Our landlord lives downstairs from us, and we have two preschoolers. He is a saint.
Are they actually the landlord or just an onsite manager? I've seen both, but the onsite manager has been much more common in my experience
Actually the landlord. He hires a separate management company that we deal with for maintenance, but when they've messed up we've dealt with him directly. It's a small building - just 4 units. (This is in Japan)
Japan is a special case where housing is largely a depreciating asset and small-time landlording isn’t a very profitable business. Small-time landlords in Japan couldn’t collude to screw over renters like they did in the US with RealPage even if they wanted to. There are also strong renter protections relative to the US, including fairly limited ability (by law) to raise rents on existing tenants without justification.
I wonder what the ratio of tenant landlords to corporate rentseekers is?
I don't have hard figures on this but I've been in the sphere long enough to gather some knowledge.. in NYC there are a few orders of magnitude more apartments owned by corporate rentseekers than there are tenant-landlords, but there are a few orders of magnitude again between the number of tenant-landlords greater than the number of corporate rentseekers.
One pays deadweight loss, the other receives deadweight loss. If they are literal neighbors, they are not metaphorical neighbors.