I would say your aunt sounds like she found a way to try and make a living. You can certainly take issue with the system but she didn’t make it. She sounds decent and not unlike my parents who bought some apartments in the early 2000s. What apparently people somehow don’t realize, is that when you’re not a corporation or running rental property like a huge dickhead, it’s actually a lot of work to either pay others to do or to do yourself. The situation my parents were in was the bluest of collar jobs.

My mom cleaning toilets and filthy refrigerators, my dad dropping everything or getting out of bed to go fix someone’s heat. This image that apparently 80% of commenters here have that they’re just laying back collecting easy money couldn’t have been further from the truth. They were working their ass off to make any money because they couldn’t afford to hire most tasks.

They rented to people for under the market rate, they let old people stay over a year without paying. They drove significant drives to pick up rent checks from weirdos who couldn’t handle mailing payments for some reason. The horror stories of how people abused their kindness and trashed their apartments are endless. SO many difficult tenants, and hundreds of thousands of back breaking hours later, they sold the apartments and made a little money. I will easily retire with more money than they made by writing software from the comfort of my home. Next to my parents’ struggle with this, my life is incredibly easy.

But somehow, to a lot of lemmings, my work is honest and my parents are exploitative leeches who are morally bankrupt for their choice to take all that shit on (btw we have said nothing about the risk of enormous unexpected expenses or things like being sued by a tenant faking an injury and arguing in court it was your fault).

Is your aunt a parasite? sounds like she absolutely isn’t. I’d say anyone willing to read what you wrote here and say she is, is probably an out of touch asshole whose opinion shouldn’t be valued. But that may just be because I have the 20 years of watching my parents struggle to do that job and it wasn’t easy for them except those few elusive weeks a year that somehow no apartments had anything break and no one moved. That entire 20 years they were afraid to even go on vacation because someone might have a water heater stop working or something.

Of course many would say “why wouldn’t they just hire those maintenance items taken care of?!” I mean yeah of course, and I wasn’t privy to their financial details all those years but it always sounded like they were only able to make money because they did most everything themselves. My parents were the ones exploited. By tenants being shitty and taking advantage sometimes, by the sellers, but most of all, by capitalism. They had to trade their lives for money, and nothing about it was easy. Anyone looking at the situation and unable to see that it was hard just honestly has no empathy at all.

This thread was a disappointing read. I have seen the spectrum, and corporate fuckhead landlords are complete scum. Honest, hardworking people who treat their tenants well are NOT, and anyone who tries to erase that nuance just wants to feel superior and probably should seek therapy (even more so than your average person – we all need it).