Landlording Q&As

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Questions & Answers (Q&As)

Have a landlording question? Submit it to the author of Landlording (see below). You will receive an e-mail response sooner or later (you may have to be patient; he's an active landlord, too). You may also see your question and the author's answer in the Q&As here.

PLEASE NOTE: Because these Q&As have become somewhat lengthy to scroll through, you might want to take advantage of your browser's search feature to go directly to a subject of interest to you. Let's say that you want to find every occurrence of the word "eviction" in the Q&As below. Go to "Edit" on the menu bar of your browser and drag down to "Find"; note there the keyboard equivalents for "Find" and "Find Again" so you can use them instead of having to resort to the menu bar repeatedly. Type the word "eviction." Click "Find" and you will see the first occurrence of the word. Enter the keyboard equivalent for "Find Again" and you will find the second occurrence, etc.

Q. My wife and I have been landlording together for years. We agree on almost everything, but we have come to a disagreement about something and would like you to help us settle it.

If tenants move out and leave behind minor damage as well as a cleanup job and if I go in and clean and repair the unit myself, can we deduct my labor from their deposit along with supplies and parts?

My wife says, "No, we can't deduct anything for my labor. We can deduct only our actual expenses and nothing more."

I say, "Yes, we can deduct a reasonable amount for my time. My time is worth something. If I work an entire day getting a unit back up to rentable condition, then we should be able to deduct more than the mere cost of cleaning supplies, furnace filter, caulking, paint, lightbulbs, etc."

Can you help settle our disagreement? --T.N., Arkansas

A. That wife of yours is a good landlording partner. She's conservative when she's not sure about something. She wants to keep you out of trouble.

She has also lived with you long enough to know that your time is valuable, and she wants more of it for herself. She doesn't want you to spend all of your time working on your rental properties, not when she has things for you to do around the house, not when she wants to enjoy your company on a trip to the big city or a cruise around the Mediterranean. Can you blame her?

Perhaps her wanting to have more of your time for herself has prompted her to assume that you cannot deduct anything for your time from a security deposit when you have to do cleaning and repair work, whereas you can deduct the actual cost of labor performed by somebody else.

This assumption is incorrect.

The truth is that you are entitled to charge tenants for work which must be done to make a unit rentable again after a tenant moves out, whether you hire it done or do it yourself. You must, of course, document it and itemize it as a deduction from the security deposit. If you hire somebody else to do the work, you must document it with a description of the work performed and a completed work order or a receipt. If you do the work yourself, you must document it with a description of the work performed, an accounting of the time spent doing the work, and a statement of the hourly rate you're charging for your time.

Problems arise when you charge tenants for work you shouldn't be charging them for, when you spend too much time doing a job, and when you charge a high hourly rate for your time.

To stay out of trouble with your tenants, be reasonable when you determine these things. Do not charge them for work to repair deficiencies resulting from ordinary wear and tear. Do not inflate the time spent doing a job. Do not charge any more for your time than what you would have to pay somebody else to do the job.

To stay out of trouble with your wife, downplay her incorrect assumption about charging tenants for your time. Hire more and more work done. Do things for her around the house. Remodel her kitchen. Buy her fresh flowers every week. Do things with her. Take her to the places where she's always wanted to go. Spoil her. She's half the reason for your landlording success.

Q. Help! I'm at my wit's end! My wife and I own four rental houses, three apartment houses with a total of twenty units, and a trailer park with fifty-six spaces. The trailer park's no problem because we have an on-site manager looking after everything, but the other properties are taking up so much of my time that I can't do the things I really want to do.

My wife used to work with me on the rental properties. We would work together fixing and painting, interviewing tenants and keeping the books. She even became good at pulling wobbly toilets, replacing the rotten subflooring, laying new vinyl tile, and resetting the toilets so they wouldn't leak. Now she's onto other things like volunteer work and tennis, and she isn't so eager to help me anymore. She says we should put everything in the hands of a property management company.

I have heard so many horror stories about property managers that I don't want to entrust our little empire to somebody who charges a lot for a little and doesn't really care half as much as we do about our properties. What should we do? I don't mind spending some of my time on the rental properties, but I don't want to spend all of my time on them. --O.M., California

A. Congratulations! Landlording has enabled you to become financially independent. You have arrived. You're in the third stage of landlording, when you should be declaring your independence from your properties. Your wife has already declared her independence. Follow her lead, but don't follow her advice about hiring a property management company.

Anybody who has worked as hard and as smart as you have to accumulate all of those properties would never be satisfied hiring a property management company to look after them. Continue being your own property management company. Just make some changes in your holdings and in your operations.

Look closely at your holdings. Are there any which take more of your time or are more aggravating than others? If so, exchange them into properties like your trailer park which are large enough to support full-time, on-site managers.

You may want to keep your whole collection of properties because you're sentimentally attached to them. You know everything about them. You know the neighborhoods. You know the tenants. You know the grounds. You know the buildings. You feel comfortable owning them, and you don't want to give them up. That's understandable thinking, but it's not sensible thinking, not now when you're trying to free up more of your time.

You may want to keep a particular property because the tenants there are like family. You don't want to desert them. You don't want to hand them over to another landlord who might treat them badly. That's understandable thinking, too, but it's not appropriate thinking. You have to think about what's best for you, not what's best for someone else. Do you think your tenants will refuse to desert you when they have the opportunity to move somewhere else better for them? No, they won't refuse. They'll move. They'll wish you well, but they'll move. You must do likewise. You must do what's best for you, and what's best for you is exchanging hard-to-manage properties for easy-to-manage properties.

You have worked like a honeybee for ten or twenty years as a landlord to accumulate properties, not so you could keep working like a honeybee for the rest of your life but so you could harvest the honey. The time has come for you to harvest the honey.

You ought to be spending five hours a week on your properties, not fifty. You ought to be taking four three-week vacations a year, not one.

If you insist upon keeping your smaller properties rather than exchanging them for larger, easier-to-manage properties, at least change your operations. Hire out everything except those things which you really want to do yourself. Hire a maintenance person, a bookkeeper, a painter, a carpet cleaner, a house cleaner, a roofer, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, an attorney, and a gardener as you need them, and on-site managers as appropriate.

Select your most competent on-site manager to look after your rental houses and look after the work you hire out at all the properties to make sure that it's done right, that it's done in a timely manner, and that it's done at a fair price. Show that person how to handle the tenant selection process, and let him or her oversee the process for all the properties. You're not the only one who can do it.

Supervise your employees and contract workers as much as you feel you need to, and review your bookkeeper's work periodically. You are the only one who can do those tasks. They require your personal attention.

Then figure out what you really want to do with all your free time.

Tennis, anyone?

Q. A woman recently passed away in one of my apartments. She did not die of AIDS or of any deadly infectious disease, nor was she murdered. She died of natural causes. When I show the apartment and tell prospective tenants that someone died there, they suddenly lose all interest in it. I remember reading somewhere that I am supposed to tell prospective tenants if there was a death in an apartment they want to rent. Is this true? If so, is this rule set in stone or is it sort of a gray area? If someone moves into the unit and then later learns about the death and wishes to break their lease, what should I do? --H.F., California

A. This death in one of your apartments was entirely incidental to the property. It had nothing to do with the location of the apartment or with any dangerous condition there. You don't have to say anything about it unless you want to. Health and safety are not the concerns here. If they were, you should say something about the death and give details. The concern here really is superstition, and you have no obligation to awaken and assuage anybody's superstitions about the apartment and this death. Just because somebody happened to die in the apartment, that doesn't make it an apartment of death. Many people die in hospitals. That doesn't make them places of death. Death is altogether natural, and a death of natural causes in an ordinary, habitable apartment is nothing worth mentioning.

Should tenants occupying the apartment later learn that a death occurred prior to their occupancy and should they wish to move out as a result, let them break the lease and extend them every courtesy.

Q. The woman who rented a house from me fifteen months ago paid her rent early or on time for the first twelve months. Ever since then, she has paid late. The first time she claimed that she mailed the payment, but it never arrived. I had to get it from her. These last two months she claimed that she was waiting for her paychecks to be signed, a flimsy excuse, I know. She has now paid me for last month, but she has paid only 15% of what she owes for this current month, and it will be past due tomorrow. I didn't charge her the late fee as listed in our contract the first time she was late because she had never been late before. I gave her the benefit of the doubt then, but being late is becoming a habit with her now, and I'm starting to feel uncomfortable about her ability to pay anything at all. I'm taking a large loss every month on this house, and I need to raise the rent to narrow the gap a bit. Should I raise the rent to make her think about moving? Is $250 per month too much? I plan to give her 45 days notice in writing of the rent raise. Then if she is late or can't pay, I'll be prepared her a notice to vacate. --G.G., California

A. You don't need me to tell you that your good tenant has gone bad and needs to be eased out. You know that yourself. You are doing the right thing by keeping the pressure on her to pay promptly. If you weren't keeping the pressure on her, she'd soon owe you a lot of back rent which you'd never be able to collect, and you'd be evicting her through the courts. You have the right idea. Ease her out by raising her rent. There's no need to make the rent raise excessive. Make it realistic. $250 might be realistic. $500 might be realistic. Find out for sure. Check the classified ads, make some phone calls, learn what your competition charges, drive by the competition for clues as to what you ought to be charging, and then determine the market rent for your house. Prepare a notice of change in terms of tenancy using this new market rent figure, and give the tenant the forty-five days you planned to give her to come to terms with this higher rent. Chances are good that she will see the typewriting on the wall and give you notice that she is leaving. If she doesn't, talk the matter of her tenancy over with her. Learn what you can about her current situation, and try to counsel her about her responsibilities. Give her no slack at all if she doesn't pay on time. Be prepared to give her a notice to pay rent or quit, and proceed to evict her if you must.

Q. Can a pregnant woman be evicted? After moving in and making her first rental payment, my tenant informed me that she and her husband had been trying for months to get pregnant and that they were finally successful. I was happy for them and gave them some slack about making their rental payments. What a fool I was! They took advantage of me. They owe me two months' rent now. I told them that I'm going to have to evict them if they don't pay up. She keeps screaming at me that I can't evict them because she's three months pregnant. She wasn't working when they moved in, but he was. To the best of my knowledge, he's still working and he's not pregnant. --C.W., Alabama

A. Some old wives' tales are true; some are half true; and some are not true at all. Here are a few which are not true at all: pregnant women should not attend funerals; a knife placed under the bed during childbirth will ease the pain of labor; a dog's saliva will kill germs; and a pregnant woman need pay no rent.

A pregnant woman may indeed be entitled to certain special benefits, such as pickles and ice cream at three in the morning, but she is not entitled to any special legal benefits. She cannot, for example, kill her husband and get away with the murder by claiming she was pregnant. She cannot run up a credit card bill and get away without paying by claiming she was pregnant. She cannot run up a bill for rent and get away without paying by claiming she was pregnant.

A pregnant woman's legal obligations are not on hold during her pregnancy.

If a pregnant woman were to receive a "Get nine months of free rent" card at the onset of her pregnancy, no landlord would ever rent to women who could become pregnant.

Give this pregnant tenant of yours and her husband a notice to pay rent or quit today. It begins the legal process of eviction. Tell them that neither the cricket in their house nor the rabbit's foot in their pockets will bring them the luck they need to keep you from evicting them through the courts. That's inevitable. Tell them that when they move, they should make sure that they do not take their broom along with them and that they should avoid stepping on the cracks in the front walkway.

Oh yes, ask this tenant of yours whether she's been eating any watermelon seeds lately. Tell her you've heard that a watermelon will grow in a woman's stomach if she swallows watermelon seeds. She may not be pregnant at all.

Q. We have a tenant who has been with us for over twenty years. He always pays his rent on the last day of the month or as late as five days into the next month. I have told him several times that the rent is due by the fifth day of the current month and that a late fee must accompany any later payment. He continues to ignore us by paying late, and he never pays the late fee. What can I do? I told him again last month and he said, "Well, you never complained before," and he walked away.
I want to write him a very forceful letter telling him to pay on time or face serious consequences. --N.V., California

A. This tenant needs to be retrained, but before you retrain him, you must examine his rental agreement. It must state that the rent is payable in advance. Otherwise, he may pay in arrears, just as he has been doing all along.

There's another wrinkle in this case which you should know about. Your having accepted his rent late so many times is tantamount to your having given him permission to pay late, and you would lose your case in court if he used the "estoppel defense," arguing that your conduct in accepting the late payments contradicts whatever the rental agreement says. Those verbal warnings you gave him don't count. Accepting the payments late month after month is what counts.
As of now, don't even try to take him to court over his habitual late payments, no matter what your rental agreement says, because you would lose if he or his attorney knows the estoppel defense, and you have to assume that they do.
Instead, send him a notice which establishes your new ground rules.

The notice should be labeled a Notice of Change in Terms of Tenancy, and it should provide for advance notice of thirty days or more.. It might be worded something like this:

"You are hereby notified that the terms of tenancy under which you occupy the premises known as [address of the unit] are to be changed. Effective XX/XX/2001, there will be the following changes:

"'Rent is payable in advance on or before the first of the calendar month for which the rent is due. The late date is five days later. In other words, tenant may pay the rent on or before the due date, or he may pay it on any of the four days following the due date without penalty. The very next day, the sixth, is the rent late date. This is the first day when owners will consider the rent late. Owners expect to have received the rent before this date.

"'Owners expect tenant to pay the rent promptly. Should exceptional circumstances prevent prompt payment, tenant will pay a late fee of $XX.'"

Deliver this notice to the tenant and tell him what it says so there is no misunderstanding. He cannot ignore the notice as he has ignored your verbal warnings. It becomes a part of his rental agreement, and it establishes new ground rules regardless of what his original agreement says and regardless of what your conduct has been in accepting late payments.

Thirty days following service of the notice, you must be prepared to enforce the new ground rules. If he doesn't pay by the fifth, be there on his doorstep on the sixth with a Notice to Pay Rent or Quit.

Q. The tenants at my rental house have complained that raccoons are active in the backyard and are leaving "calling cards" here and there. They want me to "get rid of the raccoons." Should I? Am I responsible? --D.W., California

A. Whenever unwanted critters invade one of my rental properties, I consider them my responsibility. Some tenants will take charge and not even bother me with such problems, while others will call me straightaway at the first sighting and ask for help. When asked, I always help for two reasons: 1) landlords are responsible for making their rental properties habitable, and unwanted critters can quickly make a property uninhabitable; and 2) tenants who ask for help generally need it; if they don't get it, they may botch the job of getting rid of the unwanted critters and cause me to spend more time and money to remedy the problem later.

When evicting raccoons from your rental property, you must secure the cooperation of your tenants first. Tell them that raccoons will not leave an area if they have good reason to stay, and the ready availability of food is a very good reason to stay. Tell them not to leave food outside for domestic or feral animals. Tell them to secure their garbage can and compost bin with lids held in place by a bungee cord or a heavy weight, so the raccoons cannot get to the goodies inside. Tell them that raccoons dislike strong odors, bright lights, and loud noises and that you are going to have to use one or more of those three repellents to evict the raccoons.

Of the three repellents, you should try the one which is least objectionable to ordinary humans first. That would be strong odors. Different choices include ammonia-soaked cotton rags, naphtha flakes, predator urine, RO-PEL®, ground red pepper, or a solution of Tabasco® pepper sauce (three parts sauce per hundred parts water).

The other two repellents, bright lights and loud noises (rock music), are so much more objectionable to ordinary humans that you shouldn't try them unless you have no other choice.

Q. I'm a tenant myself, but I'm also an onsite property manager. For the past eleven years I've been managing five houses and an apartment for my landlord.

Recently I rented an upstairs apartment to a couple who have a nineteen-month-old child. The understanding was that they would move into a house when one became available. When the time came, they said they couldn't afford it, so they're still in the apartment.

They asked if they could bring their dog when they moved in, and I told them that the rental agreement says "absolutely no pets allowed." Five days after they moved in, I took a new screen door handle up to them and saw that they had a cat. They said it was an exotic cat and they couldn't live without it. I asked the landlord what he wanted to do, and he said I should have them sign a pet agreement stating they would be responsible for any and all damage done by the cat. They signed.

On the fourteenth day after they moved in, they brought their yellow lab dog to live in the apartment which, by the way, has no yard. I immediately gave them a 30-day notice to vacate the premises. That was a month ago, and they are still in the apartment.

They have broken just about every rule in the rental agreement. Besides that, they call the sheriff's office every day and tell them that either I or one of the neighbors is picking on them or calling them names. I can't go out in my back yard without hearing him yell dirty names at me from upstairs.

Another tenant in the house next to the above tenant keeps partying with these people, letting them use her washing machine, and inviting them down to dinner. She had a party last night at her house, and I was amazed at the scruffy looking people who came.

Now she's telling everyone that when she first moved in, the landlord or I went into her house when the back door was open. That is simply untrue. The landlord never comes over unless I call him, and I definitely know better than to go into a tenant's residence without first giving a twenty-four-hour notice or sensing an emergency.

I'm at my wit's end. The landlord and I are going to the attorney tomorrow to file an unlawful detainer against the couple. Are we doing everything we should be? --S.H., California

A. You have heard how one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel. Now you have witnessed how one rotten tenant will cause another tenant to go bad.

The one tenant who has come under the influence of your rotten tenants may have been lonely and in need of friendship and acceptance, so she invented the story about you and the landlord to gain these people's friendship and acceptance. She likely thought that it would never get back to you anyway. Don't worry about her and her lie, at least not now. She should change for the better after the rotten tenants move.

You did the right thing by serving the rotten tenants a notice immediately upon learning about their dog, and you did the right thing by serving them with a 30-day notice to vacate because an eviction initiated with this kind of a notice is the hardest to defend. In fact, there is no defense against it other than that you are discriminating or retaliating against the tenants for some reason, and the burden of proof is on them to prove that you are.

You should still be gathering as much evidence as you can to show the court just in case you get a judge who wants to know why you are evicting these tenants. The evidence might consist of things such as a tape recording of the tenant yelling obsenities at you, sheriff's reports showing that the complaints about your behavior are bogus, a photograph of the dog on the premises, and statements from other tenants about you and these tenants.

You will prevail in the eviction. Have faith. Also, because you have acted quickly, you may have enough left from the tenants' security deposit to pay the costs of the eviction and the costs to repair the damage which the tenants will invariably cause when they vacate.

Incidentally, whenever applicants have a pet, you must assume that they will be bringing it with them to their new dwelling whether it's forbidden or not.

Q. I am a tenant who had a verbal monthly rental agreement with a roommate subtenant. Two months after this woman moved in, I gave her a thirty-day written notice to vacate. She was very angry with me for giving her the notice, but I had no choice. She had violated the terms of our agreement. She moved her teenage brother into the apartment and concealed his presence from me even though she specifically agreed not to allow anyone else to live with us (she had previously been evicted for the same reason). She also installed a lock on her bedroom door without permission and gave me and my landlord (the owner) keys which wouldn't open the lock. When confronted, she refused to give the owner and me keys which would open the lock, so I had to hire a locksmith to make us keys for emergency purposes.

After she moved in, I learned from her previous landlord and her parents that she's basically a small-time con artist, a liar, and a difficult person to deal with. Little things started happening. She pushed me hard enough to leave bruises. She called the police twice to report me for completely trumped-up charges. She let the police enter my bedroom late at night while I was sleeping (each time the police said they believed my account of the situation). She stole small objects from me, things which are ridiculous to report to the police. She gave keys to the house to other people, allowing them access to all of my belongings. She threatened me with lawsuits and with arrest. She threated to report me for child abuse of her brother if I didn't comply with her wishes. She repeatedly denied me the right to show the apartment to prospective new tenants even with a 24-hour notice.

I figured I was in for a long, contentious eviction, but I got lucky. Her brother's social worker called me to say that she was told she needed to move out if she wanted to have custody of her brother.

After that, she left, but she did not pay the last twelve days of her rent or her utility bills. She took three pieces of my furniture that were in her room, and she left a mess behind. After three days the only things left in her room were some cleaning supplies and a few items of clothing.

She refused to communicate with me when I tried asking her any questions. I was worried that she might take more of my belongings and wanted to get the place ready for a new roommate, so I changed the locks. I left her a phone message right after I changed them to let her know, asking her to call me when she wanted to pick up the rest of her stuff. Instead of calling, she broke into the apartment, claiming that her brother's medication was inside. It wasn't, and she knew it wasn't.

Here's my question. Can I use her security deposit for the rent she owes, for the locksmith charges I had to pay to provide me with a key to the lock she installed on her bedroom door, and for the value of the furniture she took? --A.M., California

A. Yes, you may use her security deposit to pay for the rent, the locksmith charges, and the furniture. If there's anything left, you may use it to pay for the damage she did to the apartment, especially the front door. You should send her a full accounting of how you used her deposit, and you should return to her any unused monies.

You should also have this former tenant of yours arrested if she tries to break and enter again. Breaking and entering is a crime. This woman no longer had any tenancy rights after she moved out. In fact, because she was actually a lodger, all you really needed to do was give her a notice appropriate to the situation, in this case, a 3-day notice to perform covenant based upon her having allowed her brother to move in, and if the brother's still there after three days, you could have the tenant arrested. You don't need to go to court. You will find the procedure for evicting a lodger in Civil Code Section 1946.5.

That said, let's consider what you ought to do the next time you sublet to anybody.

Always use a rental application and always check out every applicant before you make a commitment to rent to her. You want to learn about a person's faults from her previous landlord and her parents when you can still reject her as an applicant. You don't want to learn about a person's faults after you have already rented to her and you have to deal with those faults yourself.

Always put your agreement with the tenant in writing. Written agreements hold up better than verbal agreements, especially when you're dealing with somebody whose brain doesn't quite know the difference between fiction and fact.

Always get a security deposit from her just as you did. You may need it to settle accounts when the tenant moves out.

Having had such an appalling landlording experience as you just endured, many people would throw up their hands and say, "Never again will I be anybody's landlord." Too bad for them! What they should be saying is this, "Never again will I rent to anybody without checking them out thoroughly first." Good for you for wanting to keep going!

Q. My question is a simple one, but I can't seem to find the answer anywhere. I hope you can help. I live in Phoenix, where I am renting an apartment on a six-month lease. I am current with the rent. My boyfriend of three months moved in with me two months ago and has paid half of the rent directly to me.

At this time, we can no longer live together in peace, and I want him to leave. He is very loud. He yells and screams and slams doors and has done this almost every night for the past two weeks. He has put holes in the walls and has totally demolished a whole inside door. Even though he has never hit me, I have had to call 911 twice because he has become rough with me, and I thought I was in danger. I gave him a week to move out, but he won't leave because he says that he has nowhere to go.

What are my rights? What are his rights? What can I do without having to involve anyone else? I am afraid he is planning something on a larger scale to "get" me. In his mind I am the bad guy.

The apartment complex likes me and I have had no problems as of yet. I like it here and don't want to leave, but I feel that the only way I can get rid of this guy is to leave myself. Please advise. --T.S., Arizona

A. You have all the "rights" here because you are the tenant as far as the apartment complex and the law are concerned. Your boyfriend has no right to possession even though he has been helping you out with the rent. He is not on the contract, and he is not paying the rent directly to the landlord. He is your guest, and guests are supposed to leave when asked.

That said, there's the practical matter of getting the guy out of your apartment since he doesn't seem to understand that he's no longer welcome there.

Were I in your shoes, I would wait until you know he'll be gone for two or three hours, and I would change the locks. I would box up his stuff and take it somewhere safe, somewhere neutral, somewhere accessible, where he can retrieve it right away. I would advise the apartment manager of my plans because some managers will change the locks for their tenants free of charge under these circumstances. If your manager won't, call a locksmith to do the job, or if you're a handy person, buy new locks and replace the old ones yourself (buy the same brand, if possible, so you won't have to change the latches or make any modifications in the holes to accommodate the new locks). Give the apartment manager a copy of the key and say that neither the key nor access should be given to anybody without your permission.

In addition, I would contact the local police department to alert them that you may be calling them soon if your ex-boyfriend becomes boisterous when he returns to find that he has been locked out of your apartment.

Do not let this guy cross your threshold after you have changed the locks. Do not even open your door to him. If he asks for his rent money back, don't give it to him. Tell him that he owes you even more money because you have to pay to repair all of the damage he did to the apartment.

Getting him out of your apartment is the easy part really. Getting him out of your life is the hard part. You're on your own there. Just don't feel sorry for him. He made your life miserable, and he would continue making your life miserable if you let him. Be glad that you can "evict" him and "divorce" him without having to put yourself through our very expensive and very imperfect legal system.

Q. When you buy a property, must you honor the previous owner's rental agreement, or can you start fresh with your own? --D.W., Ohio

A. Fixed-term and month-to-month rental agreements go with the property unless the current agreement provides otherwise.

Should you buy a rental house with the intention of making it your primary residence, for example, and should the tenants have a year's lease which still has five months to run, you would have to wait the five months before you could move in unless you were able to convince the tenants to move voluntarily.

Rental property buyers should always review every current rental agreement before committing to buy.

The long-form rental agreement in the LANDLORDING book contains the following provision: "Sale of the Dwelling--If Owners sell this dwelling or otherwise transfer its Ownership to another party, they shall have the right to terminate this Agreement by giving Tenants written notice of at least sixty days, notwithstanding any conflicting occupancy rights Tenants might have under a fixed-term agreement. Should Tenants have conflicting occupancy rights guaranteed them by law, however, those legal rights shall prevail."

That provision would enable a buyer to break the current fixed-term rental agreement upon giving sixty days' notice unless there were a state law to the contrary.

Q. What suggestions might you have for somebody who is twenty-five years old and wants to become a multi-millionaire by investing in real estate? --R.R., New York

A. Be prepared to work 24/7, longer when necessary. Be willing to do menial work when necessary. Find a mate who shares your goals and will work as hard as you will to reach them. Avoid having a family before you make your first $500k. Seek out someone local who has achieved more than a modest success in real estate investing; treat that person to a fine meal; ask for advice; listen; and learn. Waste no money on expensive tapes and seminars promoted by hucksters with get-rich-quick promises. Study William Nickerson's classic How I Turned $1,000 into Five Million in Real Estate in My Spare Time, and adapt its techniques to fit your circumstances today. Avoid partnerships unless the partner has expertise, experience, or connections which you lack. Understand that your lack of money is no reason to form a partnership with someone who has money. Learn how a professional appraiser appraises a property. Study and follow the market for different kinds of properties. Identify any number of fixer-upper properties, and make offers based upon location, financing, condition, current income, and potential income. Avoid becoming attached to any property before, during, or after ownership. Fix up and trade up again and again. Borrow for investment purposes only. Pay your debts on time. Learn how the time value of money affects your business dealings. Take fewer risks as you accumulate more assets. Cultivate relationships with an accountant, an attorney, a banker, an insurance agent, a loan broker, a real estate agent, and a Jack or Jill of all trades. Hire on-site management. Handle off-site management yourself. Hire help to do those things which somebody else can do for you equally as well as you might do them yourself so that you can concentrate on doing those things which you alone can do to achieve your goals. Stay out of court except for evictions. Learn how to evict, and evict promptly. Expect setbacks and take them in stride. Be unflappable. Keep your word. Be fair. Be available. Be tough. Be patient. Be flexible. Live beneath your means. Complete a financial statement every six months to take stock of your assets. Give back to your community.

Q. Although I earned a masters degree recently, I'm thinking about pursuing a career in rental properties because I would like to be my own boss. I've been working at various jobs for ten years, and I've accumulated a nest egg of over $125,000. In addition, I have $75,000 in a 401k. I've read your book and several others, and I've done my homework on the subject.

Here is my question. Will a bank finance me if I don't have a job, but I do have an adequate down payment and some reserves? I'm thinking, of course, about properties which have good numbers. I plan to manage the properties myself and do most of the small jobs as I am fairly "handy." I would pay myself roughly $20,000 per year, and that would be my primary income. Any advice you have would be appreciated. --D.G., Kansas

A. Anybody who has managed to save as much as you have sounds like a good risk to me. Still, not every banker will look at what you have done and what you plan to do and lend you the money you need to buy income property. Some are willing to lend only to people who have a secure income, people similar to themselves.

With as much money as you have salted away, bankers should be courting you as a customer, that is, once they know what your assets are. Take advantage of your position. Visit a number of bankers and tell them about your assets and your plans. Tell them that you'd like to do business with a single bank if possible, one where they know you and will work with you. You should find a banker who is eager for your business, a banker who understands that an income property loan depends more on a property's fundamentals than on the borrower's personal income from outside sources, a banker who is just as happy to keep your $125,000 on deposit as lend you $300,000 on a $425,000 property.

Should you fail to find the right banker, however, you needn't abandon your plans. Banks are not the only lenders around. They aren't even the best lenders around. The best lenders are sellers.

Sellers don't demand fees and appraisals and more fees. They lend on the property they're selling you, which they know is worth at least as much as you're paying them for it, and they lend at reasonable rates, too. When you're looking around for a property to buy, ask about seller financing. Consider it to be an important asset of any rental property you're thinking about buying.

You're in a better position to begin a career of owning and managing rental properties than most people are when they first get into the business. Take advantage of it.

Q. We asked our tenants to move within thirty days and gave them a notice to vacate. They responded by threatening to take us to court. In light of their threat, we decided to give them an extra thirty days so they would have more time to find another place to live.

Do we need to draft a new notice? Do we have to state a reason for evicting them in the notice?

Over the past four years these tenants have consistently failed to report any problems or things that needed to be repaired even though we live next door to them. They live on one side of our duplex and we live on the other. We find out about problems when they finally impact us. This past fall we received a quarterly water bill of $1,700 instead of the usual $300! We found out from our plumber that their toilet had been running twenty-four hours a day for who knows how long! They never bothered to tell us. We are first-time landlords and find the situation frustrating.

Do you think it's a good idea for us to offer to return their security deposit ahead of time if they will sign a letter stating that they will move out in forty-five more days? We are willing to pay their moving expenses to avoid having to pay legal fees. What do you think we should do? --R.D., Massachusetts

A. Tenants who are asked to move sometimes respond just as yours have, with threats. They feel challenged and they want to lash out at you. They think you're pushing them around and they're angry. Giving them an extra thirty days to vacate might help to defuse the situation. Then again, it might not. There's no one right way to respond to such threats.

You should definitely serve them with a new notice to vacate, one which gives the new date. Whether you must include a reason for the notice depends upon local laws. Generally, rent control jurisdictions require that thirty-day notices to vacate do include a reason, and it must be a so called "just cause" reason, such as your wanting to move yourself or a relative into the unit, your wanting to rehabilitate the unit, your wanting to go out of business, your wanting to demolish or convert the unit, or their habitual failure to pay rent on time.

As for offering to return their security deposit before they move in exchange for a promise to move, don't. As for offering to pay their moving expenses, don't. That's bad business. Don't be cowed by their threat. Don't hesitate to take legal action against them if you have to.

Remember, you hold some pretty good cards in the poker game you're playing with your tenants right now. You can give them a bad recommendation when other landlords call for a reference, and you can smudge their credit rating. As a last resort, you can take them to court to force them to move. The resulting eviction will be a matter of public record which will haunt them for years to come.

Right now, take a wait-and-see approach. If they don't move when they're supposed to, file the legal papers required to evict them promptly. Sometimes you have no other choice. Don't shy away from evicting them judicially just because you hate to pay legal bills. These tenants have already cost you an extra $1,400 for the water they wasted. The average legal bill for evictions is much less than that. Resign yourself to accepting legal bills as part of the business of being a landlord. That's just what they are.

Q. For some time I had the perfect renter in a single-family home. She paid her rent early, never bothered me with complaints, kept the interior immaculate, kept the lawn looking better than any in the neighborhood, and even sent me other good referrals. Then my nightmare began. The house next door was purchased by a guy who has completely destroyed his own property and in so doing has effectively destroyed mine. There are junk cars in his yard and a huge dog pen that contains several dogs. Beer cans are everywhere, and the loud parties never seem to stop. He has cut trees down and left the mess all over the ground. My renter called the police on him, then the city, and finally me. There was no reasoning with him. Finally, she gave up and moved out. I can't rent this house now because every prospective renter has been frightened off by the mess next door. This small town doesn't have the resources to handle such a nuisance, and I am sitting on a very nice, but empty, house. I need help. I can't afford to lose the rental income. --R.F., North Carolina

A. Short of doing something to the guy which you might regret while sitting in a prison cell for twenty years, you still have options. By all means, do check county records to see whether he really owns the property or whether he says he owns it and is actually renting. If he's renting, contact the owner about the problem. If he owns the place, find out who holds the mortgage and contact them about the property's condition. They'll be interested because their loan isn't much good without good collateral behind it, and a badly maintained property is not good collateral. They likely have clauses in their loan papers about his maintaining the property in good condition, and they could call the loan due if he isn't maintaining it.

Keep the pressure on the city to do something about the problem. Whether they have sufficient resources to handle it or not, you need to be a squeaky wheel around city hall. Eventually they'll tire of your squeaking, and they'll do something. Oh, and don't forget to contact the county to get your property taxes reduced. The property isn't worth what it was when last assessed. Why should you continue to pay high taxes when the local authority supported by your tax money won't help you solve this problem. Hit them in their pocketbook.

Assuming that you have already contacted the guy directly about the problem, but to no avail, you could sue him in small claims court for the loss of rents you've suffered and whatever else you might think of, or you could hire an attorney to go after him for bigger bucks.

If you have the bucks available, you could offer to buy the guy out for a fair price, or if you have the bucks available and you think a solid fence would do some good, you could build a solid fence along the side of your property contiguous to the nuisance property.

Don't adopt a victim's mentality here and mouth the mantra, "Woe is me. Woe is me." You have a major problem. Unless you tackle it head on, it will continue until you eventually lose your rental house.

E-mail your questions to mail@landlording.com and include your name or initials, as well as your state (USA) or province (Canada).

Please note that the author of these answers assumes no responsibility for the information provided here. Consult a knowledgeable professional whenever you have a question of any consequence. Also please note that in submitting a question here you are giving permission to the author to publish your question and his answer here and elsewhere.

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