Being mad at an independent landlord is like being mad at the dog shit you just stepped on instead of the motherfucker that didn’t pickup after his dog.
Many independent landlords are people who decided to take her everything they had on a derelict home that nobody was going to buy, fix it up, and make it available. These are people that dream to get out from under the boot and are willing to bet it all for a chance. A landlord with one or two rentals are probably struggling to keep their head above water and almost for sure have a full time job as well as the maintenance of the rental, and probably the fixing up of another.
This is how the system is rigged. If you want to mortgage a house, you need to have a lot of money down, steady income, and a good credit score. Mortgaging a fully remodeled house in order to rent it doesn’t work because you’ll never be able to rent it for that much. Mortgaging an ugly house to rent doesn’t work most of the time because you need to remodel it “nice” and you need to find a tenant willing to pay a premium for a pig wearing lipstick. Most times, even when the house is done up, the neighborhood isn’t. Next up, if you want to mortgage a derelict house that you plan to bring back from the dead, wether to rent or live in, YOU CAN’T. The only way to buy those homes is cash. In other words, neither homebuyers nor wannabe landlords have access to the only homes that might provide a good value. Wanna guess who can? Investment funds. They are the ones raping renters, not the poor schmuck that’s trying to play the game the way they were told it was supposed to work. That schmuck is fucked, they just don’t know it.
My wife and I owe the current life we lead in great part to a lady that decided to rent her duplex to two college students for $275 twenty years ago. She died and her daughter sold all the houses the lady owned (she owned the entire street in that ghetto) to a fund. Each duplex (meaning, half a house) now goes for $1200 (still a ghetto) and now requires a credit check and two months deposit.
Get mad at the rigged system, not at the other suckers stuck in it. Don’t be a crab in the bucket.
EDIT: There are good independent landlords and there are bad ones. There is no such thing as a good real estate investment funds.