My old boss's mother rented to the same voucher tenant for fourteen years

I left a job in logistics eight months ago to figure out how to do this and I've been collecting stories from anybody who'll talk to me. My old boss found out what I was up to and told me about his mother.

She owned one house. Bought it in the eighties, lived in it, moved to a condo, kept the house. Rented it to a woman with a voucher starting somewhere around 2009. That woman lived there fourteen years. Raised two kids in it. When she finally moved out it was because one of the kids bought a place and wanted her in it.

His mother is in her eighties now and he handles the house. He told me the thing he noticed going through her records was that the rent almost never moved. It went up a few times, small amounts, years apart. He thinks she left money on the table for most of a decade because she never asked for an increase and nobody made her.

But the house never sat empty. Fourteen years, one tenant, no marketing, no turn cost, and the bigger part of the check showed up the same week every month whether or not anything else in the world was working.

He asked me whether I thought she'd done well. I don't know enough to answer that. My guess is she made less than she could have and slept better than most landlords do. He said that sounded exactly like his mother.