I have been in the rental business, one way or another, for my entire life. One of the most common comments that I have heard coming from landlords is that they are scared that their home is going to be severely damaged by a malicious tenant and an extremely high repair expense will be the result.

Hope Street manages over 600 different tenancies and we have met thousands of landlords. We have compiled some good statistics on tenancy trends and we notice that houses getting ruined are an extremely rare occurrence occurring less than one percent of the time (0.135% of all tenancy months). We have analysed these homes and complied the following resource relating to trashed rental homes:

º Almost every trashed home we encountered was managed by a private owner / manager.

º Almost all of these owner / managers had full time jobs that took away from their ability to inspect and attend to their rental properties.

º Most owner / managers had no previous experience managing rental homes.

º None of the owner / managers had taken any training or courses on property management.

º Less than half of the owner / managers had spent more than $1000 in the previous 12 months on property repairs and upkeep.

As you can see, a professional property manager can help mitigate many (or all) of these risks and minimize the likelihood of any such tenant damage to your rental home.