Am afraid your lease was not descriptive enough and may have a tough time in court.Take this as a lessons learned and start working on improving your lease from the things you are seeing with current tenants and then wait it out if you can, which you seem to indicate you can do.Even with a very tight lease, I paid close to $3000 in evictions not to mention the heartache from tenants that I inherited on my first duplex purchase where I lived on one side and rented the other.I will never again inherit tenants.These ones moved in an extra person a year and a half in, despite lease saying not to, smoked marijuana and cigarettes in house despite lease saying not to and worse, I lived on property so they became very sneaky about how they broke their lease and these was just a nightmare.I hate evictions, but I equally hate bad tenants and tenants that I have not personally screened and that is why I refuse to take on tenants at property purchase.I also always, always do unit inspections.I just did one yesterday and glad I did, which I had initially decided I would not do, but nope, get in there and see how your property is being maintained.My fairly new tenant seems to have an issue with basic housekeeping.There was a smell in the unit, which I still cannot figure out what it is, but brought it to their attention and will be following up, he has a car that leaks oil endlessly on my newly resurfaced concrete driveway and garage flow, has a ring in toilet bowl that is also stained and smelling toilet from lack of cleaning.It pains me to see a unit that I took great care of when I lived in it to see what it is quickly turning into but I am nipping that in the butt right now.Dirty tenants can be a liability to any landlord, but overall tenants will try to test you and see just how vigilant you are and how much they can get away with.I also make notes on what I want to update on my next lease when I run into issues.Pets?

I've since learned, not only "Could it work" but it "Does work"; so, here i am throwing my hat in the fix & flip 'Ring."  

I had one agent i called for a 40 lot subdivision in Oregon.. took that agent over 7 days to finally ring me back.. property was not on my MLS system.. by the time she called..

These are all great questions to answer.For the burglary issues in vacant homes you'd know that if you plan on marketing your vacant property for rent, you better be sure you have an alarm system or some other deterrence until this local crime ring stops.The shopping center and hotel project will likely boost home values nearby, depending on the exact location and scope of the work.

Next time you are in Sacramento, give me a ring.

My advice is to ask for the moon at first, and if the phone doesn't ring you know to lower your price or alter the terms.But truly, If the rent is $795 and the owner passes through a charge of $75. then that is really no different than rent that is $870 with the owner paying all utilities.

Turning over skinny margin rocks, hoping for the phone to ring from an indecisive seller that wants the moon got old way back.

It was cheaper and quicker finding the numbers and calling sellers directly instead of saturating a whole area with direct mail and hoping that the phone rings.

Here's a few things you can do to mitigate this from happening: Hire a house sitter (~100 per week)Ring alarm monitoring system (~20 per month, no internet required)Plant some flowers in the front (imply occupancy)Install dummy or real security cameras (some area even cellular based for live capture)Drill the exterior doors shut As far as theft/vandalism goes, make sure you are insured correctly with a builder's risk policy that covers it. 

No.. they pay a scrap price, that price is well below market value for a complete piece of jewelry but who wants a broken ring?