Landlords, Absentee

The term “absentee landlord” describes the situation where a person with the ultimate ownership of land—and this may be an actual person, a corporate entity, or even the state itself—does not personally use the land but instead extracts payment for its use by another. In one sense most landlords are “absent” in that the land is let for a rent to another person who enjoys physical possession and use of it, but an “absentee landlord” is a more pejorative description. It is meant to signify a landowner whose only interest in the land is to extract its economic value and who pays little or no regard to the state of the land or the welfare—economic, social, or political—of the person who is paying the rent. Such landlords are “absent” both in the sense that they have little or no social, emotional, or physical attachment to the land, and also because in many cases they are physically distant from the land, preferring either to regard the land as if it were merely an entry on a profit and loss account or, in some cases, to appoint a more local agent who will manage the land for the landlord on a purely commercial basis.

Historically absentee landlords have generated both social and economic problems on a grand scale, especially when the absenteeism is allied with external domination of the local territory. The Protestant owners of lands in Catholic Ireland in the seventeenth century and the mainly English absentee landowners of Prince Edward Island, Canada, in the eighteenth century are well-known examples of how absentee ownership can go hand in hand with “colonial” dominance, but this is not merely an historical problem. Absentee owners of Scottish Highland sporting estates; anonymous state control of land in less developed countries; corporate investors (e.g., pension funds) in city center business districts; absentee owners of Midwestern agribusinesses in the United States; and absent landlords of low-quality, deteriorating residential properties in most of our major cities are just a few examples from the twenty-first century.

Absentee landlords are perceived to be a threat to the economic and social viability of communities. By extracting value from the land (rent) but not spending or reinvesting in the local community, absentee landlords produce an outward flow of economic capital. They drain the local community. When accompanied by a constant turnover of short-term tenants, the social capital of a community is diminished and all of those community activities that depend on the interest and commitment of stable residents are lost. Given that absentee landlords may regard the land as merely another form of economic asset, rather than as a social and economic resource for the community in which the land is situated, many absentee landlords observe only the bare minimum of standards in relation to the land and the buildings on it. Properties owned by absentee landlords often are in a poor state of repair and building and zoning controls are either ignored or observed to the minimum standard permitted. An effective local management team can prevent some of the worse excesses, but the geographically absent landlord may be slow to respond to requests from the tenants or the local authorities. In many cases such landlords will simply sidestep calls for repairs or renovations and attempt to avoid local taxation.

Absentee landlords also generate numerous legal problems. Enforcing obligations in letting arrangments, serving of notices for the enforcement of tenants’ rights, and ensuring observance of public rights affecting the property (for example public access routes and rights of way) are common problems. In extreme cases in countries without a systematic register or record of land ownership, it may be difficult to identify who actually is the ultimate owner and this can lead to problems of squatting as well as making the land economically stagnant.

The economic and social cost of absentee landlords can be considerable and many countries or localities have attempted to impose regulatory or legal requirements either in order to curb absenteeism or to remove its harmful effects. These have included public access to land registers in order to identify absent owners, tax incentives for owners who maintain an economic presence in the local community and penal local taxes for those draining the local economy, enhanced procedures for the recovery of land for local landlords when faced with defaulting tenants, compulsory enfranchisement (sale of the land to the tenant) on long leases, and the enhancement of enforcement powers for violators of building codes.

Martin J. Dixon

absentees. Concern over the failure of Irish proprietors to reside in the country has a long history, somewhat misleading in its apparent continuity. In the medieval period, particularly in the 14th century, Irish parliaments denounced absentee proprietors for taking resources out of the lordship, neglecting their lands, and failing to play their part in defence. In 1360 a council at Kilkenny complained to Edward III that ‘five sixths of the land and more’ were in absentee hands. This was an exaggeration, but a pardonable one: the greatest absentee, Edward's son Lionel of Clarence, was by marriage earl of Ulster and lord of Connacht, and had further lands in Kilkenny and Munster. Between 1297 and 1380 a series of royal ordinances threatened absentees with sequestration of anything from a proportion of their revenues to the lands themselves if these were not defended. Such measures were patchily applied, for many absentees had influence at court. This produced added friction.

The ill repute of absentee landlords in later times has given these medieval criticisms resonance. They need careful handling. From 1171 some of those who acquired Irish lordships—such as the Marshals, Lacys, and Verdons—already had extensive lands in England and Wales, and even Normandy. Like all medieval magnates, they were peripatetic, and hence absent from most of their estates most of the time. This was taken for granted; possession of widespread centres of influence was a mark of status, and one of the ways in which regional societies were tied to the court. Many lesser proprietors, both lay and ecclesiastical, also held lands on both sides of the Irish Sea. Consciousness of absenteeism as a problem appeared later, in particular circumstances. From the 1240s English law, which in the absence of a male heir divided lands equally between heiresses, led to repeated partitions. The Marshal heiresses, for instance, carried diminishing fragments of Leinster to other English noble families, to whom they might be of limited significance. A clearer distinction emerged between lords who were normally resident and those who were usually absent; the former resented the latter and used them as scapegoats when explaining the condition of Ireland to the king. This happened at a time when frontiers were contracting, revenues declining, and defence costs rising. Absentee lordship became a problem as much for absentees as for their critics. Economic and political pressures in the later 14th century led many, including the Despensers who sold Kilkenny Castle to the Butlers, to liquidate their assets. The Mortimers, whose vast Irish lordships retained their interest, were the major exception.

The supposed ill effects of absentee landlordism reappeared as a major cause of concern in the 18th century. Absentee landlords, generally assumed to be resident in England, were pilloried as a parasitic class who neglected their estates and drained the country of capital. Estimates of the sums remitted annually in rents to absentees rose from £325,000 in 1729, when Thomas Prior's A List of the Absentees of Ireland, and the Yearly Value of their Estates and Incomes Spent Abroad first appeared, to Arthur Young's 1779 estimate of £730,000. Yet this latter figure was still less than 14 per cent of the total annual rental of over £5.3 million. Absenteeism was also a prominent part of the more radical assault on landlordism mounted in the mid‐ and late 19th century. Yet a return of 1872 showed that 46 per cent of estates had resident landlords, while the owners of another 25 per cent lived elsewhere in Ireland.

Absenteeism was in any case a complex phenomenon. Owners of more than one property had no choice but to be absentees somewhere, while others were called away by the demands of politics or office. Many landlords who were absentees from their main Irish estates remained either seasonally or permanently resident elsewhere in Ireland. Most important of all, absenteeism was not synonymous with bad estate management: levels of landlord investment depended on personal attitudes, not residence.

Bibliography

Frame, R. , English Lordship in Ireland 1318–1361 (1982)
Vaughan, W. E. , Landlords and Tenants in Mid‐Victorian Ireland (1994)

RFF/ and Robin Frame

absentee ownership system under which a person (or a corporation) controls and derives income from land in a region where he does not reside. Abuses existed in absenteeism in pre-Revolutionary France, in 19th-century Ireland, in E and SE Europe before World War I, and in some oil-producing nations of the Middle East as late as the second half of the 20th cent. Revolution and reform have abolished or greatly reduced the amount of absentee control throughout the world. In the United States the term has been applied to the concentration of economic power through various corporate devices. Chain stores and branch banking are sometimes classified as types of absentee ownership.

absentee landlord A landowner not normally resident on the estate from which he derived income and which was generally managed through an agent. While some landlords cared for the welfare of their tenants, others engaged in such practices as the issue of very short leases, which gave unscrupulous agents opportunities to raise rents frequently and evict anyone unable to pay. Abuses were common in pre-revolutionary France and in Ireland, where successive confiscations had led to Irish estates falling into English hands.

absentee landlord a landlord who does not live at and rarely visits the property they let. The term was traditionally associated with Anglo-Irish families of the Protestant Ascendancy, as in Maria Edgeworth's novel The Absentee (1822), depicting the struggles of the son of the house to rectify the results of his father's mismanagement.