It is important to be able to analyze the trailing 12 month financial statement of a property and take a deeper look at the loss to lease by examining the rent roll.Ideally, you are lucky enough to have an excel version of the rent roll provided to you by the broker or the owner you are interacting with on your potential acquisition (or.. if you or someone you know is developing a character recognition software that is able to read a PDF version of a rent roll and convert it to a nice, clean excel version please let me know!).

The right business decision is to put every tenant to full market and clean house.

Once the lease is terminated, then you can apply the last month's rent to their last month of occupancy and use the security deposit for any other unpaid charges, cleaning, or repairs.

As a newbie, I would like to invest in a city I know but I understand there are easier markets to work in, especially with the trend our city is in.

It's easier to look at a situation when one is not financially tied to the property, and the others on this thread are dead accurate.

This may be easier to get them to agree to and in the process you get it sale ready.

from my point of view if your an individual and not partnering with folks who ever is going to sue you is going to name you personally.. this is where you need good insurance to take up your defense as your first line of defense.whether they have the right to sue you is immaterial.. or whether they will prevail is immaterial.. if your operating as a group or partnership and have clean records this can limit your exposure to your ownership.other than that  retirement accounts should be maxed out they basically cant be touched... certain trusts.but just LLC labyrinths like you mention.. those are not going to do it for most or.. you will spend a ton of dough fighting to make the position they can't sue you. when suits happen everyone is named .. that's when you need good insurance to handle your defense.

One  (the good one)  no compains in almost 5 years,  she pays on time (most of the time) her part of the lease,  one time I had a really bad tenant,  she was in her 20s with 5 kids and no job,  Housing authoirty was paying the 100% of her lease but anytime I was on the property she was with  some "visitors"     normally more than 5, after having osme discucions becasue she was not a clean lady I asked her to leave,  the good thing is she moved out without any legal action,  Be careful accepting the tenant,  even they are coming with the voucher,  you need to do your due diligence all the time,  credit score is not an issue but eviction yes Good luck 

I find it easier to do comps. 

@Guy AztaYou need to get rid of the property management company, which is easier said than done.