An absentee landlord is a landlord who does not use the property as his residence and rarely, if ever, visits it.
The absentee landlord can either be an individual or a company.
In some cases, tenants have never even seen their landlords in person as all their work are done on their behalf by real estate agents and management companies they hire.
This can sometimes be due to landlords who are living and working overseas.
However, there are pros and cons for both a landlord and tenant.
While a landlord might never have to deal with the hassle of managing the property, their knowledge of the house and what is going on inside highly depends on the information communicated by agents and property managers.
This is actually very common in Singapore where households purchase a second home and choose to the keep the first one as a source of rental income while continuing to pay property tax.
They no longer have any emotional ties with the old home and it becomes just a statement on their personal income statements.
And while a tenant might not have to experience the awkwardness of living with a landlord in the house, seldom meeting him will mean a lack of communication needed to build relationships.
This would result in a landlord-tenant relationship that is solely based on numbers.
If the numbers don’t add up, or if the tenant refuses to match an increase in rental, then the landlord would simply make a business decision to rent to someone else.