Hunting for a starter home can be an exercise in discovering just how little money you actually have access to. You might feel pretty good when you find out just how much you’re pre-approved to borrow, but increasingly, finding a house that ticks all your boxes and fits your budget is a huge challenge.
One potential solution is to consider a house that previously spent some time as a rental property. These houses sometimes represent a bargain because of the real or perceived wear and tear they’ve endured, and because landlords selling them are often motivated to close a sale quickly. But that “wear and tear” part is real, and the worst thing about it is that even if the house looks passes an inspection with flying colors, there can be a lot of hidden problems due to years and years of deferred maintenance and sketchy repair work—often referred to as “Landlord Specials" (or, on the flip side, "Tenant Specials").
These “repairs” are usually more about hiding defects and problems in order to get a new tenant (or a returned security deposit) with minimal investment. The end result is a superficial repair that passes with a quick glance, but will cost you time and money down the road. Here are the most common landlord and tenant specials to watch out for when buying a former rental house.
The standard “landlord special” repair that gave the meme its name is paint, and lots of it. White paint, usually, applied thick and with all the finesse of a drunken gorilla. The Landlord Special Paint Job is equal opportunity: Everything from the chain on your door to the outlet covers will get covered in a thick coat of paint, usually several layers thick and stretching back decades. Bugs, hair, trash, stickers—anything tenants leave behind gets painted over. Some landlords seem to regard white paint as a magical elixir that makes all problems vanish.
This can be tough to spot on a casual walk-through; in dim light, a fresh coat of white paint may look clean and crisp. And a home inspector may not flag it because it’s not causing any harm or violating any codes. It’s only after you move in that you discover that a colony of ants has been entombed under the paint, and the former owner painted over the door hinges too. Pay close attention to the state of the home’s paint job before you buy.
One solution shared by landlords and tenants is putting laminate or vinyl flooring over an existing carpet. For landlords, it gives the place a kick up in visual presentation and preserves a (presumably) quality carpet from the wear-and-tear of temporary residents. And renters see it as a way to class up their space without losing their deposit or spending a ton of money.
Of course, when taken to extremes of laziness and cheapness this can deliver a nasty surprise if you thought you were buying a place with a floor you could live with for a few years. It’s always a good idea to take a close look at the flooring in any property; sometimes there’s a goldmine of hardwood flooring buried under there. Sometimes it’s a landlord special.
Anyone who’s moved out of an apartment bearing the signs of wild parties and occasional fistfights knows this one: If you have a hole in the wall and no time to fix it (because your landlord is coming to inspect, or prospective tenants are checking the place out), you can hide any hole with nothing more than some paint and a piece of paper. The results won’t be perfect, but it will make the hole largely unnoticeable—for a while. And, yes, both landlords and tenants actually do this, so you should closely inspect any rough, peeling, or otherwise imperfect spot on the walls.
Peel and stick contact paper or vinyl wrapping can be an economical way to make kitchen cabinets look fresh and new(ish). If a shady landlord or desperate tenant can find some that matches the grain and color of the cabinets, it can also be a hacky way to fake a repair and hide damage to those cabinets (and any other surface that can be reasonably matched up). If you think the cabinets in that former rental might be serviceable, make sure problems aren’t hidden by a layer of vinyl.
Both landlords and tenants tend to fix problems as they come up, without a cohesive plan for renovation. Fixing stuff on the fly gets everyone back to their busy lives, keeps the rent flowing, and kicks the can down the road—eventually to you.
One thing that’s easy to overlook is decades of replacing all the fixtures in the place one by one when they get damaged. You might not notice that every pull, knob, handle, and latch in the place is a different style and material until well after you’ve moved in, especially if the landlords and tenants put at least some effort into getting replacements that were close to the original.
You’re told the former rental house you’re buying has new wood floors. That’s great! They look good, were put in recently, and even match your general style. You’ve hit gold.
Then you move in, and actually move that rug in the living room, only to discover that the previous owner saved a few bucks by only putting flooring where it would be seen, and leaving everything under a rug as plywood. Just like retiling a kitchen floor without moving the appliances, this creates an illusion that works only if you never decide to move the furniture.
It’s possible to paint tile and refinish a bathtub relatively cheaply, but unless you’re really careful, the results will probably not be great. Still, for many landlords and tenants like the idea of spending $30 on paint more than spending on a renovation or a replacement. In fact, sometimes folks don’t even bother getting any sort of special paint at all, and literally just paint the tub, tile, and even sinks with standard white paint that won’t hold up in the damp and humidity of a bathroom or kitchen. It looks nice at first, so it'll gets that deposit back or gets the place rented out again. Don't let it slip by you as a buyer.
Clever tenants know that it makes sense to spend time rather than money when moving out of rental. If the carpet has been damaged by desk chairs, closet doors, pets, or other accidents of life, the bald spots can be repaired by snipping some carpet fibers from an out-of-sight area and simply gluing them down. The repair is janky, but won’t be noticeable until you start actually living there and walking on that carpet.
