By Mark Honey

What do landlords even do? Let’s role-play a scenario: You’re renting. Your fridge stops working in the middle of the night, and everything in there is gonna go bad if it isn’t fixed today.

Your options:

1. Let the food rot, let the appliance sit, abandon the kitchen, and never refrigerate anything again

2. Fix the fridge yourself

3. Phone a repair guy and pay out of pocket

4. Call the landlord and wait for them to fix it

The answer for renters is easy — we call the landlord. None of us are gonna pay to fix some 1980s icebox we don’t own, even if we have the money. Some of us might be able to fix the fridge, but finding time probably isn’t an option when we have to go to work, watch the kids, do the laundry, read the news, take a shower, and everything else. So you call the landlord and everything’s peachy, right?

Uh, no. The problem comes in the next scenario. Now pretend you’re the landlord. A tenant calls you because their fridge is broken.

Your options:

1. Fix it yourself

2. Call a repair guy and pay out of pocket

3. Do nothing

You want to solve this problem as cheaply as possible, but you probably don’t know how to fix a fridge. After all, you’re a landlord, not a repairman. Your job is to collect rent, not fix problems! You could call and get the fridge fixed today… but quick service like that costs a fortune. It’s just too expensive to solve the issue right now, but you can’t just do nothing. So you do the sensible thing and pick option B (kinda), scheduling a repair for early next week. The tenant will understand. Right?