Ever accidentally become what you thought you hated? I'm talking about moral hazard in econ.

[Dominus]

I've read most of what you have posted in years gone by about being a landlord. I would never think of you as other than as a very responsible, conscientious owner/landlord. I was also not accusing you of price gouging. I was just answering your question with a question since I've often learned more about myself when someone does that to me. In the future, I would err on the side of initially asking more rent and security before ever showing the property. Market rate if often deceiving. You can always lower the amount if it doesn't rent, but to me that smacks of looking desperate and is something I have always tried to avoid. My experience has also been that the people most likely to be able to afford the property are not always the best tenants and it doesn't mean they are any more likely to pay on time. Many people live paycheck to paycheck no matter how much they make. Credit checks also don't always reflect everything about the person. There are many benefits and risks in being owner/landlords.

Even though I do background and credit check on all my potentials, I don't base my decision on just these things. I talk to them one on one. So far, the only problematic tenants I have are the ones I inherited with the properties when I bought them. It is not a coincidence that 2 of my tenants used their recent stimulus checks to pay a whole month ahead. It is not a coincidence that when one of my tenants got covid-19 and was in ICU for weeks, she asked her mom to pay rent on time despite the fact that I told her to not worry about it for now.

On the other hand, the tenants I inherited when I bought those properties have been hit or miss. Going through eviction with one right now. The shutdown been delaying it for months.

With all the hating of landlords going around, nobody is thinking about what kind of risks we have to take. The tenant I'm evicting owes us thousands. They won't even answer the door. They got all kinds of violations (garbage collecting in yard, inoperable cars in driveway, etc.) and is getting a fine, which I have to pay for. I spoke with the commissioner office today. I explained to them that legally there is nothing I can do right now, that they won't even answer the door to me. I essentially got "too bad" response from the commissioner.

My point is while there is an eviction moratorium in place, nobody is giving landlords a break. Banks still want those mortgage payments. Landlords still have to pay fines for code violations even though there is nothing we can do about it right now. We are weathering this crisis because I chose enough good tenants to offset the bad ones I got from previous landlords and we own most of our buildings outright so no mortgage payments. Most other landlords are not doing that well.

Oh yeah, and we are not getting any relief whatsoever from the stimulus package. Most of the relief funds for small businesses went to billionaires.

One question, would you even sell a property to a tenant?

Hell, no. Too much sentimental values in these properties. They're MY BABIES.

Business wise, they will make me a lot more money in the long run. It goes back to this question: would you rather have $100 now or $5/day for the next 5 years?

One property I got at a tax auction for $15K. Put about $2000 into it. It is now making me $1200/month. I can probably sell it for $100K or so. But I'm 36 now. Over the next 30 years I can get about $400K from this one property (assuming rental rate stays at $1200/mo which I doubt). Why would I part with it?

But yeah, the most important reason I would have a hard time parting with these properties is I worked way too hard to raise them from the dead. I mean what I said. About half of our properties were boarded up and abandoned before we got to them. I spent a lot of time, energy, and labor bringing them back to life. I feel a special connection to these houses.