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> Consider a $150 repair for your AC

These are precisely the examples I was cursing after I bought my house. They were the ones existing homeowners always talked about.

A $150 repair for the AC is nothing. The prospective homeowner needs to think about things like:

"Your roof is shot." The lowest bid is $15,000. Check is due before they leave your property.

"Your trees are dying." Cost of cutting them out and replacing them is $2000. When you give us the check, we'll start the job.

"Your water heater needs to be replaced." And what you learn is that it's a special type of gas water heater that costs $2500 and up. Payment is due before they leave your house.

On any of these, you call the landlord (or don't even need to in the case of the dying trees) and you don't think about it again.

Having experience with most of these types of issues, I think there might be a bit of a scarecrow here.

In particular, the remedy to each repair is presented as “replacement”. It is my experience with most landlords that they will not “replace” anything unless they 100% absolutely must. When a roof needs to be replaced that has tenants in it, a landlord will patch the roof to avoid replacement for as many years as they can (a roof replacement is a well known item that is inspected prior to purchase) - Like the landlord, the homeowner can elect to patch the roof. A landlord will repair a water heater or AC by any means necessary, not replace it.

As a tenant, you have no say in the repair process. The likely scenario is that the landlord will patch the roof 3 times during your lease and take weeks for each repair. Leaving you to deal with weeks of water running down your walls as you wait for the landlord. (this is known from rental experience)

As a homeowner, you might elect to patch the roof. You could pay in full for replacement. You could pay in monthly installments. You could also choose to install a Tesla solar roof instead. But I don’t think your options as a homeowner will be limited to “check is due in 2 weeks”.

> "Your roof is shot." The lowest bid is $15,000. Check is due before they leave your property.

When you buy the house, you should have had an idea on how much it costs, and saved for it. $15K over 30 years is nothing.

Also, of course this depends on where you live and how big your roof is, but for my house, $15K is overpriced. I recently got bids and while the numbers varied quite a bit, $11K was more typical. Of course, there are people who quote as high as $25K - learn to shop around.

And none of them wanted all the money up front.

> And what you learn is that it's a special type of gas water heater that costs $2500 and up.

I think $2500 is a fairly standard price.

One definitely needs to research these costs before buying! Especially for:

Roof

Garage doors

Water heater

Furnace

Central AC

Any pending yard work (like dying trees)

Any kind of code related work you may need to do (asbestos, old electric wiring, etc).

Move the decimal one place to the right if you're DIYing.

Most people are going to DIY 1/3 to 3/4 the stuff on that list depending on whether or not their checking account is fat enough to easily write the check in the first place.

Edit: move the decimal left.

> Move the decimal one place to the right if you're DIYing.

I’m not sure of this is a mistake or commentary on the cost of not doing it right the first time.

Meant to say left.

In my experience you can screw things up several times over before you come close to the cost of paying someone else.

Would not recommend if it's plumbing related. That's one of those things where a screw up could cost a lot more than calling a plumber in the first case.

Not to mention going days without water because no plumber is available.

Not an experience I want to repeat.

> Also worth noting that a home warranty program helps a lot with these things both for my landlord and for myself as a landlord.

Not the home warranty programs I've had, which seem to be focused on getting revenue via call-out fees and not doing a whole lot else. Even when the last one replaced an air handler because of a bad fan (seemed like they could have replaced the fan, but I dunno), and gave me a check to replace an oven with a bad control board (no replacement parts), the fact that everything took months to go through made the experience negative for me, even if it was a positive fiscally.

Oh yes. My HVAC system died before the recent PNW heatwave. Three days plus of 110F+. A week or so of ~100F either side, a week or so of ~90F either side.

Despite me being able to find a HVAC repair company able to come out the next day, warranty company said they would not reimburse anything because they were able to find a company in their network... that could come and see me in just under four WEEKS.

"Oh, I understand it's an emergency and that's very hot. This is our policy."

I canceled that call-out. And then had to remind them that that meant they should also refund the call-out fee.

>Whereas you can easily call and have it fixed within 5 hours if you owned it.

The caveat with these sorts of fixes is these service companies will sometimes upcharge a big fee for "emergency work" to have it fixed within 5 hours rather than in two weeks. I literally had water shooting out of my ceiling and the property manager admitted as much to me when I asked why the owner left me without water for days.

True, but at least you get to answer that question, instead of your landlord.

Honestly dealing with some of the contracts I've dealt with, it's not much better