Sounds like you're hoping for some beginner's luck; you may end up being disappointed with the type of luck that befalls many beginners (usually they experience BAD luck).Some good advice already in this thread: be sure to have enough funds to cover incidents that will occur in the rental business.

How can one protect from such an incident?

An unrelated incident (eventually renting to a family with 1 kid) can then be used against you.3.

The person that should be in jail over this incident is Mr.

Your answer can cite a specific incident or general philosophy learned over the course of several years.So far the biggest lesson this depression has taught me is that leverage is much more dangerous than I ever thought it would be.

Anyway, still waiting now for almost 2 mo and as I understand if drags on for too long I run the risk of losing the money I've already been charged for not picking up the item... because they haven't released it out to me yet, due to stalled paperwork.The level of bureaucracy and overhead in our defense system is astounding, quite honestly I'm surprised they've been able to invade anything as much as a dune of sand with this modus operandi...For those that doubt the truth here, simply google "EUC sent to Battle Creek" and you'll see that this is not an isolated incident but rather a very common experience that others that made the same mistake as myself (buying from the government) are going through.

We can fill out an incident report and take them downtown."

The chances of a broken pipe or other major incident happening in a two week period are VERY LOW!

There is lots of "Monkey business" incidents going on especially with REOs where properties are put on the market while a deal is being worked out behind the scene with some wholesaler or a bulk buyer...

Normally to reduce DOM we include really nice appliances, or we stage the property, or we include some "bling" type features to make sure our rehabbed properties get on our retail buyer's short-list.However, in our Atlanta area homes we have had some serious theft incidents (even in nice neighborhoods) - all of our properties are alarmed, but that doesn't deter them.