Setting Rent Due Dates

[Travis Geary]

Has anybody here ever heard of requiring rent to be paid before the first of the month?

I'm thinking about doing this to shave a few days off the eviction process when necessary.

As a new landlord in the process of evicting a problem tenant right now (my first tenant), the need of having a rental process from start to finish has become abundantly clear to me. As I put together my rental process for finding the next tenant, tenant screening is my first priority. However, even with good screening habits, the occasional bad apple will inevitably slip through. That said, I want to have a ready solution for speedy evictions at hand if needed.

Requiring April rent on, say the 25th of Marh, seems like an easy way of shaving 5 or 6 days off of the eviction process. Since my SFR is in a higher price range, I'm also planning on requiring tenants to pay via Dwolla, as referenced here: http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2014/02/26/how-to-automate-rent-collections-dwolla/. This would require them to have a bank account (seems like a good screening requirement given my rental property), and the automated payment option should mitigate problems of tenants forgetting due to the odd rent due date.

Any thoughts? I'm in VA if any fellow Virginians want to chime in... particularly about the legality of this. I haven't found anything in the code myself that prevents it.