When you are the landlord and renting out part of your home to tenants, you might consider not disclosing that you are the landlord. In reality, this is simply not legal in many states. Of course, as always check with a real estate attorney or error on the side of caution and disclose it within the lease.
Pros and Cons For Telling Tenants You Are The Landlord
Pros:
From a tenants perspective, they know you are a moments notice away if there is any real emergency. They have a piece of mind knowing you are constantly looking after the property and know the problems that are going on (ie: if a basement is flooding you are there in seconds to resolve the problem or if a tree fell you are there to cut up the tree and dispose of it).
From the landlord perspective, you know what your tenants are up to. You know if they are throwing loud parties, if they are breaking the lease with having pets over, if they had a new born and need to move out due to occupancy standards etc.
Cons:
As a tenant there is a conflict of them seeing you on a regular basis knowing you are getting a financial gain from their rent.
For Landlords, you might not feel as free to say jokes around the property with friends or play sports outside if you need to keep up the good image with tenant landlord relationship.
To avoid any possible drama with a tenant you would simply need to be confident that you know how to screen your tenants.
How To Make Tenant Not Know You, The Landlord, Live on The Property
You might want to be a covert landlord to have more peace of mind that you won’t get any maintenance calls late at night nor any other awkward remarks. If you believe that it is a best practice that the tenant does not know that you are the landlord, you’d have to be extremely covert. There are many extremes that are possible.
Any person can use their effort and time to find who owns a property. Using tax records would be the simplest method to look up who owns the property unless if the property is in an LLC (for the most part).
It might be possible to have the property in an LLC and use a P.O. box, and then your name would not be attached to the property. But then someone could find out who the owner is of the LLC through a business database search of the state and review the articles of organization. It is also probably highly unlikely that you can have the property in an LLC with a residential owner-occupied mortgage.
In addition to an LLC and a P.O. Box, to keep it a better secret, you can have a realtor do the showings and have a property managing company do the day to day operations so you are an incognito hands-off house hacker.
The mindset of keeping it a secret that you are the tenant’s landlord is you are able to observe your tenant’s behavior without you or them putting on a front and the tenant psychologically will be better off not knowing who they are giving money to since we landlords are essentially making money off them.
Why It Does Not Matter If They Know you Are Their Landlord
If tenants are screened properly there should not be any problems with them. To avoid any possible drama with a tenant you would simply need to be confident that you know how to screen your tenants. Have a process in place that involves as much of a thorough search as possible. This should be done because you are giving someone access to your property for the length of the lease but should be particularly careful with this process because you are living next to someone that has keys to your property.
