27 Dec What’s a Slumlord?

There is no question about the existence of Tenants who take advantage of Landlords and other property owners for their own personal gain. More often than not what we tend to see are Tenants who like to demonize real estate investors as greedy, uncaring slumlords. These types of property owners absolutely do exist, but the proliferation of these slumlords has been incredibly exasperated by the slum-tenant who love using plausible deniability as a reason for not paying their rent. We run into tenants who claim they are not or have not been paying their rent because there is something small or something wrong with the property, in many cases the tenants themselves are the ones who created the problem in the first place. What it all comes down to in many cases however is that the tenant cannot pay their rent or has simply not prioritized their rent payment.

We all go through hard times. When I was growing up, my family was evicted numerous times and many of those times, even though I was young, I knew it was our fault. Sometimes it was not our fault that we could not afford the rent, but even so we signed a lease, and it was our family’s obligation to continue to pay the rent. To what extent is a landlord or property owner supposed to grant X amount of charity and free rent to a tenant? The simple answer is they shouldn’t grant anything. Rental properties are an investment, we’re not in the friend making industry, we’re not here to provide charity. We worked to acquire what we have and we’re here to run a business and many of our clients have big hearts and that’s why they hire us. Our business is a business, it does not have a heart, just a brain.

Back to the topic of Slumlords, a slumlord is someone who truly takes advantage of their tenants, and it honestly boils down to just not taking care of the property where the tenant resides. Becoming a slumlord is sometimes a choice, when a property owner has enough recurring income to upkeep a property but has poor money management and pockets it all instead of making repairs, but it can also come by accident. Properties that perform poorly for a set period of time can become a problem when there are major repairs needed, most furnace replacements cost between $5,000-$8,000, roofs range from $10,000-$15,000 on average and so on. With many investors only earning $200-$400/month on their investment, one repair can wipe out an entire years’ worth of income.

Investing in rental properties, especially in the Syracuse market can be very lucrative, you can receive excellent returns, but you have to invest with the goal of bringing the area up. Do not buy a property in Syracuse that has many problems with no intent on making repairs. We will not manage properties where the property owner is not willing to make the investment to bring the property up to code compliance. We will work with our clients to make these repairs as smoothly and as headache free as possible, but we do not work with Slumlords.