And the one person operated apartments are usually undercapitalized and doesn’t have a professional maintenance staff. The ones I have stayed at have on site office personnel.
These were both in the north suburbs of Atlanta - one was mid upper end at the time and the other was in one of the more affluent neighborhoods
I have no reason to care about staffing or capitalization. Those aren't my concerns. Those concepts are beyond my purvey as a tenant.
I care only about timeliness. My entire relationship any landlord is that of paying money, and receiving housing and services relating to that housing.
When the aircon dies and it takes weeks of pestering for the corpo entity to address it, that's a problem for me that changes the way I view the world in a negative way.
When the aircon dies and it's fixed the next afternoon by the action of some dude who owns some apartments, then I don't really have anything to complain about at all. There was a problem and it was in the past almost as soon as it was discovered.
Capitalization is your concern because if your landlord is pinching pennies barely scraping by they take shortcuts and slow walk repairs. If they lack staff, they don’t have repair people on site that can fix things.
No I’m saying given a choice between working with a company that has 500 units an onsite staff and on call repairmen and Billy Bobs one person operation, statistically you are more likely to get better service from a professionally managed complex.
And anecdotally, my lifetime of experience so far does not support that conclusion at all.
I'm an outlier; I understand that most rentals in the US are not owned by individuals, but instead by [large-ish] corporations. I understand that it is impossible for my experience to be broadly shared.
I was the under capitalized landlord with $500K worth of mortgages between my house and two rental properties in 2008 before the financial crisis and making only $70K a year. As were most real estate investors back then.
And the reason I ended up back in an apartment for four years from 2012-2016.
And during those years I was fortunately in my mid to late 30s and could afford to stay in nice apartments in an upper income suburb of metro Atlanta.
These were both in the north suburbs of Atlanta - one was mid upper end at the time and the other was in one of the more affluent neighborhoods