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Concept

Landlord

A landlord is the owner of a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate which is rented or leased to an individual or business, who is called a tenant (also a lessee or renter). When a juristic person is in this position, the term landlord is used. Other terms include lessor and owner. The term landlady may be used for the female owners. The manager of a pub in the United Kingdom, strictly speaking a licensed victualler, is referred to as the landlord/landlady. In political economy it refers to the owner of natural resources alone (e.g., land, not buildings) from which an economic rent, a form of passive income, is the income received. The concept of a landlord may be traced back to the feudal system of manoralism (seignorialism), where a landed estate is owned by a Lord of the Manor (mesne lords), usually members of the lower nobility which came to form the rank of knights in the high medieval period, holding their fief via subinfeudation, but in some cases the land may also be directly subject to a member of higher nobility, as in the royal domain directly owned by a king, or in the Holy Roman Empire imperial villages directly subject to the emperor. The medieval system ultimately continues the system of villas and latifundia (peasant-worked broad farmsteads) of the Roman Empire. In modern times, "landlord" describes any individual, or entity such as a government body or an institution, who charges rent to a person living in a home they do not own. A rental agreement, or lease, is the contract defining such terms as the price paid, penalties for late payments, the length of the rental or lease, and the amount of notice required before either the homeowner or tenant cancels the agreement. In general, responsibilities are given as follows: the homeowner is responsible for making repairs and performing property maintenance, and the tenant is responsible for keeping the property clean and safe. Many owners hire a property management company to take care of all the details of renting their property out to a tenant.

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Related concepts (16)
Leasehold estate
A leasehold estate is an ownership of a temporary right to hold land or property in which a lessee or a tenant holds rights of real property by some form of title from a lessor or landlord. Although a tenant does hold rights to real property, a leasehold estate is typically considered personal property. Leasehold is a form of land tenure or property tenure where one party buys the right to occupy land or a building for a given length of time. As a lease is a legal estate, leasehold estate can be bought and sold on the open market.
Lease
A lease is a contractual arrangement calling for the user (referred to as the lessee) to pay the owner (referred to as the lessor) for the use of an asset. Property, buildings and vehicles are common assets that are leased. Industrial or business equipment are also leased. Basically a lease agreement is a contract between two parties: the lessor and the lessee. The lessor is the legal owner of the asset, while the lessee obtains the right to use the asset in return for regular rental payments.
Land tenure
In common law systems, land tenure, from the French verb "tenir" means "to hold", is the legal regime in which land owned by an individual is possessed by someone else who is said to "hold" the land, based on an agreement between both individuals. It determines who can use land, for how long and under what conditions. Tenure may be based both on official laws and policies, and on informal local customs (insofar higher law does allow that).
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