They're never late on rent, have perfect rental history, great credit, clean, stable employment.

Consider the liabilities that you are accepting as his employer..... driving around while on the clock, drunk, hits somebody...... gets hurt on the job, giant increase in WC premium for a long, long, long time...... damages products or materials during installation, guess who gets to pay for them and can't deduct them legally from his pay check...... you run out of work, he collects unemployment...These may be worst case situations, but they still exist and lets not forget incentives to being productive... hourly employees have little financial incentive to being productive, it basically comes down to a combination of a mixture fear of losing a job, how much they can get away with and of course their work ethic.What all this means is that unless there is huge gain for you somewhere beyond just a couple of thousand dollars over a year there is no way you will offset these issues, there would need to be some very large gains, possibly non-financial to warrant hiring this guy versus paying him as a 1099.

Instead of taking it from a self-employed solo 401k, right?

I would verify income with is employer and his paystub should show his YTD earnings to give you a better understanding of how much he's made so far.  

Go to wikipedia for a decent summary of a town/area - history/economics/employment/population trends.

Hi,My husband and I are about to rent out our first investment property and need some advice, please.Currently we're checking out our prospective tenant's information, including previous landlords and employers.

The only "con" I see is that your employer may have thoughts.

If the US economy gains in strength in a variety of metrics , although probably most importantly income growth in conjunction with employment growth then we could see rates rise off the bottom in which hey have been dragging along for years.

No social security # or no employment in the US required.

Many investors I know employ this strategy while pursuing traditional debt product to finance purchases.If you have a nice pile of cash to play with you may consider trying to find some non-recourse commercial financing instead for larger assets.