Sometimes I think the slum lords get it right. They buy the buildings cheap, pack in the tenants, collect as much rent as possible, and let the building fall apart until its time to abandon it and move on. Landlording is easy if you don’t bother to reinvest in the property. Sink not draining? Tough. Water heater acting “funny”? Who cares. Driveway collapsing? So what. By the time someone gets around to making them fix it, the building will be too far gone to save anyway and they’ll be on to the next deal. Yeah, sometimes I think the ones who just let the place fall in on itself have the right idea. Buying the property is the easy part. It’s the maintenance that’s going to kill you in the long run.
Some day, almost anyone who’s ever owned a home ponders the thought of being a landlord. Someone else is paying you to live in your place. Sounds like a license to make money, right? Well, let me disabuse anyone out there thinking about doing it of that notion. A rental property is pretty much a black hole into which you’re going to throw a never-ending stream of money. It’s like having a boat without the perk of, you know, actually having a boat. It’s going to start with an easy sounding $500 repair to the driveway, which will morph into needing to remove half of the driveway, which then becomes digging up the a trench across driveway and replacing a section of sewer pipe, and ultimately becomes a project remove the entire driveway, trenching deep enough to meet code (since the original builder didn’t bother with that), replace the entire sewer line from the house to the street, and then lay down an entirely new driveway over the freshly fixed and sparkling new swear line. By the time it’s done, your $500 “it’ll only take a few days” repair job will turn into a month long $7000 fiasco involving two city inspections, several pieces of heavy equipment, and a squad of bonded and insured union tradesmen. And you’ll get the joy of watching it all happen from 1000 miles away and hoping that someone down there actually has half an effing clue what’s going on.
So yeah, when you’re seized by the idea of being a landlord, save yourself the time and trouble and just go to the bank, take out a couple of thousand dollars, and set it on fire right there in the parking lot. You’ll have just as much to show for your troubles.
