Rental payment in full up front?

[A Schweda]

I have a possible tenant that would like to lease my property for 2 years.. and pay in full up front. Obviously I am ok with this..  no chasing rent and such. But, would there be any negatives to this? And what type of clauses should I include in the lease?

[Account Closed]

Is the property in AZ?  You need to see if your state has a duty to mitigate law.  A duty to mitigate comes into play if the tenant breaks the lease.  Most states have one.

So, what can happen is, the tenant breaks the lease, then, under the duty to mitigate the tenants' damages, you have to try to find a new tenant asap using reasonable means.  You can only charge the leaving tenant rent until rent starts coming in again.

So, let's say you accept 2 years worth of cash from this tenant, and the tenant breaks the lease after 6 months or whenever.  You then look for another new tenant, and you have to reimburse the leaving tenant all of that money they pre-paid, less rent and advertising fees to find the replacement.  

And in the meantime, you probably rented to a problem tenant.  There's a reason someone offers to pay up front.  They are either trying to hide assets from a bankruptcy judge, or social security, or some agency that limits the assets they can have on hand.  Or they can't find someone to rent to them because they have horrible credit or evictions, or a criminal background.

So, which is it?  And I'm always amazed at the applicants who have terrible credit, evictions, etc., who have that kind of cash lying around.  Why is that?  Where would someone like that get that kind of cash?  Maybe from manufacturing meth?

And you would have to probably reimburse all of their ovepaid rent, and then only use the security deposit they paid to deal with damages, if they trashed your place, and be required to then try and sue them to recover damages over and above the damage deposit.  But, good luck ever collecting what they owe you, because they just took all that money and pre-paid rent to the next landlord, which means they have nothing you can collect on.

My advice: run the other way.