Mike Charton has lived in his apartment for many years. When I asked my fellow author what kept him there, he listed five things. Those five things reflect reasons renters stay in their rental homes for a long time. He first listed the neighbors he has. Second, he can write, rather than working on a […]

One bad tenant can destroy a rental business. That’s why we screen applicants carefully by examining credit reports, rental histories, employment information, and verifying that the information is accurate and belongs to the person applying to rent. Failure to do that is a disservice to other tenants and to our investment. But you know that […]

Losing an eviction starts when you send a notice to your tenant demanding that he or she pay the past due rent or move, but you make a mistake and lose the eviction. One or more of four errors bite landlords and guarantee a lost eviction. Bad Form Bad or incorrect form tops the list. […]

How can you conform to a law that has no specific, measurable requirements? Impossible? Perilous? Case in point are the occupancy standards for rental properties that HUD expects rental owners to abide by. A rental owner may have legitimate cause for limiting the number of people allowed to live in a property. That limit may […]

Who won’t be paying the rent next month? Half of US tenants can’t afford to pay their rent, CNN reported on January 24. Not surprising since the median rents have increased 30.5 percent since 2019, up $309, according to Zillow. Even though eviction filings have increased 50 percent from their pre-pandemic rates most tenants will […]

Law-abiding citizens don’t expect the police to come knocking on their doors with search warrants and raid their houses. But what if, unbeknownst to them, they aren’t law-abiding? That’s what happened to Adrian Hart of Toledo, Ohio. Adrian had applied for a “work from home” job and got hired by a company called Ovebone to […]

The owner of ABC Technology (not its real name) was surfing EBay looking for used equipment and found two new computers for sale across town that matched two she had seen delivered from a customer’s order the day before. Curiosity piqued, she discovered more than $300,000 in equipment sold on EBay by two of her […]

Crime does pay. Credit Karma made millions with their scam for which the Federal Trade Commission fined them $3 million, lunch money to Credit Karma. They garnered 2500 data points from each unsuspecting consumer who answered their ad that claimed they were pre-approved for a credit card. Those data points will provide a never-ending supply […]

Several years ago a lawyer called me who was representing a property owner who had been sued by someone who got injured on the owner’s property. The owner hadn’t done much maintenance, preventive or corrective, and the injury resulting from that lack of maintenance brought about the lawsuit. In what seemed to me like a […]