A Field Guide to Columbus Landlords

By Daniel, our founder who manages a handful of buildings in Columbus and once lived in one with a raccoon situation nobody wants to hear about

You learn to spot them eventually. Not the way a birder spots a warbler—more the way you learn to clock which gas station on Sullivant is going to ask you to pay before you pump. It's pattern recognition built up over years of leases, walkthroughs, and texts that go unanswered between 4:47pm Friday and 9:14am Monday.

What follows is a field guide. I've rented in this city, I've managed in this city, and I've met every one of these people. If you've rented here for more than two leases, you have too.

The Grandview Inheritor

Habitat: Grandview Heights proper, the nicer end of Marble Cliff, fringe Upper Arlington. Occasionally seen as far south as Victorian Village but visibly uncomfortable there.

Distinguishing characteristics: Drives a clean older Lexus. Refers to the property as "my mother's house" for the entire duration of your tenancy, including the year after his mother dies.

The Grandview Inheritor did not choose to be a landlord. His mother died, or his father did, or both did within eighteen months of each other, and now he owns two to four units that were paid off in 1994. The math on this is obscene and he knows it—which is part of why every maintenance request lands like an accusation.

You will text him about the dishwasher. He will respond, six days later, with a paragraph that begins "Well, in my day we washed by hand." He is fifty-three. His day was 2007. He had a dishwasher in 2007.

He is not, on the whole, a bad person. He's just doing a job he never applied for, with no manager, no training, and a baseline assumption that anyone asking him for anything is trying to cheat him. If you catch him in a good mood—a Buckeyes win helps—he'll fix it himself, badly, on a Tuesday afternoon, and stay for forty minutes telling you about the neighborhood before the apartments went up.

The Short North Operator

Habitat: Short North, Italian Village, Olde Towne East, a couple of buildings in Franklinton he bought in 2019 and is now nervous about.

Distinguishing characteristics: Wears a quarter-zip. Has a real estate license he got "mostly for tax reasons." Genuinely a nice guy.

He owns six units. There is no LLC. Rent comes in through Venmo with notes like "🏠 october" and he Venmos receipts back from his personal account, which is also where his fantasy football payouts land. When his accountant brings this up he changes the subject.

The Short North Operator means well in a way that's almost painful to watch. He'll show up to fix the garbage disposal himself, which is good, except he doesn't know how to fix a garbage disposal, which is bad, and now there's water under the sink and he's apologizing on his hands and knees and you feel weird about it.

He's overleveraged. He won't say it but you can tell—he asks if you can pay early "just this once" with a casualness that doesn't quite land. The next lease renewal will be a $200 jump and he'll feel terrible about it and do it anyway because his variable rate reset.

He is one bad tenant away from getting out of the business entirely. You are probably not that tenant. The guy on the second floor might be.

The Absentee Owner

Habitat: Older Clintonville. The Hilltop. Stretches of Linden that the listing photos don't show in daylight. Anywhere with a porch that's seen things.

Distinguishing characteristics: A voicemail box that has been full since 2019. A property listed under an LLC named after a street he doesn't live on. A phone number with a 513 area code, or 941, or once, memorably, 808.

The Absentee Owner lives in Cincinnati. Or Sarasota. Or—and this is the dream scenario for him, the nightmare scenario for you—somewhere genuinely far, like Tucson, where the time difference means your 7pm furnace emergency is his 5pm and he is at a winery.

"My son handles maintenance." The son lives in Dayton. The son does not handle maintenance. The son works at a dispensary and has his own problems.

What's strange about the Absentee Owner is that the rent always finds him. The portal works. The late fees auto-apply. The eviction filings, when they come, are filed correctly and on time by a paralegal in a city you've never been to. The infrastructure of extraction is immaculate. The infrastructure of habitation is whatever you can rig up with a YouTube tutorial and a trip to the Morse Road Home Depot.

The Yardi Warrior

Habitat: The new builds near Polaris. The big complexes around Easton. Dublin, the parts that look like every other Dublin in America. Increasingly, Grandview Yard.

Distinguishing characteristics: A leasing office. A logo. A property manager named Brittany or Madison who will be gone in eight months and replaced by another Brittany or Madison.

The Yardi Warrior isn't a person. It's a company—three people in a regional office running 200-plus units through property management software they've been told is the industry standard and which they spend roughly forty percent of their working hours fighting.

Nobody at the Yardi Warrior is mad at you. Nobody at the Yardi Warrior knows who you are. Your maintenance request enters a queue, gets a number, and at some point a contractor named Dwayne shows up with the wrong part. Dwayne is great. Dwayne is the only person in this entire organization who has ever been inside your unit. Dwayne should be running the place.

The trick with the Yardi Warrior is that they're not malicious—they're just incapable of being responsive at the scale they've grown to. When something goes wrong, escalation is the only lever. Email. CC corporate. Reference the lease section by number. Be the squeaky wheel, in writing, because the software does not know how to handle a squeaky wheel and it will route you to a human just to make you stop.

The House-Hacker

Habitat: Victorian Village. German Village. The good blocks of Franklinton. Any duplex that's been chopped out of a house that was built for one family in 1908.

Distinguishing characteristics: Lives in the other half. Has a podcast about real estate, or wants to. Owns a smart doorbell that points at your door, not his.

The House-Hacker bought a duplex with an FHA loan in 2021 and is, technically, your neighbor. He is also your landlord. These two roles are in tension at all times and he has not figured out how to manage that tension, so he overcorrects in both directions—overly friendly when you pass in the shared hallway, weirdly formal in text messages about the rent.

He hears everything. You hear everything. The wall between your unit and his is 1908 plaster, which is to say it's basically a suggestion. You both know that he knows when you got home last night and you both pretend otherwise. This is the central pact of the arrangement.

The House-Hacker is genuinely the most responsive landlord you'll ever have, because your problem is happening fifteen feet from him. The downside is that he treats every problem as a shared problem, including ones that aren't, and you will at some point have a conversation about your shower habits that you did not consent to.

The Recent Convert

Habitat: Bought a place in Westgate, Merion Village, or the southern edge of Clintonville in 2020-2022. Moved to a bigger house. Decided to rent the old one out instead of selling because Zillow said it would appreciate.

Distinguishing characteristics: Has read one book about being a landlord. Quotes it. The book is bad.

The Recent Convert is the most dangerous category, because he combines the Short North Operator's amateurism with the Grandview Inheritor's sense of grievance, and he doesn't have either of their saving graces—no inherited goodwill toward the property, no fundamental decency about the situation. He's running the numbers in a spreadsheet and you are a line item that occasionally generates exceptions.

He read somewhere that you should never accept the first offer on rent. He read somewhere that you should always do a "walkthrough" the week before move-out and "set expectations." He read somewhere that pet rent should be non-refundable and that you can charge for "wear and tear" if you call it something else.

He's wrong about most of this and he'll find out the hard way—either when a tenant who knows ORC 5321 takes him to small claims, or when the appreciation stalls and the math stops working and he has to actually live in the spreadsheet he built. Until then, document everything. Especially the walkthrough.

The point of a field guide is not that the species are good or bad. They just are. You'll rent from at least two of these people in your time here, and if you're lucky, one of them will be the Short North Operator on a good year, and if you're unlucky, you'll get the Recent Convert in his first six months.

Know what you're looking at. Take pictures on day one. Read your lease. The rest is just weather.

We're DGApartments. We manage rentals in Columbus and Dayton and try really hard not to be the landlords in this article.