landlord 101

Pay attention when reading Jeff Adler's post...Notice he never had a mortgage? Yeah.. Where would he be if he'd had a mortgage when Miss "Professional Squatter" showed up???
I "had" a rental.. what a PITA.. I've been a renter, I never treated someone else's property like my rental was treated... Selling it was the best thing I ever did... Thank God I sold it before Covid when the government decided paying rent was optional..
We had a guy that I worked with that was a well-paid supervisor. He had a dog and a few month old newborn and a one other child. We rented him a 3 bedroom on a nice double lot with a one car attached garage. This was our second. It was a repossessed HUD home that we spent months rehabbing. It was pretty damn nice when we rented it out. We had no huge problem getting the rent but Mike suddenly informed us they had bought a home in a small town a few miles away. When we went to inspect our house for repairs for the next renter we found out why he moved. His dog had fleas it was summertime when white tube socks were popular. (What ever happened to that? LOL) We went into the house and in a matter of seconds my socks were dark brown from fleas. Complete infestation. Then we found 12 55 gallon plastic drums behind the garage full of used diapers with urine and baby **** and household food garbage filled on top with rainwater. He stopped his rural garbage pickup! He refused to talk to me at work and go clean it up. We bombed the house and crawl space multiple times and got rid of the fleas. I was especially pissed about the fleas because we completely renovated the crawl with construction grade plastic covered with pea gravel, new plumbing and lighting. It was a nice tall crawl space and this made it easy to work on and no dirt or sand. We also insulated down under to keep the bills down. I found a guy in town with a skid steer with the barrel claw attachment. I took the day off and he loaded my mom's farm truck 3 times with the barrels. I strategically backed up into Mikes driveway at his new place and did hole shots until all the barrels full of **** where in his driveway. While I was there I noticed his dog was in a nice new kennel outside.