&gt;  Nobody&#x27;s going to come by and drop off a check if you lose money, but they&#x27;ll certainly be there to collect if your property goes up in value.<p>I mean this in the nicest way possible:<p>Do you live in California, and&#x2F;or rent in San Francisco?<p>Prop 13 ensures that property values -and thus the taxes due on that property- are only reassessed when a property changes hands. If you&#x27;ve held on to a property since Prop 13&#x27;s passage, your property taxes have not increased in <i>37 years</i>.<p>If you&#x27;re a landlord in San Francisco, the following additional things apply:<p>You can recover the 100% of the cost of any legally mandated building improvements from your tenants through rent increases.<p>If you pay for your tenants&#x27; utilities, you can recover 100% of utilities cost increases from your tenants.<p>You can recover either 100% or 50% (depending on the number of units in your building) of capital improvement costs from your tenants.<p>In the case of increases in Operating and Maintenance expenses, you can <i>permanently</i> increase your tenants&#x27; base rent by up to 7%. Small landlords can do this <i>every</i> year. Large landlords can do this once every <i>five</i> years. Unlike the capitol improvements and legally-mandated-improvements recovery mechanisms (which end when the landlord has recovered what he can legally recover), this increase <i>never</i> goes away.<p>There are <i>even</i> provisions for increasing rents, if they are extraordinarily below &quot;market rate&quot; for extraordinary reasons.<p>Read this and be enlightened: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfrb.org&#x2F;index.aspx?page=947" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfrb.org&#x2F;index.aspx?page=947</a><p>In the five years I&#x27;ve been here, I&#x27;ve only ever a landlord ask for an O&amp;M rent increase <i>once</i>. His petition included a wide variety of line items that even a child could have seen were inapplicable, [0] so his petition was denied. [1]<p>Landlords who hang on to properties to <i>provide housing</i> see only slow, gradual changes in their operating costs, which can almost <i>always</i> be <i>completely</i> recovered from their tenants. Their property taxes will <i>never</i> go up for as long as they live. Frankly, they have a pretty sweet deal.<p>[0] The landlord was <i>clearly</i> using an O&amp;M petition to attempt to recover the cost of renovations whose primary purpose were to double the number of &quot;bedrooms&quot; in each newly vacated unit in the building so they could collect 1.5x to 1.75x the rent.<p>[1] Given that a landlord can <i>trivially</i> recover increases in his O&amp;M costs, why have I <i>never</i> had an O&amp;M-related rent increase in five years? Is it -perhaps- that landlords in the city just <i>don&#x27;t</i> see significant increases in their O&amp;M expenses?