It can be a hassle at times. As a landlord, you are the first to get blamed, and the first to get asked for money (rent discount, etc) since a lot of tenants assume that, since you own rental property, you are very wealthy (not true in my case...yet). It's important to leave emotions out of the equation...sounds cold when dealing with people, but it's necessary to keep your sanity. You can't buy into all the sob stories as most of them are false. Even it they are true, it's not your problem...again, sounds cold, but you have to have the "business is business" mentality or you will go crazy trying to please everybody.

However, like many have said, these problems can be minimized by thoroughly examining your prospective tenants' background (ie- criminal background, credit, employment, references, etc.)

In all honesty, I'm a pleaser and tend to be a "softy" when it comes to a tenant's problems (learned the above the hard way), so I hired a property manager to manage my properties. Not only does he deal with leasing, evicting, and day to day issues. He maintains the yard and other small tasks.
So now in addition to not worrying about tenant issues, my time has been freed up as well. If you go this route, make sure you factor in the cost of management (8-10%) when you buy a property.

Hope this helps!

My father owns 12 properties (single family homes) that he's acquired over the past 20 years. We're now in the process of trying to sell a few - they're a huge headache. I'm the bookkeeper for the company now and it's more busy-work than anything.

Many tenants like to not pay - so we've had to deal with evictions - and then the city inspectors come out and cite stuff that's not really an issue, causing us to piss money away into these homes.

We're going to sell a few and keep the ones in good shape and with reliable tenants (we have about 6-8 of them)...but the rest need to go.

That's what my job is now - and my father is just like you. More gets done now that I'm in the "driver seat." I urge him to make decisions and then I can carry them out without him feeling bad or dealing with it himself.

How do you go about getting these background checks? Do people get offended when asked for the information needed for background checks or do most understand the situation?

For background checks, you go through a company - there's many available online and locally, check your yellow pages.

And as for being offended, you have to go through background checks for pretty much everything these days - and you need to know what's going on before you rent to them. Chances are if they don't pay their bills elsewhere, they won't pay rent.

My father doesn't do background checks as the rental business is just a side thing, and I really would like to change that going forward. We've gotten burned so many times and I think that doing checks would have eliminated that.

No i don't think so lanlord's are creating hassle in rental properties.