Reyna Vasquez is forty-six. She worked for fourteen years on the front desk of two mid-priced hotels in the Colonia Cuauhtémoc, put herself and later a niece through school, and in 2019 bought a small twelve-unit building in Roma Sur, which she now runs herself. She is the first landlord in her family. We met at a café on Calle Chihuahua, on a Thursday morning, before her rounds.
Q The building. What is it, physically?
A
Twelve apartments, four floors, one small courtyard with two lemon trees. Built in 1962. I bought it in November 2019 for a number I still can't quite say out loud in public. I renovated four of the twelve apartments over two years — one at a time, as leases ended — and did not raise the rent on the other eight. Six of my tenants have been in the building longer than I have. Two of them remember the earthquake of 1985 from that specific staircase.
Q How did the down payment happen?
A
Fourteen years of the front desk. A very long and specific conversation with my mother in the summer of 2018. And a partnership with my youngest brother, who put in less money than I did and is the silent partner. My mother's part of the money — I want to say this carefully — was not a gift. It was a loan. We wrote it down. She wrote the terms. She was tougher than any bank I have spoken to. She is now paid back, with interest, at a rate slightly above the mortgage rate. She is not the last person I will borrow from.
Q The conversation with your mother. Can you say more?
A
It was one evening in July, on the balcony of her apartment in Iztapalapa. I told her the number I needed. She asked me three questions. She asked me what I would do if the building lost half its tenants in a bad year. She asked me what I would do if my brother wanted his share back at a moment I could not pay it. She asked me what I would do if I got sick and could not work the desk. I had answered two of the three. She sent me home to answer the third. I came back the following Sunday. She wrote the check the Wednesday after that.
Q What was the answer to the third question?
A
Disability insurance. She had had a friend, a fabric-shop owner, who had lost her business to a stroke, and she was — she is — very serious about this. I bought the insurance the day after I bought the building. It costs me 4,200 pesos a month. It is the only bill I have never resented.
Q What is a good landlord?
A
A landlord who fixes the thing on Tuesday when the tenant tells her on Monday. Everything else is decoration. If the tenant tells you on Monday and you fix the thing on Friday, you are the kind of landlord my old landlord was. He did not know me. I do not want to be him.
Q You did not raise the rent on the eight sitting tenants. Why?
A
Because I bought the building at a price that worked without raising their rent. I did the arithmetic. I did not need to raise the rent. If I had needed to, I would have bought a different building, or a smaller one, or waited a year. This is the whole of it. The problem with raising the rent on a sitting tenant is not the rent. It is the letter. Every letter you write raising a rent takes a month off your life. I do not have unlimited months.
Q The renovations. What did you change?
A
Kitchens. All four. Not gutted — improved. Better sink. Better light. Better ventilation for a Mexican kitchen. New floors in three of them. New windows in one. I did not turn the flats into show-flats. If you walked into one of my renovated apartments, you would not photograph it. That is on purpose. I did not want to signal a new kind of landlord to the block. I wanted the flats to be quietly better and to rent for slightly less than the block average. They do.
Q Terms. You said you use your own terms. What are they?
A
Three, mostly. One: the security deposit is returned in full within thirty days unless there is a specific written reason. I have returned it in full in nine out of nine cases so far. Two: the tenant may sublet a room to a family member, with my written notice, at cost. I do not charge for the second name on the door. Three: if a tenant loses her job and tells me by the fifth of the month, we have a conversation before the tenth. I have had this conversation twice. Both times the tenant is still in the building.
Q Your niece, whom you put through school — where is she?
A
She's a nurse, at ABC Observatorio. She is twenty-eight. She lives on the third floor of my building, in the smallest of the four renovated apartments. She pays rent. She pays it late sometimes. I fix her sink faster than the other tenants' sinks, and I do not apologise for that. Some things do not have to be fair. They have to be honest.
Q Money. Are you a rich woman now?
A
No. I am a woman with a building. Those are different words. My net worth on paper is significant. My private ledger is that I have a job I like — I run the building, I keep the books, I know all twelve doors — and I have a small apartment on the ground floor that I did not renovate, because I did not need to, and a savings account that could hold six months of empty units. If a rich woman is the woman with a house she does not walk in, I am not one. If a rich woman is the woman with time to have this conversation with you at 10 a.m. on a Thursday, then yes, I am one.
Q Last question. If you could tell a twenty-eight-year-old woman at the front desk of a hotel one thing, what would it be?
A
Open a separate bank account. Move a specific number into it every payday, before anything else. Ten percent, if you can. Five, if you cannot. Do not tell anyone about it for ten years. Do not use it. Do not name it. Do not withdraw from it, not for a wedding, not for a car, not for a bad month. In ten years, it will be roughly the down payment on a building. It will not be enough. That is fine. In year eleven, have the conversation with your mother.
✦ End of Interview N° 01