Mar 27 2009
The Dilemma Facing Landlords
Consider the situation: one family rents a chunk of land, puts on their trailer house and goes about the business of paying bills. Then work slows down for the breadwinner. And the wife and grandchild is staying at home, hoping the husband will get work. They miss a rental payment. The owners, trying to work things out, have to pick up the bank payment. The breadwinner slips on ice and gets hurt. Again, they miss a payment.
Now the landowner/ landlord faces a problem. It’s a bad time in the economy, these people are in distress. How can you kick people who are already down? Since they owe the landlord money and since the trailer is sitting on the property, now the landlord has a right to the trailer. How do you make a family homeless?
Such is the problem facing one couple in central Minnesota today. These are people who are trying to help this couple out, to keep the renters they have. But slowly the situation is falling apart, and slowly the family moves toward homelessness.
In 1929, the same thing happened to a landowner in the small town of Frazee. The renters had no money; many people had no money. The landlord was just happy to have someone living in the house so vagrants didn’t take up residence. In the end, those people who stayed there left for California and never did pay their rent. Those were bad times, and so are these.
It’s not just rental properties. On a long stretch of Highway 78 just north of Ottertail is a storage business. Here the owners are fighting to keep the payments to their bank so they don’t lose their livelihood. People have been unable to pay the bills, so they leave the storage unit and run. The owners never know until it is too late, and then they are left with worthless junk. With money tight in the area, even auctions won’t recover the loss.
There have been financial gurus predicting a commercial real estate crash for several years now, and we are most likely in the throws of it. Thank goodness for the All American enthusiasm and ability to bounce back. Because this nation is going to need that more than anything.
