About Mr. Landlord

Mr. Landlord’s Neighborhood is the name I have chosen for my maiden voyage into the blogosphere.  I wonder though, if a more appropriate name would be Mr. Landlord’s Parallel Universe.  My tenants take me there so often I’m beginning to accumulate frequent flyer miles.  The mere prospect of a tenant inviting me into their apartment sparks images of fissures in time and a portal into the unknown. 

O.K.  It’s not that bad…most of the time.  But, as you will read in the posts to come, I often travel to the land of weird, and to my dismay, I sometimes feel at home there.  The stories are NOT fiction or embellished.  Believe me when I say, “You can’t make this stuff up”.  Truth IS stranger than fiction.  The only fictitious parts of these stories are the names.  One destination I do not care to visit often is the planet where all the lawyers and judges live.  Believe me, they DO live on another planet, and they’re invading ours in large numbers.

My journey into the land of tenants started around 15 years ago when my brother caught me at a moment of weakness and talked me into joining him in the landlord business.  He started the company ten years earlier and had reached the maximum number of apartments he could handle on his own.  I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, but recently recovering from a business partner walking out on me and a very lucrative future, I said yes.  My brother is a great guy and I trust him implicitly…unlike the bonehead who had deserted me.

Now it’s 15 years later and I’m wondering how the heck I wound up being LORD OF THE LAND.  Actually, I’m not…the bank is.  Well, 80 percent of it anyway.  I’m LORD OF THE DEBT…and whipping boy for around 800 tenants.  Fortunately, only about two to three percent of them (about 25) want to run me down with their cars at any given time.  Since my properties are in nice neighborhoods and I keep them in pretty good shape, these 25 are usually the ones who want to live in my apartments, but not pay me to live there.  I kinda have a problem with that.  So does the bank.  Some of the stories are about this group, but most fit into the other 97 percent.

I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone is weird…including me.  But, I know I’m weird, and I know what is weird about me.  The tenants in my stories don’t know they’re weird.  They think they are an island of normalcy in a sea of weird and stupid people.  They are the pinnacle of rational thought and must educate all others to the correct way of thinking.  What they don’t realize is that their island is really a lawn chair in an algae covered kiddie pool of the reality they have created.

Having said all this, I do understand that the tenants are my customers and I give them the best customer service I can.  My brother and I personally answer all phone calls and visit our properties weekly.  We know many of our tenants by name and most tenants know who we are when they see us.  We wear jeans and sweatshirts, drive work trucks and are just everyday guys.  Weird…but everyday guys.

I hope you enjoy these stories for their entertainment value and they don’t make you want to hunt me down and pummel me.