Divesting yourself of the mindset that all tenants are bad is the first step for a landlord to let successfully.

Getting the right mindset is the first step for a landlord to let successfully.

If you think all tenants are bad, they are bound to be. It's very difficult to find a good apple when you think all apples are rotten, so why look for a good one in the first place.

Tenants are people and your property is your asset. By lending your asset to another, you are constantly worried because you own it, and you are worried about what will happen to your property. That is completely understandable, after all you are responsible to pay the mortgaged bond.

This causes many investors to become emotional about property to the extent that they see all tenants as bad, potentially bad or capable of doing harm in one way or another.

The first step is therefore to start looking at tenants as people and human beings. Some humans are good and some are not, but you have to start, without emotional baggage, to be able to identify the potentially good tenant that will up-keep your property at all times and the potentially bad tenant that will not or even not pay the rent.

I know this may be the hardest step you will ever take. But put yourself in a good tenant's shoes, isn't a good tenant constantly afraid he or she will end up with a bad landlord?

It cuts both ways.

In any business transaction there are two parties, the vendor and the customer. In the buy-to-let industry, the vendor is the investor and the customer is the tenant.

As a person, would you like to get good service from vendors? Do you think tenants
expect to get good service? Or at least fair service? You do, tenants do, we all expect this.

But in the buy-to-let industry, there is a massive emotional factor that makes property investors view customers as an "enemy". Do you think you will have a good vendor-client relationship when you get started with such perceptions?

Of course not and I am sure you agree.

But investors say: "I have more to lose than the tenant, I am paying the bond, I have incurred debt for this asset". And you know what, you are right, but that still does not mean that all tenants are bad.

In summary, the first step to successful buy-to-let investing and avoiding bad tenants is to start a fresh. Remove the fear that every tenant is bad, that tenants are the necessary evil and property investing is only about capital growth and tenants are required as a "by the way thing" to pay the bond or part thereof.

Buy-to-let is a business, your tenants are your customers, you can get good and bad customers. But if you are constantly afraid of customers, you can't make any clear judgments about your business or the customers you are accepting to service.

Sure all businesses will land some bad customers, some will turn bad in hard economic times, but that is not a good reason not be in business, nor a good reason to make a flat out judgment that all customers will be bad.

Property24 2008/04/14