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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

Being generous with your ~6 number to be either 5 or 7 houses you have either 7.8-11 people per unit?

That's slumlord territory and not any morally better than corporate landlords unless your average unit size is a 4 bed/2 bath.

Also there is zero world where you have 6 houses, 50+ people and can call yourself a small time landlord. That's being able to live entirely off of your rental income and a full time landlord. You could maybe, _maybe_ get away with describing yourself as a medium time landlord.

Small time is living in a 3 floor house and renting the other 2 floors, or owning 1 other home to rent.

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I'm sure OP meant 6 houses with several units in it each, not 7-11 people per house. Otherwise the distinction between house and unit doesn't make sense.

This is a small time landlord. Large landlords have easily over 10000 units, and he is one half of a percent of that.

I hope he is able to live off the rental income. It's a big job to manage 55 units and keep everything in shape and administratively going, deal with turnover and so on.

nah, having 6 buildings(not houses, if were being precise with terminology here) with multiple units in each, is not a small time landlord. If you can live entirely off the rental income then you are a full time landlord and can at best claim that you aren't a large corporate landlord, but you don't get to invoke the idea that you are some sort of mom and pop situation renting out a spare unit, which is what people assume when you say "small time landlord"

I didn't invoke a "mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit" idea, that's your own that you're projecting on my comment.

I did say that they are a small landlord, and I stand by it given that a large landlord is several orders of magnitude larger than them. If in your world that's only a label you want to give someone renting out a single spare unit, then so be it. I disagree.

> mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit

> small landlord

Those are effectively synonymous to me. The line in the sand that definitively makes you not a small time landlord is if you earn enough from rental income after expenses to make as much as the average job's income.

If you disagree I will need you to define what "small time landlord" means to you then so we can figure out the gap in our understanding.

"Small" is a word indicating that quantitatively relative to other things, it is less, i.e. Very Small < Small < Medium < Large < Very Large.

According to [1] (Doorloop, 2026), Greystar manages 823,581 units as the largest landlord. The 10th largest landlord is WinnCompanies with 120,855 units. These are "very large" to me. If we make a generous curve then a large landlord has 10% of those units, so somewhere in the 10,000 unit range, a medium landlord 10% of that or 1,000 units, a small landlord 10% of that or 100 units, and a very small landlord has the last interval of 1-10 units. Hence, 55 units is somewhere between very small and small.

[1] https://www.doorloop.com/blog/largest-property-management-co...

I gave my definition for what a small time landlord is in the comment you replied to.

You can disagree with that definition but don’t pretend like I didn’t give one and then explain to me what my beliefs should be.

I'm the OP—just chiming in, I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE. Yes what I am is not analogous to someone renting out a few extra rooms. I just think my experience is analogous to that of a small time landlord in that I know each tenant very well and we have good relationships—and I manually handle each part of their tenant experience. To add more detail, I share a bedroom in a 25 bedroom house that I own, which accounts for a bit more than half of my tenants.

> I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE

there is a large gap between "can live off of"(my words) and "a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE"(your words). If you're making more than the median household income which based on the fed numbers is ~84k/yr[1] you've crossed the line past small time landlord. You may be making less than that, but I am going to be surprised if you are with ~55 tenants.

[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.

Sorry, I meant I live in a bedroom in the 25 br house. Its not a particularly nice or well-built house; it's a frat house near the UW campus in Seattle. As a matter of fact, I live in the basement in the smallest room in the house. I am not a fancy person and don't need anything more than the basic necessities to remain content, and I like the neighborhood here.

Now, where could the world’s tiniest violin be? Garfield!

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