When the Landlord Is a Friend

10269897_sWith New York City real estate prices soaring, the only way for some city dwellers to achieve the American dream of owning property is to become landlords. And these days, many landlords are their tenants’ contemporaries — learning on the fly how to manage property and relying on YouTube for how-to tutorials on home repairs. Still others are filling their homes with friends-turned-tenants.

Members of the new guard of landlords are just as likely to come in for an after-work beer as they are to stop by at midnight to fix a clogged sink.

When Frances Largeman-Roth, a nutritionist, and her husband, Jon Roth, a director at Alexander Interactive, both 42, found out they were expecting their third child, they decided to sell their two-bedroom apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, and buy a home that would fit their growing family. It soon became apparent that this would mean taking on tenants.

Their two-bedroom apartment sold for $750,000, and in July 2014, they bought a two-family home in Windsor Terrace for $1.1 million.

“There were places we looked at that were a little bit cheaper that didn’t have a rental property attached, but knowing how much work we’d have to put into fixing them up, the math just didn’t work,” said Mrs. Largeman-Roth, the author of “Eating in Color: Delicious, Healthy Recipes for You and Your Family.” “This was the only way. And so I really hopped on it. My brain was really working overtime. ‘Can we all fit? Yes.’ ”

With a newborn in tow, Mrs. Largeman-Roth struggled to get the rental apartment ready for tenants. “I remember so much running up and down — it’s a big flight of stairs — with the baby,” she said. “Always trying to find someplace to breast-feed where the workers were not. It was really pretty crazy.”

Calvin Gladen, a salesman at Corcoran Real Estate, helped place Thom Fuell, 30, a litigation analyst at Debevoise & Plimpton, and Alodie Larson, 33, an editor at Oxford University Press, in the second-floor apartment. The couple, who recently became engaged, were specifically looking for a rental with the owners on the premises.

“I feel like if something really bad happened I could run downstairs and be like, ‘Help!’ ” Ms. Larson said.

The setup has worked smoothly. On a recent visit to their upstairs tenants, the Roth children started an impromptu dance party as Mr. Fuell played “Norwegian Wood” on his guitar while Ms. Larson harmonized.

“I think we’re super lucky that they are who they are,” Mrs. Largeman-Roth said of her “conscientious” tenants. The $2,000 a month in rent that comes into the family coffers allows the couple’s three children — Willa, 7, Leo, 4, and Phoebe, who is almost 2 — to enjoy having their own backyard.

And although there have been plumbing problems to deal with, the couple feel that being landlords has actually given them more freedom.

“We never wanted to buy a place where all your life decisions have to get made around a big fat mortgage,” Mr. Roth said.

“Young people are exploring the idea of becoming landlords as a way to have more control over their own destiny as investors,” said Darin Shaw, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “A sense of security comes when you invest in brick and mortar, as opposed to the uncontrollable ups and downs of the stock market. Any area of the city can suddenly become the next housing hot spot, and young people have always been the pioneers, because often they can’t afford anywhere else.”

In 2011, Sydney Blumstein, an associate broker at Corcoran, helped her friend Kyla Kohler buy a two-family house in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn for $569,000. Ms. Kohler, 34, now lives in the downstairs apartment with her husband, Will van Breda, 30, a former travel agent turned stay-at-home father, and their two young sons. Both parents are from Sydney, Australia.

As for tenants, the upstairs part of the house seems like the cast of MTV’s “Real World” – there’s Noah Gardenswartz, 32, a comedian; Gary Hidalgo Rodríguez, 32, a property manager and the resident cook; Justine Lee-Mills, 32, a saleswoman for Corcoran; and, for now, Léa Benacerraf, 21, a French Airbnb guest doing a semester abroad at Pace University.

Outsiders are initially skeptical about the setup, which involves adults sharing a kitchen and other common areas. “A lot of people call it a youth hostel,” Ms. Lee-Mills said. “They think it’s weird, but they love to come over here.”

Ms. Blumstein said after the sale to Ms. Kohler she sold a house to “friends who repeated the model.”

“I think that young people understand how to leverage an asset by doing it in a fun and community-building way,” she said, describing Bushwick as “a beautiful, park-filled neighborhood where you could buy townhouses for $500,000 and young people could basically live for free, offsetting expenses by renting rooms to friends while sharing common areas, backyards and experiences.”

On a recent Sunday afternoon, the housemates gathered around the center island in the upstairs kitchen for platefuls of Mr. Rodríguez’s homemade arroz con palmito — rice with heart of palm — free-flowing wine and one another’s company. When Mr. van Breda arrived with his and Ms. Kohler’s sons, Felix, 2, and Frankie, 9 months, the housemates greeted them as if they were the boys’ favorite aunts and uncles. And in a way, they are very much a big, extended family.

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“Noah drove us to the hospital when Kyla’s water broke,” Mr. van Breda said.

“I was the only one home,” said Mr. Gardenswartz, the comedian. “I’ve definitely gotten some jokes out of the situation.”

Mr. van Breda has learned on the job how to fix most things that need repair in the house.

“I’ve learned all about heating systems,” he said. “We don’t have boilers in Sydney. With a lot of things, it’s just about opening it up and seeing how it works, and hoping the problem is obvious.”

The housemates appreciate Mr. van Breda’s handyman rules to live by: “If it moves and it shouldn’t, you use duct tape. If it doesn’t move and it should, you use WD-40.”

Since becoming the owner of the house, Ms. Kohler has started her own business, Total Package-Bushwick Property Management, for which she oversees about 30 homes in the area.

Mr. Rodríguez, who came to the United States from Costa Rica, rents the largest room, with an en-suite bathroom, for $1,000 a month — the smaller bedrooms go for around $800. He said he preferred house-sharing with others to having his own apartment. “They are my family,” he said.

For the landlords, the house offers much more than just financial security. “The setup provides us with a lot of support,” Mr. van Breda said. “There’s often someone upstairs that can help in an emergency or even just for moral support, like when Justine comes down to take Felix for an hour. If we were somewhere by ourselves, it would be very different.”

When Matthew Trebek, 25, decided to open Oso, a restaurant serving Mexican street food to debut soon in Harlem, he immediately began searching for a home in the neighborhood. Initially he and his agents, Jason Hernandez, a salesman at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, and Lesley Steiner, an associate broker there, looked for one-bedroom apartments. But their explorations took them to townhouses where Mr. Trebek could have more room, as well as steady rental income. He wound up with a five-story townhouse with an owner’s triplex for $1,915,000 and began a new adventure as a landlord.

His father, Alex Trebek, the host of “Jeopardy!,” lent a helping hand making updates and repairs.

“Oh, yeah, my dad is handy,” Matthew Trebek said. “He’s 75 now, but he is one of the hardest-working people. It’s, ‘Get out of bed, we’re going to Home Depot!’ He traveled here from L.A. with power tools.”

Mr. Trebek’s tenants include friends — the contractor for the restaurant, Mike Rockhill, 40, a project manager for New World Design Builders, and his wife, Kate Rockhill, 34, a front office manager at Midtown Integrative Health and Wellness, were immediately on board to rent the top floor. Mr. Hernandez placed the 82-year-old mother of a neighbor on the floor below. An apartment on the parlor floor went to Oso’s chef, Cassandra Rhoades, 26. Mr. Trebek’s apartment includes part of the parlor floor, the garden level and the finished basement.

The rents on the apartments range from $1,000 to $2,400 a month.

With a contractor as a tenant, Mr. Trebek doesn’t have to worry about most repairs. Mr. Rockhill said he had no hesitation about moving into the house of a friend. “If you’ve ever looked for an apartment in Manhattan — I’ve had people asking me for six months’ security up front. It worked out well because I didn’t have to do that.”

Mr. Trebek created an intergenerational home that brings together people from the neighborhood with newer transplants. He’s also found a new hobby — furniture making. He and Mr. Rockhill recently made a coffee table in the backyard. Mr. Rockhill called the project “an excuse for my wife to let me buy a $450 saw.”

“We enjoy doing the work,” Mr. Trebek said. “Mike and Kate will be here for dinner. We’ll go off on tangents about home renovations and Kate will be like, ‘I’m going to go.’ The conversations go on forever.”

Mr. Trebek said that being a landlord has required him to roll with the punches.

He was not keen on babies or pets. “Mike told me three weeks after he moved in: ‘We’re pregnant.’ And Cassie was like, ‘I have a dog.’

“A small dog?” he asked.

“Yeah — it’s a 45-pound pit bull,” Mr. Trebek said recently. “So now I’m a godparent and I have a dog. You don’t really know what to expect going into something like this. But it’s great. I couldn’t be happier.”

Some people see themselves as accidental landlords. Cecily Horner, 37, a dance and fitness teacher, bought a two-bedroom condominium in Harlem for $390,000 in 2013.

“I thought it was going to be me and the dog in this apartment,” she said.

She hired designers who suggested a hand-painted golden wall for the living room. Ms. Horner and her broker, Bridget Harvey, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman, immediately dubbed the condo “the Pretty Princess Palace.”

Plans changed when eHarmony introduced Ms. Horner to Eric Kaplan, 42, a technology manager at the Fashion Institute of Technology who lived inQueens with his daughter, now 9. The couple moved to a two-bedroom rental in Forest Hills and married, and Ms. Horner became Mrs. Kaplan. And she rented out the Pretty Princess Palace and became a landlord.

Mrs. Kaplan had few problems when she lived in the condo, but quickly found out that when it came to managing the property from afar, Murphy’s law applied.

“Within two months a leak sprung in the kitchen, the bathroom door broke and the electrical outlet in the bathroom stopped working,” she said. “Then a radiator pipe leaked into the bedroom.” The golden wall warped.

Mr. Kaplan took on the role of troubleshooter and used Angie’s List to find a reliable handyman, whom he now has on speed dial.

The Kaplans use an application from the website Cozy.co to automatically collect the $2,600 a month rent, which is split by two roommates, Corey de Groot, 26, an art director at Publicis, an advertising agency, and Michael Trapani, 29, a senior grant writer at Win, a nonprofit. Both men like having a person for a landlord rather than a management company.

“Every other place I’ve lived, it’s been a company you had to deal with,” Mr. de Groot said. Calls placed to faceless numbers often went unanswered — or resulted in an early-morning unannounced visitor. “At one place, the super came in — he didn’t even knock — and said, ‘Oh, you’re here.’ ”

Now if there’s an issue, a simple text message gets immediate results. “As I type, I see the three dots on the phone as Eric is responding to me,” Mr. Trapani said.

The rental income the Kaplans receive will cover the mortgage on the three-bedroom apartment they recently purchased for $495,000 for themselves back in Manhattan in Morningside Heights.

Mrs. Kaplan’s Harlem two-bedroom turned out to be a great investment — the condo is now valued between $550,000 and $600,000.

“We qualified for a bigger mortgage because we have this rental income,” she said.

Now, nine months pregnant, Mrs. Kaplan is glad she was able to give her family a security blanket. “Who knows what’s going to happen in life? Owning this place makes me feel secure as a woman,” she said. “I’ll never have to move back to my parents’ house, I’m never going to be homeless.”

Source: nytimes.com