Oh, yeah, my experience as a landlord makes me a fantastic tenant. Last place I rented before buying the current house, I was working on fixing the roof in my spare time - mostly because I really like to be fixing houses in my spare time anyway and, as we were in Puerto Rico, the roof was concrete and thus a really new and fun experience.
All it takes is just a teeny bit of responsibility. Landlording somehow filters out some of the people who really have none and drags them through your life.
I've heard similar horror stories from friends who rent places out, however it does cut both ways - for myself, despite going absolutely out of my way to be a good tenant, I have had landlords try to rip me off (several times), scream at me because I dared remind them that it'd been > 6 weeks since I'd asked them to look at the faulty gas boiler (!), etc.
I think some landlords need to learn to appreciate good tenants as well as to be wary of the bad ones.
Note: I don't mean to imply you, or even most landlords are like this, it's just that there are some out there and they need to learn how to behave decently just as such tenants do too...
Oh, absolutely. But remember - a lot of landlords aren't very good at it. God knows I wasn't. If they don't have a property manager, your boiler being out is just one more thing they have to remember, and can't, because they're just trying to make a little extra cash on a house they maybe can't sell - or somebody told them rental management is easy, when it's not. They may be working a regular job and simply can't get the focus for your issues. It sucks, but it happens a lot.
In situations like that, I usually send them a letter or call them, explaining that I know exactly what they're going through, and I'd be happy to arrange maintenance for them as long as they reimburse me. I've never failed to get a response of, "Oh God, could you please?"
Depends on the landlord, too. If you live in a low-rent building, they have a really high stress level for not a lot of return - it doesn't take much to set yourself apart from the jerks they normally deal with, though. Get on a friendly basis with them and it'll go a long way.
Once you've had a couple of the really bad tenants, I think it's very, very difficult to learn to see the good in people again as opposed to the enormous risk exposure.
You sound like a great landlord, to me it really comes down to whether they are actively acting maliciously, for example the landlords who screwed me out my deposit were clearly trying to steal the cash - one when I was at uni made up loads of costs despite us having spent a day cleaning, painting and getting the place spotless, another kept on promising to pay but then suddenly dropped all contact, in the end I had to threaten legal action (after a couple months).
> Once you've had a couple of the really bad tenants, I think it's very, very difficult to learn to see the good in people again as opposed to the enormous risk exposure.
Absolutely, I can understand that - sorry to hear you've experienced that. Seems unfortunately quite common. Who are these people?!!
Trust me, anybody who's rented to more than a couple of people has experienced it. Anybody I've talked to, anyway.
As to who these people are: it's a mixed bag. I keep wanting to write some kind of tl;dr screed here, but ... it's complicated.
I'll say this, though. I went to school with a guy whose dad was the manager for an American-owned automotive plant in Spain. They lived in a freaking mansion in Cadiz, although they were basically regular people from Cleveland or Akron or someplace. But he basically grew up a lot richer than me (and considered me bourgeois, but damn we were young and foolish).
He told me the story once about how he'd been depressed and visited a friend of his who was housesitting for their teacher at the American school there. I.e. another rich kid. So what this friend did to cheer him up, among other things, was to set up a target and throw knives at it. Except instead of knives, they destroyed every pair of scissors in the house and used the halves as throwing knives, you see. He laughed about how the teacher must have been perplexed about having no scissors when he got back from his trip.
I'm sure that he'd be mortified to know that I remember this story twenty years later, which is why I'm not naming names (yes, Mr. Google, I'm watching you!)
OK. So extrapolate that rich kid's behavior - and this was a good guy who I really liked - to our original post here. It's the same thing, just a lot more extreme. There are just people who think that kind of exploitation of the vulnerability of others is funny and fun, although I'm sure the vast majority grow out of it at some point.
It's kind of like sociopaths, I guess, as abused as that concept has gotten lately. I think there are those of us who would never have considered finding all the scissors in the house they were entrusted with, and tearing them in half for knife throwing. I'm one of those people. You probably are. And sadly, AirBNB is probably made up exclusively of that category of people. And probably the vast majority of users of AirBNB also fall into this category.
Now, one didn't. Honestly - I think the only way AirBNB is going to weather this is to have some serious, serious talks with an insurance provider and have some kind of blanket coverage they can extend to their hosts, perhaps with an additional fee - but they're not going to get through it with just being nice guys. Which arguably they are.
So that was really more than I intended to write. Sorry.
All it takes is just a teeny bit of responsibility. Landlording somehow filters out some of the people who really have none and drags them through your life.