The answer is that the majority of tenants are pretty good, so they just get lucky.As far as renting to people with criminal background or severe financial issues, there is a whole segment of landlords that deal in sub-prime tenants.

A few years ago, we studied vacancy costs for the three major tenant pool segments in Las Vegas.

If you do engage these services, it is advisable to have the Planner and Civil Engineer quote their entire scope of services so that you know what each of them will do as their part of the entire project, when they will do it and how much each segment of their services will be paid.Many times, it is possible to have the Planner and or Civil Engineer do the very early work on “spec”.

@Jay HinrichsJay, in your institutional memory, was there ever a time when US homebuyers or a segment of them didn't try to buy, as a default, the very largest and most expensive primary residence a loan officer told them they could afford?

Rules vary a lot from state to state and even by smaller segments.

A good tenant is someone who:Has stable employment in a market segment that is very likely to be stable or improve over timeHas a credit history with which you can evaluate the likelihood that they will performPays all the rent on scheduleTakes care of the propertyDoes not cause problems with neighborsDoes not engage in illegal activities while on the propertyStays for many yearsThe right tenant pool is so important that I would interview multiple local property managers to validate the tenant pool selection.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________Twice the Advice: A new segment of the newsletter where I add yet another golden nugget of knowledge unrelated to the topic of the month.

I watched a Maury segment online last night -- after she proved he was the baby daddy, the guy took a $100 bill out of his pocket and knelt on it to propose to his girlfriend with a (maybe diamond?)

Capture them in one place, then segment them.  

Does anyone have any recommendations for insurance companies that offer policies within the fix & flip segment?