I am only coming up on my first decade, so defer to Joe.Where you can get burned very easily with vacancy is assuming you won't find a tenant, so lowering your standards and getting someone that not only breaks the lease, but destroys the place.  

Hello @Robert Burns,We offer a marketing service for Direct to Seller marketing for about 40 Investors and Wholesalers currently, as well as do our own Marketing.

Mikeoh- Might I also suggest a coleman or wood burning stove.

When my house burned down, they were on the scene with vouchers to hotels and restaurants (I owned only 2 rentals at the time, both negative cash flows!).

To do that though, means me burning a lot of midnight oil.  

He doesn't know a lot of the laws and he's just burned out with landlording.

It allows those pros to pass on a deal that looks fantastic but burns investors in a couple of years.The point is, you can start with rules of thumb and you can only use them and you can have a nice real estate investing career / portfolio.

Unlike stocks, there are tons of things that can burn you on real estate, in my opinion a lot more than a stock.3) Liquidity - Real estate is illiquid with high transaction costs and as such would require a premium because you can't really turn around and sell without a loss because of the transaction costs and even if you want to sell it might take 2 months or longer to sell. 4) Time- real estate takes a lot more time to manage than investing in the stock market. 

I think these kinds of landlords are the most likely to "burn out" after a few poorly timed chance instances of tenant issues.  

You can test with burning string or something else to create actual smoke, but pushing the test button is what is specified.