Peter Lohmann breaks down who pays for what between tenants and landlords. Residential landlords must maintain habitability (heat, water, structure), while tenants handle routine fixes like clearing a clogged sink. Commercial triple-net leases typically shift all maintenance costs to the tenant. Always check your lease first.
A great topic in property management and real estate investing is who's responsible for maintenance at the property. Now, some things are very obvious, like if a tenant punches a hole in the wall, obviously the tenant is responsible to fix that. And if the heater breaks, it's a 20-year-old unit, you know, obviously the landlord is responsible for that. You know, some of you may be familiar with commercial leases, which are sometimes run as like a triple net, which, you know, long story short, basically means that the tenant, the commercial tenant, is responsible for all expenses at the property, including taxes, insurance, and maintenance. But residential leases are almost never set up that way. And that a lot of times is dictated by state law. So in residential leasing, The tenant is normally responsible for certain items and the landlord is responsible for many maintenance and repair type items at the property. So landlord has certain duties to keep, to keep the unit habitable and safe, including, you know, maintaining heating and air conditioning, making sure that clean water is available, sanitary sewer, just keeping the general property in, in good upkeep. Keeping it safe and sanitary. So there's some gray areas here as well. And normally when someone comes to me with a question about, hey, is my tenant responsible for this item? I'll always say, well, what does your lease say? Because the lease should really dictate on the margins who is responsible for those items. And our lease is very clear. So a common example is a garbage disposal. If the garbage disposal stops working, our lease specifies that it's the tenant's responsibility to clear it if there's a clog, or to use the little tool that's usually under the sink, like a little Allen wrench thing, to free up a jam and get it running again. Or if it's a GFCI that tripped, to fix that. But if the garbage disposal has actually reached end of life and is no longer working, then that's a landlord responsibility item. Another really common one is what we call local clogs. So if the sink clogs you know, that's a tenant responsibility item. We're not going to pay a plumber on the property owner's behalf to go out to the property and clear that. When we provide the property to the resident, the sink drain was unclogged, so the tenant will be responsible for that. Now, I can contrast that with, you know, if the main sewer line going out to the street is clogged, that's a different story. You know, that's not something that the tenant is responsible for in most cases. And we're going to send out, you know, a plumber to get that line cleared. So in general, you know, we try and make as much the tenant responsibility as, as we reasonably can under the law while still being, you know, a good landlord because we want to prevent the property owner from incurring unnecessary expenses.
