Yes I do criminal and background check for 25 and make the tenant pay for it upfront.If they are hiding something I will know it.If you do not do the checks you might get lucky for one tenant but not another and get burned.Professional tenants look for landlords that do not follow proper screening and then they LIE and put on a good front.Then when they get in there they run their game and pay one months rent and then milk a few months free and then move and do it again.

Mr Money mustache has a really good article over this topic, if you search it in good my money mustache hvac yourself, it lays it out and it does not look too difficult if you are somewhat mechanically inclined. 

Hi @Mabel Lung, I'm also a big Mr Money Mustache fan and found BP through the forum on his site about 6 months ago, we're on track to FIRE in about 8 years and found ourselves looking for other ways to push our passive income streams.

Some guy was sitting on a milk crate having a beer a few months ago and I just asked him about the day and weather until he got mad and left.Tough to say whether these good changes are short or long term but they're in the right direction.

As a teenager back in the 1960s, my parents had a good chuckle when I said someday computers would be milking cows.https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robotics-the-cows-decide-when-its-milking-time.html

An uncle who farmed got an extra cow to keep us in milk.  

Wear a fake mustache and old paint stained clothes if you have to.

Working for a large wholesaler, I see a lot of investors that do repeat business with us because we have consistent inventory and we don't milk every single deal we do and instead we focus on consistent more conservative fees so that our investors have plenty of room.

If a buyer is dumb enough to allow their agents to call shots on how much commission they are willing to show a property for, I’d rather just milk the buyer and let them pay their greedy agent instead of me!

The reason I'm here is because the other day they started an argument with us, my boyfriend asked them to stop doing drinking our milk (we buy all our own groceries) and it immediately started a big argument that ended with them yelling and throwing a dollar and change at our door, and now they want to kick us out.