Landlords And Tenants

Landlords and tenants are sometimes at odds. Other times landlords and tenants are very close friends. I was a tenant for different landlords over a period of twelve years and I have had many different landlord and tenant relationships. I have found that the ideal relationship between landlords and tenants is friendly but distant and relaxed but professional. This is a very difficult balance to maintain, especially when dealing with a person’s housing.

My first landlord was a duo. The two men invested in a house less than a mile away from my college campus and they offered to rent it out to five students. They were looking for female students because they did a lot of work on the house and had visions of Animal House in their heads when it came to college boys.

Our landlord and tenant relationship was ideal because we took pride in our house and they were at ease with having girls living in the home. We did have our share of parties, but many things are kept secret between landlords and tenants.

My roommates and I enjoyed our stay and we each went our separate ways. To our surprise, the landlords were not happy with the way we left the home. They had expected it to be professionally cleaned before we left. They even included this in the lease but none of us read the lease very closely.

This is a classic example of the importance of communication between landlords and tenants. If we had known that the home was supposed to be professionally cleaned, we would have had someone do the work. As it turned out, the deduction from our security deposits amounted to the cost of hiring a professional cleaner to polish the house. It balanced out in the end, but it did cause a rift in the relationship between the landlords and tenants.

My husband and I rented from a homeowner for five years. We married and had a child and it was time to move on. Landlords and tenants usually see each other frequently, but we almost never saw our landlord and this was good. He gave us privacy and he only contacted us when he thought something needed to be done to improve our apartment.

This landlord and tenant relationship was so distant that he did not even know that I had a baby. He was pleasantly surprised and wished us well. Landlords and tenants should have a distantly friendly relationship like this. In the end, we found that he put our security deposit in an interest bearing account. He gave us the security deposit back with interest. When it comes to landlords and tenants, this relationship was the best in my experience.