It's the third day of the month and you realize you forgot to write your landlord a rent check.
Lucky for both of you, your landlord lives right upstairs. Paying rent is a breeze. If you ever get locked out, help is just a few feet away.
These conveniences are part of the reason Wendy Oakeson has enjoyed living in the same building as her landlord. She's done it three times now.
"Overall, it was a great experience," she says. "It's super convenient. If you have a maintenance problem, you just knock on their door."
But living in such close quarters with your landlord comes with its fair share of challenges. What happens when the landlord takes your parking spot, for example? Here's a look at the good and the bad of paying rent to the guy upstairs (or next door). (Bing: How to deal with a problem landlord)
Good deals and (potentially) good friends
One definite perk of renting a mother-in-law or basement apartment in a landlord-occupied building: "I've always been able to get better rent that way," says Oakeson, an office manager who lives in Logan, Utah.
"In many cases, with current homeowners being faced with income loss, foreclosure or short-sale-potential properties, they are instead opting to share their space, often sacrificing for themselves the main living area for the tenant, to avoid being completely displaced from their homes," says Ariana Loucas, a real-estate agent in Maryland.
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Oakeson also says a landlord living that close to you tends to be more observant of your needs. In her most recent situation, she had a maintenance issue that was fixed within a couple of hours.
"He knew he needed to take care of us because we lived below him," she says. "A landlord doesn't want someone who's upset living that close."
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New York City landlord Al Thompson rents out the other half of the duplex he owns and lives in, and says it's definitely convenient to be close when there's an emergency, such as a locked-out tenant.
"You don't have to send people over to fix things," he says. "In that case, the closer to the property you are, the better."
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One of the biggest perks for Oakeson, though, is relationship-building. She continues to socialize with all three former landlords she shared space with.
"I've made lifelong friends," she says. "We're invited to their family events and we do stuff together all the time. We basically lived in their house."
It's the "becoming friends" part that could muddy the business relationship between a landlord and tenant, say lawyers Dave Crow and Janet Portman. Crow lives in a duplex next to his landlord, but says he always advises tenants against such an arrangement.
In Crow's case, the duplex he lives in was too good to pass up. Plus, he and his landlord have a cordial business relationship.
"The benefits come from the fact that he is a person who understands that it is more of a business relationship," Crow says.
But not all tenants and landlords living under the same roof can easily draw that line.
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Whom do you complain to?
If your upstairs apartment neighbor doesn't do his share of the upkeep on the premises or blares the stereo at all hours of the night, you would typically complain to the landlord. He acts as the intermediary between disputing tenants. When that upstairs neighbor is the landlord, it's a bit more complicated.
Read: When to call your landlord
Oakeson's worst experience living near her landlord came when her son, now 4, was a newborn. The landlord was newly married, owned the home and lived upstairs. Every night, Oakeson and her son were kept awake by constant "newlywed noise."
"How do you call him up and say, 'This is really loud and you need to stop'?" she says. "It was super uncomfortable. We left that place because it was so uncomfortable."
When your neighbor is the one in charge of your living situation, you lose your intermediate leverage. You're "giving up the hammer," says attorney Portman, who wrote "Every Tenant's Legal Guide."
And while maintenance and repair issues are usually made easier when the landlord is right there, there can be an added level of animosity if things aren't always resolved in a timely manner.
Oakeson recounts a time there was a drain issue in her laundry room. She talked to the landlord and he did the things he could do himself, but it didn't fix the problem.
"I got a little resentful," she says. "There was this leaking drain that wasn't a big deal to him, but it was to us."
The troll in the basement
On the other end of the spectrum is the landlord who is "too hands-on," Portman says. "He can become an obnoxious, intrusive landlord."
Crow says living so close gives a landlord "too much opportunity to snoop, visit without cause and blur the lines of what ought to be a business relationship."
In a tenants-rights blog he maintains on his law firm's website, Crow talks about one variety of overly nosy landlords: the troll in the basement. As Crow puts it, a troll is someone "whose quest for the American dream to own his own property stretched him so thin he had to move into the garage."
He describes such trolls as nosy, but not mindful of your needs. This may be an extreme example, but intrusive landlords are not uncommon.
"The problem when the landlord lives upstairs or downstairs is it's so easy for them to come and knock on your door, and the law says they can't," Crow says.
Depending on your state, a landlord is required to tell you when he's going to be coming on the premises, and to give a certain amount of notice. It's easy for a landlord to ignore those rules when he can just walk downstairs and knock.
And knowing that the landlord might stop by any time changes the way a tenant views her own home.
"We inherently kept our portion of the home spotless because of the thought that they could come to our door at any second and come inside," Oakeson says. "We don't want them to be upset and think we're trashing the place."
