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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I found a great apartment to rent. It was spacious, quiet location, reasonable rent. We were happy for a few years.

Then the owners sold the complex, and the new owners set out to remodel everything, very much against our wishes. Construction crews started entering our apartment. They came in while we were out, laying down plastic sheets and moving our furniture around. They sometimes came in while I was sleeping, and while I was getting dressed. It was humiliating: I felt stripped of my privacy and dignity.

Buying allows you to control your property, but more significant to me is what renters must endure: arbitrary changes to their home, allowing unfamiliar men to enter their homes uninvited, etc. As a homeowner, nobody enters my home uninvited, unless they have a search warrant!

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I am a renter as well but we have pretty strict rental agreement regarding these kinds of things. The owner is not even allowed to enter the property without my prior permission or a certain amount of notice.

When you are paying for someone else's house, please do not be afraid to protect yourself with a proper, binding rental-agreement/contract.

Edit: I live in Canada incase that makes a difference.

> but renters must submit to arbitrary changes, allow men to enter their homes uninvited

Before buying our home, my wife and I rented and had a horrible time with our property manager.

The climax was coming home on a chilly friday night in November with NO WINDOWS in our bedroom and nice little note stating: "Be back on Monday".

The painters were supposed to paint the trim and windows and decided take them out to paint them but not to replace them for the entire weekend.

> Buying allows you to control your property

Amen

> They sometimes came in while I was sleeping, and while I was getting dressed.

Your country (which country is it?) seems to have very substandard legislation in these matters, if such intruding is not illegal.

Which country was this in? I find it incredible...is it everywhere like this?

Certainly in most (all) of Europe (even in places with relatively weak, by European standards, tenancy agreements like the UK!) nobody except the tenant can enter the property unless advance notice is given or in case of emergency (e.g., if a pipe bursts, the landlord is entitled to repair it without having to give advance notice).

If you are in the states and are not in a place with an extremely well established rental market run by professional landlords, it is probably like that.

Of course, most places require that landlords give the tenant some amount of notice before entering the home (generally a day or so), but taping a notice to the renter's door that said "remodeling starts tomorrow and will last a month" would probably cover that.

Some states have renter's law that says something like "if your rental is unusable because of construction or damage or what have you" that you can seek "equivalent premises at the market rate" and bill your landlord, but I suspect if you do that you'd better start shopping for a new place to live and limbering up your small claims court documentation.

//edit

The bottom line in the states is that you probably have decent rental protection but will have to sue the guy you are buying a roof from if they don't voluntarily play nice.

This was in the USA, where the law states that landlords and their hired contractors may enter during "reasonable hours" for "improvements."

Probably rendering the apartment inhabitable for hours every day is not legal, and I could have sued for some compensation, but living there had gotten so miserable with the construction noise and random water shutoffs that I just wanted out.

The law varies by state. The states I'm familiar with have a tenants' right to "peaceable enjoyment" of their rented premises.

The new owners were trying to smoke you out. They might have been able to evict you on the basis of their desire to do significant work on the apartment (again, varies by state), but they probably figured it'd be cheaper to just make you miserable. Maybe that's legal in your state.

I don't think a court would have found those hours to be very reasonable if you were asleep or still getting dressed.

This is insane and would be illegal in most European countries, AFAIK.

It probably wasn't legal in the US either. The remedy, however, is threatening legal action and withholding rent.

This is why I was forced to buy a home, in India. Two months into new rental place the landlord casually said he's going to sell the place and that I will have to abide by whatever the new owner says, worst case being vacate the place with 2 months notice that had taken us a good one month to find and settle into.

BTW, this isn't an isolated incidence. If you are renting a house in India, you will most like be subjected to the vagaries of land lord.

In the end it all turned out to be good. Now I own my house, decent mortgage and I get tax benefit as well. The net outflow (considering savings on rent and tax benefits) is very much manageable.

In India, if you can afford it, then the decision is fairly straightforward. Buy!

Is the argument here that there is never inconvenience or downside to home ownership? That sounds rather naïve and one-sided. The flip side of all this is that as an owner, any sort of problem is YOUR problem. And there are a lot of potential problems with a building.

Absolutely, owning a home is more work. However, IME it is less inconvenient, because we are able to better control the timing of that work. For example, when our roof leaked one night, we were able to get it fixed the very next day. When we needed electrical work done, we scheduled it for when we would be gone, so as not to disrupt our lives.

There's a valid point that we had to pay for these out of pocket, instead of a landlord paying. In return for these random financial hits, we get a predictable mortgage and an increased property value, which sure beats the yearly rent increases [1].

[1] CA's horrible Prop 13 limits our property tax increase to 2% a year.

Kind of prefer that landlords take care of all that, personally. As a renter, if something is broken I'm calling the landlord and going to work. Sure ain't my job. Couldn't really care less if someone else is inside.

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