Renting
Seven questions we ask every landlord
We ask these before we agree to list a rental, in this order, on the phone. The order matters more than the questions: by number four you can hear whether the answers are being remembered or invented.
We ask these before we agree to list a rental. On the phone, in this order, in about eleven minutes. We turn down roughly one owner in five on the strength of the answers, which is a proportion that has been stable for two years and tells you something about the market rather than about us.
You can ask the same seven at a viewing. The order is doing more work than the questions are: the first three are checkable facts, so by the fourth you can hear the difference between someone remembering and someone inventing.
1. When did the last tenant move out, and why?
Open, factual, easy. A good landlord answers in one sentence with a month in it. "March. She bought a house in Round Rock."
What you are listening for is a date. Vagueness here — "oh, a while back now" — on a unit that has been advertised for six weeks means it has been advertised for six weeks and nobody has taken it, and you want to know why before you find out yourself.
2. What did you refund of their deposit, and what did you withhold?
This is the one that separates the field, and it is second on purpose, while the conversation is still easy.
Texas gives a landlord thirty days to return a deposit with an itemised list of anything withheld. Most owners you speak to will either say "all of it" without hesitating, or start explaining. The explanation is the signal. Normal wear is not chargeable and every landlord knows it; an owner who withheld $600 for carpet cleaning on a two-year tenancy is an owner who will do it to you, and they will tell you about it unprompted because in their own mind it was reasonable.
Ask for the number, not the policy. Policies are aspirational. Numbers happened.
3. What was the July electricity bill?
In Austin this question is worth more than any other single fact about the building. The difference between a 2021 build with a modern heat pump and a 1978 building with the original ducts is real money every summer — routinely $220 a month between two apartments of the same size on the same street.
A landlord who manages their own property knows this number or can find it. One who says "it varies" is telling you they have never looked, which usually also means the last tenant complained and got nowhere.
For the record, Cypress Row Two ran about $180 last July. The older stock on the same street runs closer to $400. That gap is $2,640 a year and it is invisible on every listing site including, until we started asking, this one.
4. Who do I call at eleven at night when the water heater fails, and what happened the last time?
This is the hinge. The first three had answers that exist somewhere in writing. This one requires the owner to have actually been through it.
A prepared landlord gives you a name and a story: "Me, and if I don't pick up, Ruiz Plumbing — they replaced the unit in 2024, took two days because the part came from Houston." An unprepared one gives you a process that has never been tested: "You'd contact the management company and they'd dispatch someone."
By the end of this answer you know whether you are renting from a person who owns a house or from a person who owns a spreadsheet. Both can be fine. Only one of them is fine at eleven at night.
5. What did you do at the last three renewals?
Not "what is your policy on increases" — that invites a reassuring answer that costs nothing to give. Ask what actually happened, three times, with numbers.
Austin rents fell then recovered over the last three years and the honest answers reflect that. What you are hoping to hear is a small increase or none, on tenants they wanted to keep. What should worry you is a landlord who has never renewed anybody, because a unit that turns over every twelve months is turning over for a reason and the reason is rarely the tenant.
6. What is not in the photos?
A deliberately awkward question, asked late, when refusing to answer has become socially expensive.
Every property has one. The good answer is immediate and slightly rueful — parking, the road noise, the fact that the second bedroom takes a bed and nothing else. Cypress Row's answer is parking: one covered space, and the street is permit-only after six, which we put in the second line of the listing because a household with two cars should find that out on a screen rather than at the door.
The bad answer is "nothing, really." There is always something. An owner who cannot name it either has not looked at their own property in two years or has decided it is your job to discover it.
7. Would you live in it?
Slightly unfair, and we ask it anyway, because the pause is the answer. It is the only one of the seven where we care more about the two seconds than the sentence.
What we do with the answers
If questions two, four and six come back badly we decline the listing. Not out of principle — out of arithmetic. A landlord who withholds deposits creatively and cannot name a plumber generates complaints that cost more to handle than the letting fee is worth, and the complaints arrive from a tenant who trusted our name.
When we do list, the answers go on the page. The seven questions being answered is the reason Cypress Row's listing can say "the landlord has already answered all seven" and mean something specific rather than being a phrase.
And the question behind all seven
Whether to be renting at all. At $3,450 a month you are spending $41,400 a year, and the useful comparison is not against a mortgage payment but against the whole cost of owning — the down payment you would stop earning interest on, the tax and insurance, the transaction costs at both ends. The rent-versus-buy arithmetic gives you the month at which buying overtakes renting, and it is usually later than people expect. Sometimes much later, in which case a good landlord answering seven questions honestly is a genuinely good outcome and not a consolation prize.
