In an ideal world, your experience with your McKinney investment properties would be a smooth one:
We all know that the real world is a bit different.
You can tackle maintenance problems with a little bit of elbow grease, planning, and outside help. Market analysis and some proper bookkeeping can keep you in the black—but tenants can be a whole different breed of trouble altogether. They are the engine that powers your McKinney investment properties—and when the engine breaks down, so does profitability.
Even the best tenants are human: and we all have our challenging days. However, there is a particular type of renter that can make investors want to think twice about investing in property. These predatory renters are often known as “Professional Tenants,” and take some special handling to understand and avoid.
While we've touched on them briefly before, in today's blog post, we're diving deep to warn investors about what they need to know.
A Professional Tenant (occasionally known as a Professional Renter) is a tenant that goes well beyond the scope of a merely being challenging. They are not a tenant who fails to understand what you expect of them or who falls on hard times.
A Professional Tenant is someone who has made an effort to understand federal, state, and local laws and policies to exploit loopholes and technicalities for their benefit. This type of renter is out to game the system in any way that they can. They sign a lease for your McKinney investment properties with no intention of paying what they owe and can leave you on the other side of a lease term with thousands in unpaid legal fees, an empty unit, and months of back rent—and they've done it to other investors before.
Professional Tenants can be difficult to spot right away. They’re often veritable chameleons who excel at passing themselves off as excellent tenants and obscuring past misconduct. If you have a proper application and screening process, you can look at a few key red flags. You may find some "odd" things in their past, such as:
One or two of these items shouldn’t have you too concerned. Many well-meaning and hard-working people find themselves out of work or struggling with debt. Applicants with gaps in their rental history may have lived with family or friends or traveled abroad.
Don’t read too deeply into every potential issue—but be alert to problems that occur in clusters. Professional Tenants will display several of these issues at once—and they are experts at glossing them over. You may also encounter one or more of the following tactics:
When it comes to handling this type of renter, evasion is your best bet by far. You can turn down a Professional Renter before they sign a lease to prevent the nightmare process of eviction with one of these self-taught legal eagles.
Your best tool for catching this type of tenant is a thorough screening process. Do the legwork necessary to protect yourself and your investment properties. Be sure to:
Working with a skilled property management company can go a long way towards protecting your investment from this type of renter.
If Professional Renters are a concern for you—or you find yourself embroiled in trouble with one already—RentHub Property Management can make a difference. As an expert McKinney property manager, we can assist you with your tenant screening, record keeping, portfolio guidance, and many other tasks besides.
A great place to get started with RentHub is to put our free resources to work for you! As we've mentioned here, your first line of defense against a Professional Tenant is your screening process. Download our free Tenant Screening Checklist today! Use this as a vital tool to inspect your screening process for gaps that a Professional Renter could slip through and protect your investment properties!