Most landlords think real estate is passive. Buy a property, collect rent, done.
Then a tenant smoking with an oxygen tank blows out an apartment, sending fire through 17 units. Or a family unfamiliar with US kitchens cuts a hole in the floor to build a charcoal pit, and a different property loses 35 units to fire. Ken’s seen both. After 30 years and more than 10,000 tenants, his takeaway is simple: buildings are predictable, people aren’t.
The legal side matters just as much as the physical side. You can’t just remove a problem tenant. Every state has landlord-tenant law, and every state leans differently (some heavily pro-landlord, some pro-tenant, some in between). The process usually means a notice, a right to cure, an inspection, and only then eviction if nothing changes. Skip steps and you’re the one in violation, not them.
On the screening side, Ken’s rule of thumb is simple: rent should be roughly a third of a tenant’s income. $800 rent means they need about $2,400 a month coming in. That’s it. And don’t write off C-class properties. They get a bad reputation, but plenty of good tenants live there, and it’s often the only affordable option in a given market.
Lessons learned:
- Treat every lease as a $12,000 contract (or whatever the annual total comes out to), not just “$1,000 a month.” That reframes how seriously you screen and enforce.
- Know your state’s landlord-tenant law before you need it. Waiting until you have a problem tenant is too late.
- Enforce the lease consistently. Most landlord headaches come from leases that exist on paper but aren’t actually enforced.
