He Charged His Friends Rent At His Uncle’s Property and Kept The Money For Himself. Was He Wrong?

If there’s one theme that seems to run through complaints about the younger generations it’s their perceived sense of entitlement – and housing is definitely a point of contention.

OP is close with her uncle, and when he learned that she’d gotten into college but would have to take out loans and work for her extra expenses, he offered to help.

This will be my first year in college. When I got accepted, the 1st person I told was my uncle. We’re very close because he took care of me when I was little because of my parent’s crazy work schedules.

Anyway, my grades were good enough to get me in but not enough to get me any scholarships. That means I’ll have to take out loans for tuition and work for my expenses.

When my uncle found out, he said I should just concentrate on school instead of working but my dad (his brother) said that money is tight right now so my parents can’t help me out as much as they want to.

He’s a real estate investor and decided to buy a property near to her college. She would live there free of charge, and instead of working, she could rent out the other 3 rooms and keep the money.

My uncle has investment properties all over the place so he said it’s not a big deal for him to buy another one near my campus, which he did. Then he had contractors renovate the house so emerging in there is brand new. He even had them install a bay window in the master bedroom just for me and I got to pick out everything else like the carpet and counters.

He told me he wants me to concentrate on school and not work. Instead, I can be his landlady and rent out the other 3 bedrooms and keep that money to fund my expenses.

She immediately presented an offer to her friends, who gladly accepted.

I have a group of friends who are attending the same school so I made a deal with them. Studio apartments are going between $900-1500 (not including utilities) around the campus with the expensive ones being closer.

My uncle’s house is one street over from campus so I can literally walk to class everyday. I’m charging my friends $700 per room or if they double up, $350 per person per month and split utilities evenly.

They all jumped at the offer and no one asked any questions until recently when one of them asked me how much the overall rent was.

The problem arose when they started asking more questions, and OP told them the whole deal.

Then, they were upset that she was living free and not giving them a sweet deal.

I was honest and told them about my uncle and our deal. That blew up in my face because now everyone of my friends are calling me greedy for charging them rent then pocketing the money.

We’re all in a huge fight and they all want to either pay nothing or “throw a couple hundred” in for utilities.

Her uncle told her it was her situation to solve, and after speaking to Reddit (ha!) they decided she would ask her friends to move out, because mixing business and friendship is never a good idea.

I cried to my uncle but he said now that I’m an adult, I need to make my own adult decision. He’ll stand by my decision. I don’t want to lose my friends but I don’t want to disappoint my family with bad grades either. I thought I was being fair with rent but literally all of my friends are calling me a greedy AH.

Update:

Thank you for reading my post and giving me advice. I went to my uncle, this time without crying, and told him some of the advice given on here and asked him for his advice. This time he didn’t tell me to make my own adult decisions and told me he was waiting for this conversation. This is what we agreed to do.

I texted all of my friends (former?) and told them because of the arguments and hurt feelings, we can no longer live together. My uncle offered to work out a lease for me in the beginning but I refused because these were my friends. Because no one signed a lease, we didn’t have to break any.

I was worried about them suing but my uncle said that the law in our state requires anything to do with real estate be in writing. Unlike other situations, real estate deals cannot be oral so I’m good. This time I took him up on the offer of creating a lease for me to have new tenants sign

Instead, she’s done research and is advertising the place – and will end up making more in the long run.

We spent the morning researching rent prices and making ads. My friends and I made the agreement at the beginning of summer. Now that there’s only a couple of weeks left until school starts, we found almost nothing within 3 miles of campus. There were some options further out but nothing was cheaper than $1,200 for a shared room and that was in an old house with window A/C units and 5 miles from campus.

When the house was being renovated, my uncle had central air and heating installed. We came to a rent price of $1,300 and placed ads in several places including FB.

Within an hour, I got a dozen messages. It’s 4 pm now and I literally have over 100 messages. Many of them don’t even need to see the house in person. Based off of the pictures and location, they want to submit their application today.

Some even offered to send me the deposit and 1 person said her dad will pay me the full semester amount today.

Let’s see what advice Reddit gave her that turned things around!

The top comment tells OP for sure to not back down.

They told her that being a landlord for friends and family can be tough in the best of times.

This person says rending from someone you know doesn’t mean they’re any less your landlord.

Basically, mixing money and friends/family can be tricky.

This person, though, chastising OP for not knowing when to keep quiet.

It seems like OP has learned a couple of valuable lessons.

So aside from losing some friends, all’s well that ends well.