At Your Service
It’s the day after Christmas. While children everywhere are admiring their heaping piles of presents, Michael Kleinman is receiving news of a considerably less exciting holiday surprise. The local mailman has discovered water gushing from one of Kleinman’s properties on Congress Street. Kleinman hops on Route 33 toward Athens, where the house’s sevenfemale tenants—all Ohio University students–are missing, gone home for winter break. And this leak isn’t exactly a trickle; more a waterfall, crashing down the yard and into the one-way street.
As a veteran college town landlord, Kleinman isn’t surprised at the news of the thriving Congress Street river. This is just one of the many outrageous incidents of this year. With each, he makes the familiar drive to the property, assessing the emergency and inevitable damage. He begins moving furniture out of the house, using a system of post-it-notes to document where each piece belongs. This is a day in the life of an Athens landlord, one who owns 72 properties–72 chances for something to go awry.
Because there are so many houses and apartments to keep up with, a typical day at Kleinpenny Rentals is filled with phone calls and emails from tenants, as well as trips around town to deal with the dramas of student leasers. Included in the daily escapades are problems like uprooted bushes, busted drywall, floors marred from stiletto heels and pipes clogged with tampons. It’s safe to say that Kleinman has seen it all, and so have the 120 other brave landlords in Athens.
Mark and Marcia Shubert, of Amesville, Ohio, are among the brave. They bought their first property in the 80’s. They currently lease three houses and one apartment near OU’s campus. Marcia, the brains of the operation, and Mark, the brawn, run the whole shebang themselves. While many of the large student rental agencies in Athens have full crews of cleaners, landscapers, electricians and plumbers, Mark does all of the above himself. When the Shuberts’ properties are damaged, the couple is directly affected. “Our good tenants definitely outnumber the not-so-good ones,” Marcia says, “But I would have to say that we got a bit hardened because even the best of tenants can be very hard on houses.”
Debbie Allen, administrative assistant at L’Heureux Properties for the past 13 years, agrees that the good tenants outnumber the bad. However, L’Heureux rents out about 70 houses and apartments in Athens and members of the staff are certainly no strangers to dealing with the aftermath of destruction.
“Graduation is the time of year when we have the most problems, even more than weekends like Palmerferst,” Allen said, recalling a party that took place the night before OU’s commencement at one of L’Heureux’s West Union Street houses. The yard was destroyed by rowdy seniors who were leaving Athens in true OU fashion. A large dogwood tree and a privacy fence were unsalvageable by the L’Heureux clean up crew.
While college-aged tenants are away at school, most of whom are on their own for the first time in their lives,, landlords are the metaphorical moms and dads. It’s a landlord’s job to take care of students’ mess-ups, whether accidental or not. Of course, it’s a landlord’s number one priority to watch over properties and make sure precious investments aren’t going up in flames (Kleinman has only had two fires since he started renting in 1989.) But believe it or not, it’s also a priority of most landlords to make sure tenants are safe, comfortable, and happy. Like being a parent, being a landlord is a full-time job that sees no hours. Both Kleinman and the Shuberts can attest to answering late-night phone calls from student tenants with a problem. For example, Marcia recalled one instance when a girl called in the middle of the night to ask if Mark would come over and kill a hairy spider that she had spotted in her bedroom. The couple also got a phone call during the wee hours from tenants who reported a heavily intoxicated stranger had wandered into their house and was sleeping in their living room. Like mothers and fathers, these college town landlords are there to scare away the monsters from under the bed–and chase the drunk people off the couch.
While it may seem like a right of passage to trash college homes, it doesn’t usually occur to students that they may feel a little embarrassed about it after graduation. Zack Jones, a 2008 OU alumnus with a new “grown-up” job, who admits to trashing his former apartment at Riverpark Towers, says he has one or two of his own. “I do regret putting holes in the wall by driving golf balls from the end of the hallway,” Jones says, “It was dumb, but I only regret that because I got fined for the damage.”
Jones says that all the other damage he caused to the apartment with the two friends he lived with was all in good fun. The roommates threw spaghetti on their white walls, spilled an entire bottle of hot sauce on the carpet, regularly threw patio furniture off their balcony and shattered their sliding glass door. Surprisingly, Jones said he even received some of his security deposit back at the end of the year. Still, looking back as an alumnus, he’s not embarrassed of his destructive behavior.
In a profession that seems so stressful, it’s a wonder that people in the rental business like Kleinman, Allen, and the Shuberts don’t have any regrets themselves. On the stresses of his job, Kleinman says that there is aggravation in any business where money is involved. To stay level-headed, he takes every individual renovation, repair and dispute and learns something from it with the goal of bettering his business. “I used to own a pizza shop,” he chuckles, “and being a landlord is easier.”
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