My property manager argues that I should pay for water because:    -  If water bills are unpaid, the City of Grand Rapids can put a lien on your home even if the bill is in your tenant's name    -  The cost of water paid by the landlord is offset by higher base rentsMy thought process is that the cost should be passed to the tenants because:    -  With the tenant paying the bill, they will be most usage conscious and overall cost will decrease    -  I am skeptical that having the landlord pay for water results in a dollar for dollar increase in base rents    -  I have always had the philosophy that as many utilities should be passed to the tenant as possibleMy plan is to push my property manager to change leases moving forward so that tenants pay for water, but I wanted to get the BiggerPockets community's thoughts in case I am missing something here?  

Now you can argue class A's might have some basket cases too and that's absolutely true, but it certainly is a lot less frequent and a lot easier than class C.You are hopping a bit all over the place on strategy as well.

I'd argue that the answer is often flipping.  

@Tim Swierczek many would argue that if you have more equity you have more to lose with a property. 

YMMV and plenty would argue otherwise, but this has been my experience over many years, many different properties, in a few different markets, at many price points and price-to-rent ratios, in both high and low markets.

Nice work Chris, now i argue the same thing with myself regularly.  

@Matt Gragg if you only go with the insurance estimate, then yes, it won't be accurate, that is the point of my job, to come up with my own scope of work using xactamate and then we basically end up arguing with an adjuster for a couple of weeks until we came to a reasonable price usually 50% to 75% more than their first estimate (sometimes 100 to 200% more,  that depends on the level of adjuster that you get, if they send out a small loss adjuster or even a mid-loss adjuster first then the estimates are going to be really bad).  

Worst case, if you still want to move forward, is you'll have ammunition to argue a lower price if you do find limits on what you can do with the property.In the FWIW category, the second house, since it is behind and away from the street, is an really easy rent.

Are you familiar with the book ABC's of Real Estate Investing by Ken McElroy?  

You do all the calculations and it looks good....however....this particular property is tucked away in a neighborhood off of ABC Street (that's what we'll call it).