[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.