Albert Lee seems more like an urban legend than a real landlord. Lee, who has managed his family’s Oakland, Calif., apartment building for 35 years, operates from a “give and take” philosophy — which he says often means that he gives more and takes less.

“Money isn’t everything,” he said. “Ultimately, things work out the best for all involved.”

So when Jenn Perkins, a 41-year-old research scientist, asked to look at a two-bedroom apartment in his building in January 2008, Lee offered to drive her to their first meeting. When she accepted the place, he knocked $50 off the rent, bringing it to $1,150, and waived the first two weeks. He prefers a month-to-month lease so tenants can move whenever they need to. When Perkins declined to pay an extra $50 for parking, he offered her a spot for free three days later.

As a result, even though rents are dropping in her neighborhood, Perkins can’t imagine moving and changing landlords. What’s more, she takes good care of the building. She cleans up trash outside and fixes water leaks immediately. A night owl, Perkins habitually washes her clothes late into the evening. But when she saw Lee’s handwritten note asking tenants not to use the washer and dryer after 10 p.m., she stopped.

“We send him cards with our rent checks, thanking him for letting us be his tenants,” she said. “You just want to do good things for him because he’s so good.”

She’s not alone. Most tenants who live in Lee’s two-bedroom apartments have been there for 10 years or more. His approach is unorthodox but not unique. Some landlords think keeping rents low and tenants happy is more profitable in the long run. It’s more common to raise rents when competition heats up and lower them when demand drops, but that attracts renters who are looking for the best deal — tenants prone to move at the first sign of cheaper rent elsewhere. Even in a market that favors renters, landlords like Lee have fewer vacancies.

Still, Lee’s unconventional approach doesn’t pencil out financially, said Len Zumpano, director of the Alabama Real Estate Research and Education Center at the University of Alabama. In the long run, he said, landlords still make more money if they raise rents during booms and offer move-in incentives during slow times.

“If you’ve got rising demand and rising rents for five years, and it goes south for one year or two,” he said, “charging what the market will bear still makes more sense.”

A generous approach might not be as financially profitable, but it pays landlords other dividends, said Matthew Hallinan, co-owner and manager of several hundred apartments in San Francisco, who also ascribes to this philosophy. For one thing, he said, you don’t get sued by discontented tenants. For another, tenants do their own policing of the building.

But cash still matters. Perkins recalls her previous apartment: a two-bedroom in a seedy part of town that was notable mostly for the rusty stove prone to gas leaks and the people begging for spare change and groceries. When her old landlord raised the rent, she started apartment-hunting.

After she moved, she followed her old apartment on Craigslist for months. She observed: “I think it finally rented in the fourth month.”