I had no idea that DH and I were "shysters". We pay around £600 a year for the right to rent out our property and an annual inspection, it has more fire safety measures than the average office or hotel, it has log books for checks and other safety measures to such an extent that it actually impinges on our tenant's lives, our lease is monitored by the local authority and if we want to take money off our tenants for damage they cause, we no longer have access to court if a dispute ensues.
This month alone, DH has spent two weekends at the property and 3 evenings after work putting in a new shower because the tenants pulled the last one off the wall and broke it, fixing a tap that ditto they broke, putting new bags in the vacuum cleaners and fixing the front door lock and security entrance system, plus taken a day off work to meet gas safety engineers because the overflow valve for the central heating system had mysteriously jammed itself on. One of the other evenings he came round it was to let back in a tenant who had locked himself out. He also works full time.
We are also just shelling out nearly £2000 on roof repairs, which will make it around £5,650 this year on maintenance anyway - our local authority carries out communal repairs and gives us little choice as to how much they will cost or whether or not they are really necessary. We did save thousands by sanding down and repainting the windows framework ourselves though, and probably did at least as good, if not better, a job of it.
After paying the mortgage, which is massive, in some years we have made a profit, but not for the last two years. Doesn't matter - its our pension and so we look after that property. If we actually paid an accountant to do our tax returns, we would be running at a larger loss still, but we do them ourselves too. But we do pay 40% tax on whatever profit we have left after all that.
But my goodness, do our tenants pay for all this. The rent is massive. There is absolutely no way on earth we could charge them less as actually having the thing on the market to that standard is so expensive. But happily its an expensive city and we have plenty of willing tenants wanting to live there and to pay that much. We used to roll along quite happily before all these standards came into play, the only difference they have made is that we have had to stop spending our money on decoration and putting in secondary glazing and replacing carpets and instead spend it on statutory notices and the new inventions that the local authority come up with every year - the latest wheeze being locks which cannot be locked from the inside with a key - which, mysteriously, could only be satisfactorally supplied by one company in the whole of the country, as that was the only one the local authority had authorised...
Despite the massive rent, if my tenants constantly phoned me up and took it upon themselves to "remind me" what my responsibilities were, or trot out that line that they were my customer - its an exchange of goods, not services (I am not your cleaner/concierge/bum wiper) - then I would evict them under one of the statutory listed grounds. I'd be very polite about it, but dealing with that sort of character, in any field of work, is something to be avoided. In fact, I did evict one tenant who sent me a series of increasingly ranty emails about a property that had absolutely nothing wrong with it, culminating in one sent on Christmas Eve informing me that she would be out of the property the next day and "I could fix the dripping tap that she had complained about hundreds of times then". Unless of course they were actually paying for a serviced let, in which case they would be paying such a massive rent that it and their contract would entitle them to instant service.
If we need a Trip Advisor for landlords, we really need one for tenants too. The work I put in at the end of tenancies in encouraging tenants to get damage they have caused themselves fixed so I don't have to take it off their deposits and end up in a dispute with them would stand me in good stead for a job on the UN Security Council.
Sorry, did I digress? I really do object to being termed a "shyster", and if I think about it when I am spending my free time basically wiping someone else's bottom or running around after them fixing damage they have caused, it tends to dwell in my mind...