Tip of the Month - January, 2020.

Problem tenants are the bane of landlording business. They are always testing you. They are the last ones to pay and the first ones to complain. They are the ones who change their own locks, paint their walls flat black, adopt stray animals, report you to the health department and invite their latest friends to move in with them, all without ever saying a word to you. They can be noisy, contrary, destructive, malevolent, or hypocritical all at the same time or at various times. They enjoy their music one way, loud, especially between midnight and sunup, and they can cuss as well as any guttersnipe, but what they seem to enjoy most is misquoting landlord-tenant laws to you. They love those incredulous looks on you face when they tell you what your legal responsibilities are as their landlord/landlady and what their rights are as your tenants.

Unless you inherit them from a previous owner, you will never have the displeasure of encountering them if you practice prevention whenever possible, if you select tenants carefully, enforce agreements assertively and collect rents promptly. An ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure, for cures are costly, agonizing, time-consuming, crisis-oriented, and sometimes downright dangerous to life, limb, and property. Prevention methods, on the other hand are not cheap either, but neither are they costly. They may cause dyspepsia at times, but they are hardly agonizing. They do take some time to do, but they save much time in the long run. What is most important is that they serve to eliminate crises altogether, and they never endanger anyone or anything.