unless it's a truly urgent issue).

I'm under a guy that just manages 20 or so doors now and he's a good dude, but I have to wait a longer time, generally, like when my heat wasn't working at the beginning of the winter and his plumber had the flu. Luckily it wasn't bad weather yet, but I definitely felt the potential for strain.

[cucumber3732842]

There's an uncanny valley between "I own three properties in a 1mi radius and live in one of the units and will swing by after work" and "the company has fulltime maintenance employees" where maintenance is the worst.

[HDBaseT]

You hit the nail right on the head.

As a renter, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Contacting your landlord to get something resolved is a nightmare. Majority of the the time they will refuse to cover it and refuse to send someone out.

Majority of the time they will also not let someone come fix it, without approval, because you aren't not allowed to make modifications to someones property.

We had a fan which died upstairs in a bedroom. The downstairs had an aircon although it was a living room. We requested the fan get replaced multiple times, 13 months late (two different rent increases later) the fan was still not replaced. A third price increase without the fan being replaced and we moved.

[JuniperMesos]

> There’s also a psychological benefit of not having to worry about most problems. Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix. And so on. You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

I've never understood why people argue that the model of appealing to a landlord to perform house work is psychologically superior to doing that same work yourself. As a tenant, you have an inherently somewhat adversarial relationship with your landlord - they want to minimize costs, and they aren't the ones directly living with the household problem. You are living in their property and are bound to what they replace or repair, and how, and to some degree on what schedule.

Not being able to make my own decisions about what constitutes a household problem and what should be done about it is the single biggest annoyance of renting for me. It's the main reason I would like to live in an owned home; and this intangible facet of living is more important to me than any financial argument about the costs of renting vs owning.

[c0nsumer]

You illustrate this nicely.

Just something as simple as "that ceiling fan doesn't work so well, and squeaks once in a while when on high" can easily be remedied yourself when owning the house by just going buying and installing a new ceiling fan.

Regardless of how handy one is, with a landlord that's generally not allowed without permission, the landlord often won't install as nice of one as you might like, etc.

This goes for every fixture that's not part of the rental. Major appliances, flooring, even door knobs... Like if you suddenly want an electronic keypad on your deadbolt.

Of course, this flexibility has to be something you care about. Not everyone does, but for those of us that do...

[Mezzie]

If you live somewhere long enough and under a negligent enough landlord, you can just do a lot of those upgrades anyway and either take them with you when you leave or just chalk them up to practice for when you own a place.

I've lived in my current apartment for 9 years and I've never met the guy who owns it now (it was sold). I'm also not getting my deposit back, so that doesn't matter.

It's the big stuff that's annoying. Can't install A/C or an exhaust fan in the bathroom, for example, simply because I can't afford it. I'd totally feel comfortable upgrading the stove/fridge and tossing theirs or putting it in the basement. They're not going to find out until I move out anyway.

[somehnguy]

> They're not going to find out until I move out anyway.

Maybe. Probably, given what you've described. But you're still relying on an assumption and the behavior of someone else. It could be sold again tomorrow to an owner who has a real problem with those sorts of changes and it would be out of your control.

[paulcole]

> I've never understood why people argue that the model of appealing to a landlord to perform house work is psychologically superior to doing that same work yourself.

Because I have less than 0 interest in doing that work myself. If I have to email 5 days in a row to get something fixed, that is a cost I’ll happily pay.

I want to spend 0 of my time on home maintenance of any kind. I’d rather be reading a book, watching tv, shopping online, going out to eat, sitting quietly, etc.

It’s not particularly complicated, we just see the world in different ways.

[throw0101c]

> There’s also a psychological benefit of not having to worry about most problems. Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix. And so on. You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

"Rent is the most you'll pay for housing, but mortgage and property taxes is the least amount."

[thrance]

> There’s also a psychological benefit of not having to worry about most problems. Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix. And so on. You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

Not my experience, at all. All landlords I've had were lazy assholes who did the bare minimum, but never forgot to increase rent on the 1st of January, every single year.

Paying someone else for no other reason than to have the right to a roof is Middle Ages shit, that future generations will no doubt liken to serfdom.

[I_dream_of_Geni]

To be fair, there's piles of sh*tty renters too, who abuse the system and ruin the experience for everyone. If you have ever been a landlord, especially in certain market areas, it pays to be that "lazy asshole", otherwise you'll lose your shirt (and more). Ask me how I know....

[tstrimple]

I bought a house shortly before unexpectedly relocating to SoCal. It didn't make any sense to sell, so we rented it out while we were there. The renters never seemed like a problem. Payments kept coming in as expected. They moved out and we took the place back over and found out they had converted one of the bedrooms to an indoor pet bathroom. Literally let their dogs shit and piss all over the floor. I always got annoyed trying to find a rental that would accept pets because our children have always done far more "wear and tear" on the house than our pets have. But after that mess we were left with it makes a lot more sense.

[sokoloff]

Where should housing come from if not by paying someone for it (either by the month [renting] or for an eternity [buying])?

My uncle built his own house; it took him ages (and still hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the materials and land).

[hdgvhicv]

If you treat renting as a longer term hotel it’s fine. If you move to a city and want o know where to live you probably want somewhere short term for a year or two.

It’s when you are looking at long term living that there’s a problem.

[UncleMeat]

My experience is that getting a landlord to fix things is a nightmare. They say "oh I'll send someone over" and then when there is a no-show you have no idea what happened and its days of back and forth to get somebody out to fix things.

I don't think I have ever once had a positive "hey this is broken let me call the landlord and they'll fix it quickly" experience.

[FireBeyond]

> There’s also a psychological benefit of not having to worry about most problems. Sink broke? Call landlord to fix. Roof leaking? Call landlord to fix. And so on. You never have an unexpected $20k repair show up.

Hah. Or you get letters from the water utility about a suspected leak, you call the PM the landlord contracts with and (great blame diffusion) they "refuse" to authorize a plumber to come look, in just the right way so you can't take it into your own hands for months, meanwhile you're getting calls, not just letters now, and your water bill is $800/month that you still have to pay, but because the home still has water flowing to it it's not considered a habitability "must remediate" issue. Dealt with that one for months.

Or "appliances as-is". Dishwasher breaks. "As is, remember?" You pull out the broken dishwasher, install your own and then have to fight for your deposit back in small claims because the landlord withheld it because in his eyes "the home came with a dishwasher when you started the lease, it needs a dishwasher at the end of the lease" and somehow "as-is" means, to him, "tenant shall repair and replace".

Or when a shitty (hah) weird hybrid septic system fails (home goes to septic, but then to city sewer) and the owners have to pay $15K to fix it, they start denying and stalling on everything after that point because "we just HAD to pay thousands of dollars FOR YOU".

But sure, "call landlord to fix". "Never have to worry about most problems".

[rustystump]

I have lived/rented in many states and still rent. The overwhelming majority of landlords are cheap af. I had the ceiling collapse in an office due to clogged ac drain only to have it happen again because the land lord was too cheap to hire a professional contractor. The pro had the ac clog fixed in 15 minutes.

The current place has this stupid thing where the dishwasher is attached to a circuit that has ac on it so if you run both it flips. I have to flip the breaker everytime i use the dishwasher.

[tracerbulletx]

You can pretty much always finance a repair that size and amortize the expense so that it works out ok.

[smithza]

This is a personality difference. People who notice their surroundings and seek to improve them. People who are content with the way they are. People who are more type-A, DIY, etc. People who don't know the difference btwn a phillips vs flathead,etc.