Prejudice
My husband doesn't have a “real” job. (He hates it when I say it that way, so I say it that way a lot). He takes care of our two small children and manages our real estate investments. Part of our decision to move out of California and into Austin, Texas was to take the equity from our home there and invest it in real estate here. We currently have 5 rental properties around town that we rent.
After he finds, buys and fixes up a place, he places the ads, interviews perspective tenants and rents it out. My husband, we'll call him Charlie, is the face of our real estate empire. Our empire looks like an athletic, white, 6'1” bald man with a goatee.
I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blog lately. He has a piece on Pervasive Prejudice. In it, he talks about how car salespeople pre-judge their buyers based on race and gender. That lead us to thinking...
In our quest to live the lifestyle that we have chosen we have given up our love for nice cars. Instead of the Land Rover and Audi that we owned in California, we now have a VW van and 2 old Saabs. And I'm talking old, one of them is an unkept 1968 9-3 wagon. It's a very rare car, but we've never gotten around to fixing it up. Which makes it perfect for lugging around tools and the lawn mower fits conveniently in the back.
When a tenant has a problem, Charlie shows up in his beater old car in “work clothes”. Likely, he is unshaven. To our tenants, that is their landlord. One of our houses in particular has been a problem. Or the tenants that have lived there have been. So, we are wondering, if instead of showing up in a battered old car, unshaven and in grubby clothes, he showed up in a nice car (we'd have to borrow one) and dressed up, would the tenants treat the place differently? Have the tenants that have lived in that house so far treated it so badly because they feel that their landlord doesn't care about such things as a clean house and timely rent? Are they reacting, like the car salesperson, not to him, but to his appearance?
Posted at 02:06PM Jan 12, 2007 by sarad in General | Comments[1]