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ck2

Think of renting as "housing as a service". Ha.

Except for one problem, landlords. Most are not good people.

Would rather be my own landlord.

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Renters are by far worse than landlords. As long as we're generalizing.

idk, I'd give most the benefit of the doubt that they are "good people", but may not necessarily show that side to you the tenant for a variety of reasons, such as fear and greed, especially when they are dealing with an asset that represents a large portion of their net worth.

Good people can behave poorly.

You also have landlords that hold a large number of units (often times a corporate entity, with management outsourced), then you have individuals who are renting out their old house after they moved (either because they can't sell for what they owe, or other reasons). And often times the people renting behave pretty bad (not intentionally, but there is often more than the "normal" wear and tear).

Also you never talk to your landlord for good things. It's almost entirely for bad things like late rent, etc.

I don't own, but if I did I'd love a "landlord as a service" where I could just call or email someone about a problem and have them fix it.

Plenty of handymen out there, I suspect you could find one who would be happy to take care of anything. Don't really need an app for it, just call a few and ask around..

This I think is important because I sure as hell have never rented anywhere where a landlord was some one to call if you needed to fix a problem.

Where I live, if the landlord doesn't fix the problem within a reasonable amount of time, you can fix it yourself and deduct the repairs from your rent payment. You should educate yourself on your local laws surrounding rentals if you haven't already; there are likely similar terms where you live.

and then what lose more money taking time off work to go to court when the landlord tries to evict you for not paying rent in full?

You would resolve it the same as any other contract dispute. If resolution fails, then you go to the courts. If they sue first, you counter-sue and tack on malicious prosecution as well.

They won't try to evict you assuming you're abiding by your local renting laws, because I'd bet they've read them as well considering it's part of their job. A lot of landlords will take advantage of the fact that tenants often are not aware of these rules to get away with not abiding by them, but if you demonstrate that you know the laws they aren't going to mess around when you can sue them in small claims court and win handily. Not to mention, oftentimes if you do suffer some opportunity cost as a result of their actions, that cost can be included in the damages.

I've always thought this was a gap in how property management/maintenance services marketed themselves. In the past as an owner I'd have happily paid a retainer for somebody to be a trusted keyholder and just arrange for stuff to be fixed. Now I'm in a fortunate position of having 2-3 trusted trades people who can cover their specialities and for the other stuff they can't do I know they will tap into their network of people they trust to get me the right person.

I can do that in Finland. If I have a problem I just open the website of the house management company (not sure what the official term is) and create a ticket, and someone comes in an fixes the issue.

In fact, interaction with the "landlord" is rare, and often the apartment is owned by a company, not an individual.

If Finland's rental market is anything like Sweden then you are almost always renting for a larger company that owns hundreds of apartments all around town and have pretty good economies of scale when it comes things like maintenance. It seems that in the US it much more common with individual landlords and tiny rental companies that perhaps only own that one house you happen live in.

Most are business oriented people. I never met anyone particulary not nice.

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