Landlord-tenant laws rankings by state

[George Wines]

This post marks the start of a journey to decide what state then area is the best place to invest in buy and holds. In general there are many criteria to consider when deciding what area to invest in like cash on cash return (cashflow v. appreciation), school quality, crime rate, etc. Since my risk appetite is not one for large losses (even if rare), there is one piece of data would overrule all the other commonly talked about data points when deciding the best area to invest in, landlord-tenant laws. In particular, how difficult/lengthy is it from the time a tenant stops paying rent to when they are evicted and the search for a new tenant can begin. Even with great tenant screening, if you have enough doors and your investing career is extended on a long enough timeline, you will need to evict a tenant. I dont have experience with being a landlord in any state aside from Colorado and I have not yet had to evict a tenant.

There are several articles below which show similar top states that are landlord friendly repeatedly. Whether those articles equate to an echo chamber is up to the reader to decide. I figured that I would create this one stop shop for landlord-tenant laws ranking by state and let the more experienced audience of the forum chime in with their more specific knowledge to either strike out a state that is marked landlord friendly or talk up a state that is marked as tenant friendly. Thanks for your input.

Article 1

Texas

Indiana

Colorado

Arizona

Florida

Article 2

Texas

Indiana

Colorado

Arizona

Florida

Kentucky

Georgia

Mississippi

Article 3

Texas

Indiana

Colorado

Georgia

Kentucky

Article 4

Arizona

Texas

Indiana

Florida

Colorado

Article 5

Landlord friendly eviction in priority order:

Colorado

South Dakota

Georgia

Montana

West Virginia

Tenant friendly eviction in priority order:

Maryland

Massachusetts

Pennsylvania

Tennessee

Vermont

Article 6 (full 50 state rankings with more specifics to why the states are ranked this way)

Ranked from most landlord friendly to least

West Virginia

North Carolina

Georgia

Wyoming

Louisiana

Idaho

Mississippi

Colorado

Ohio

Indiana

Florida

New York

Alabama

Illinois

Texas

South Carolina

Connecticut

Missouri

Maryland

Virginia

Utah

Michigan

New Mexico

North Dakota

Oklahoma

Iowa

Wisconsin

Tennessee

Kentucky

Montana

Massachusetts

California

Pennsylvania

New Jersey

New Hampshire

Minnesota

Washington

South Dakota

Kansas

Nevada

Maine

Alaska

Oregon

Nebraska

DC

Arizona

Rhode Island

Delaware

Hawaii

Vermont

Eviction Data

Since laws around eviction are potentially the most costly for a landlord, it warrants a look at state/area eviction data. This provides an interesting data point from two lenses when looking at whether a state is landlord friendly. Areas with high eviction rates/counts are areas with a lower quality tenant base. The other side of that coin is that areas with low eviction rates/counts may be low because the lawful process of eviction is so tenant friendly that landlords do not execute it as often as the higher eviction areas with swifter due process. It is not clear to me how to interpret this data without more context, like from the above sites.

The data easily manipulated The data reported by this site are admittedly not perfect. Their data does not include cash for keys or illegal lockout scenarios as part of the eviction rate/count. Their report shows more details as to how the eviction data was calculated.

List of states with simple landlord/tenant laws

Alabama

Alaska

Arkansas

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Idaho

Indiana

Iowa

Kentucky

Maine

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

Mississippi

Missouri

New Hampshire

North Carolina

Ohio

Oregon

Rhode Island

Virginia

Washington

Wisconsin