So, as a landlord (I bought a house with more bedrooms than I need, which I fill with roommates, and I help my mother rent out her lake cabin up north), hereās the trick/explanation for how (Iād guess) theyāre able to keep it cheap:
Many tenants are the most horrible, disgusting, destructive people you can imagine. They cost way, way more in damages than they pay in rent, and the way that you make your money is because the property is leveraged through debt, which is tax deductible if you rent it out, but not if you donāt, and the tax savings can make up for the damage, usually. But not in the worst cases. And since the worst cases keep getting kicked out of places or feuding with neighbors, theyāre most of the applicants. There are three ways to deal with this (four, if you count ānot having any tenants,ā but then youāre just a real estate speculator, and you arenāt helping solve the housing crisis at all, if anything, the opposite):
1) Keep rent high enough that you can pay for the damage for the average tenant. This is usually less than youād think. People who can pay more rent usually arenāt as shitty. (Well, in their long-term dwellings. The comfortably well-off can still be super super shitty to vacation housing.) So, if you raise the rent a little, the quality of tenant goes up a bunch (with diminishing returns), and you eventually find a nice balance.
2) Make sure thereās nothing valuable there for them to destroy. You canāt break whatās already dilapidated. People who pick this option are called āslum lords,ā and while I get it, lots of people wind up in their housing who wouldnāt have been shitty, and being shitty to your business partners first, as a preventive measure, is a pretty dishonorable way to conduct yourself. I canāt say that I donāt recommend this, under the wrong circumstances, but I probably wouldnāt be the friend of someone who does this.
3) This is what I do, and what Iād guess your landlord does: Make rent kind-of high in the first year, security deposit super, super high, and then cut the rent as much as you can in subsequent years, but only for people you get good vibes from, and maybe donāt renew people you donāt. Do your walk-through, or whatever, and people who are taking care of little maintenance things on their own? Who donāt have visible food-rot on the counters? Who arenāt the cause of noise complaints? Maybe send them the same contract again without the inflation adjustment. Maybe keep doing that year-after-year. Maybe do what you can to make sure they donāt go away.
So of-freaking-course they let you have a garden! Not because they like gardens. (Maybe they do, maybe not.) But because they love tenants who are the sort of people who garden.
Remember, some of what youāre paying in rent is for housing. Most of it is you subsidizing, in expectation, people way shittier than you to their surroundings. (In much the same way that most of what youāre paying in health insurance is subsidizing, in expectation, people way sicker than you.)