A tenant's nine years of self-repair notes is a case study in what long tenancy is actually worth

The pencil is what gets me. He was not building a case against the owner, he was keeping his own records because that is what he had always done. Take a tenant in a four unit who repaints his own kitchen twice in six years and mentions it afterward, casually, like it was weather. Later the landlord finds he also replaced the closet doors with better ones and never adjusted the rent either. Same reason as this case probably: the account was boring and boring is exactly what most owners want.

Is it normal for a tenant to just do repairs themselves and not tell the landlord? I've been reading leases all month and most of them say the tenant has to report and not fix. Was he technically breaking the lease the whole time or is that a thing everyone just lets slide?

Juniper, most leases say that, and most tenants who fix a flapper aren't thinking about the lease. There's a difference between a flapper and someone rewiring an outlet, and thicket's guy seems to have known where that line was.

Thicket, nine years at 1,150 while the market moved to 1,475 is roughly 3,900 a year you left on the table at the end. I'd still have made the same call. A tenant who caulks his own tub three times is not a tenant you go poking at in March.

This pattern shows up on the property management side maybe twice a year. The one that worries most isn't the flapper, it's the tenant who gets on a ladder for the gutter. A fall off that ladder turns a warm conversation in the driveway into a cold one with an insurance carrier. That doesn't make him a bad tenant. It makes him the kind of tenant worth an actual conversation with about what to call in.

None of this shows up anywhere in a rent roll. Nine years of stable occupancy and low maintenance spend on the P&L, and the reason is one tenant's habits, which walk out the door with him. That's a weirdly fragile thing to be underwriting on.

Sable, that pattern shows up across most small residential portfolios. The maintenance history a buyer is shown is really a history of who lived there, not a history of the building itself.

Two pages front and back in pencil. I'd have framed it.

In a lot of markets this describes half the tenant pool. People who have owned before, lost the house or sold it, know how a hot water heater works and would rather handle it themselves than wait two days for someone with a van. The flip side is the tenants who think they know and do not. One seller once described a tenant who fixed a leaking supply line with a bike inner tube and a hose clamp, and it held for four years, which is the part worth sitting with.

Hollow, the inner tube case is a real one, and it turns up more than people expect. The owner usually has no idea it's there, and the tenant is usually proud of it. Thicket, a number like 6,400 for a turn after nine years of tenancy is honest, not alarming. That's years of small deferrals landing at once because nobody was walking the house regularly. Not a criticism of a long term tenant who earned that trust, just a reminder that the bill eventually comes due either way.

Worth reading the lease again. Most residential forms have a clause making the tenant responsible for damage from unauthorized repairs, and a separate one about alterations. There may also be a habitability provision that a landlord can't sign away, and how far that goes depends on the state, so an attorney there is the right person to ask. None of which matters here. What matters is the day one of these repairs goes in wrong and the subfloor rots for two years before anyone notices.

This is the version of the business worth aiming for. One house, one tenant, nine years, four phone calls. A 6,400 dollar turn at the end of that stretch isn't much to weigh against the alternative.

That's where the useful question sits, though it's worth working out how anyone would know in advance they were getting a tenant like that. Did anything in the original screening signal it, or was he just an ordinary application that turned out to be that reliable?

The coffee can is the part that will stay with me. He'd been carrying that debt in his head for four years over a water heater that was never his.

The customers who keep receipts in a rubber band are a specific generation, and they are aging out. Worth appreciating them while they are still around.

Running the numbers as given. Nine years, call the rent gap an average of 200 a month over the back half, that is somewhere around 12k of foregone rent, plus 1,900 of parts that would otherwise have been paid by the owner. Against that there was no vacancy, no turn costs, and no leasing fee for nine years. At a 1,150 rent, one 45 day vacancy and a light turn runs close to 3,500 all in, and a nine year hold like this would typically see two or three of those. So it lands closer to even than the 1,475 comparison suggests. Still a net negative, but the size of the miss depends entirely on how much value gets placed on never once thinking about that address.

Sextant, that's the calculation, and I'd add the thing you can't line item, which is that the guy's habits kept small problems from compounding for most of that stretch. The tub is the counterexample. He caulked it three times because he didn't want to bother anyone and by the time thicket saw it the answer was a subfloor.

I'd want that legal pad in the file for the next house I buy. Ask the seller if the outgoing tenant left anything. Most say no. Once in a while somebody hands you nine years of history in pencil.