Bad tenants are a nightmare.
Try to get rid of toxic renters at your property, and you can expect to incur thousands of dollars in costs: months of unpaid rents, damage to your property, eviction court costs, attorney or other legal help, and, of course, dozens of hours of your time wasted.
The best answer to avoid this appalling problem, as always, is preventing bad tenants in the first place.
You should start with aggressive, thorough tenant screening, including credit reports, criminal checks, eviction reports, income verification, character references, and rental history verification with several past landlords.
However, prevention doesn’t stop with tenant screening. Landlords need to send a consistent message — month in and month out — that they take the lease terms seriously and enforce them without hesitation.
That means conducting regular inspections, serving lease violation notices immediately, and checking in with tenants about maintenance, and most of all, serving eviction warning notices on the first day the rent officially becomes late.
If you do all of the above, you will prevent 99% of your tenant headaches.