True, but you still have to cough up. The benefit of renting is that it's an SEP (Someone Else's Problem).

There are also home warranties or tech solutions/concierges like tidy.com.

The issue historically is that these concierge things are expensive (should be solved by tech/ai) and the warranties create their own class of problems (claim frustrations etc).

But home ownership is expensive, no way around it. But the work in coordinating etc doesn’t fundamentally need to be.

Yep, I debated mentioning home warranty services, but that is also a thing a lot of folks surprisingly don’t know about.

When I bought my house the realtor gave me a free home warranty for a year (a $600 value vs the tens of thousands in commission they got paid). The old washing machine broke during that year and the home warranty did replace it, so on paper I got good value out of the policy.

However, I think it was on the phone with the company waiting on hold for about four hours total to process the claim. That was without any dispute or confusion, it’s just how long the process took. The person on the other end of the line would ask me one question, then put me on hold for another 15 minutes before asking the next question. I got the impression they are actually handling multiple customers at once and switching between us. I can only imagine this system is designed to deter folks from making claims. I was afraid to delay the call any longer by inquiring about whether there were multiple replacement models I could pick between. I received a $600 model from a manufacturer I wouldn’t have chosen.

If I’d paid $600 for that home warranty, I would not be a satisfied customer. I certainly wouldn’t recommend home warranties as a time-saver. It would be much easier to directly purchase products and services from people with some incentive to obtain my business.

I definitely don’t think they’re generally worthwhile and don’t subscribe myself, but my in laws have had excellent luck with their policy.

Sort of. If it's not something that's damaging the building, landlords tend to not be in a huge hurry to fix things. So it's your problem until he gets around to fixing it. I've had good landlords and I've had landlords that took two weeks to fix the sink.

I've had worse, and experienced the full range from literal slumlord--I say that advisedly and not frivolously--to excellent landlord. One does have to choose one's landlords somewhat carefully. However, on the higher end of housing, I've had very good experiences with this, in the median.

It has been my experience with nearly all of them that you need to limit their exposure to big, capital items, and might need to fix smaller items yourself, at own expense. To run the latter through the landlord is just more trouble than it's worth.

That's okay with me. Very small price to pay for the convenience of not having to own the thing, and moving out essentially whenever I please (no, a 12 mo lease isn't "whenever you please", but compared to a mortgage, it is).

Living in a college town, there's a lot of this "prelease for $((YEAR + 1)) in August of $YEAR" crap going on, which really, really grinds my gears, since it undermines the most cherished aspect of why I rent -- the freedom to move, move often, move quickly.

Of course that’s a benefit of renting. How does that relate to the OP _homeowner_ saying one downside of ownership is they don’t have a single number to call for any maintenance issues?

I guess on the face of it, it's not related. I didn't read his comment as literally lamenting the lack of a number, or even someone to orchestrate, but rather to imply that there's nobody on the hook for it in all facets. With a landlord, you just call the number and magic happens and it's free to you (in theory, not always in practice).

Heh, gotcha. Yes, as a homeowner, the buck stops with you since you own it.

This is also a hazard of renting, because the landlord will deal with it on their own schedule and as cheaply as possible.

This is true. But I've had some really great landlords, too.

And some terrible ones.