Landlords, you provide a service and that requires minimum standards

Alongside the sword fights, bottles of Beaujolais, and romantic drama, one of the curious marks of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers is the way the king’s soldiers see landlords. These burghers are not lauded as exemplary middle-class battlers, but treated with a kind of haughty contempt. In this vision of pre-revolution France, merely owning a city apartment is no ticket to admiration.

It is a timely observation. The point is not that landlords ought to be scolded, cheated or cuckolded, as happens to one hapless cloth merchant in Dumas’ tale. Rather, it is a simple reminder of perspective: today’s attitudes are not universal. In particular, there’s nothing automatically praiseworthy about owning property and charging rent. No one is owed esteem — let alone deference or obedience — because they took out a mortgage.

Landlords have to earn respect, which does not come simply by paying off their loan quickly, or pocketing tax breaks. If they want to run a business, they have to demonstrate the same traits that ought to be valued everywhere: high standards of service, ethical behaviour.

Similarly, we shouldn’t assume renters are capricious, lazy, sneaky, or destructive. Anecdotes abound, of course. They graffiti walls, or pay late, or leave rubbish on the street. No doubt these things happen, as there are poor customers in every industry. But as a cohort, renters are simply Australians who pay for a service.

And this cohort is growing. While home ownership remains the dream for many, this market is a breaker of fantasies. The average house price is between seven and 12 times average wage. As a result of this, precarious employment, and low wage increases, more Australians will rent.

So, a rental property isn’t a generous gift to dodgy villains. It’s a service for an ordinary citizen, like fixing a car or providing a certain number of words by deadline. And this service asks for certain minimum standards.

I thought about these simple corrections recently, reading a story on a landlord struggling with finances because her tenants pay late. The owner apparently couldn’t sell the property, because “the tenants sent [the landlord’s] agent a letter threatening to seek compensation for holding open homes”.

While this is presumably an accurate report, it may be confusing for landlords and renters alike. And, as I’ve argued, it’s important to resist one-sided portrayals of home and property.

I can’t speak to these particular renters’ state-of-mind, but asking for compensation is quite reasonable. Tenants are entitled to “quiet enjoyment” of their premises, and having any number of strangers walking through their home is in obvious conflict with this entitlement. These visitors can be loud and messy, as can estate agents: I still remember one agent’s muddy footprints on what was clean hallway carpet.

And even if the visitors are quiet and pristine, their presence is still an interruption. Valuables must be secured, private information removed from walls, fridges, desktops, and so on. Guests must be either supervised or trusted not to transgress propriety. Sometimes even expecting agents to lock doors is seemingly too much.

Given all this, there need be nothing threatening or malicious in a request for compensation. Tenants have paid for a service that includes “quiet enjoyment”, and this service has been compromised. Supermarkets offer discounts on bruised fruits, booksellers on bent books—why not landlords on a knowing infringement upon comfortable tenancy? This is especially so, as these open homes are straightforwardly about money: the landlords are hoping to profit by selling assets. In this sense, compensation is just another business expense. To make more money, owners might need to spend more money—just like in any other industry.

So, once again: being a landlord is a job. It’s not a weirdly lucrative hobby or amateur sports betting pool. Landlords ought to treat it as a form of employment, which requires minimum standards of thought, effort, and ethics. Obviously there’s no ongoing tradition of vocational identity here, akin to medicine or the older disciplines of academia. To become a landlord isn’t to join a guild or association in any meaningful sense, with explicit rights and duties. Nonetheless, some basic familiarity with local laws, and reflection on one’s moral obligations, is an excellent start.

If homeowners are not prepared to cultivate this professionalism, or can’t reasonably afford to, then they shouldn’t become landlords. They should invest elsewhere, and let accredited and trustworthy financial experts manage their portfolios instead.

None of this means owners ought to be maligned or manipulated by tenants; treated like the bourgeois coin-counters in Dumas’ novel. It simply means they have to take their responsibility seriously. That is: as seriously as they take their wealth.

Damon Young is a philosopher and author.