The first thing you need to do is understand tenants: what do they really want, what should they expect their living plans and, of course, what they are entitled to when they pay rent dollars for living in your properties.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years as a landlord is that there’s no such thing as a $500 per month apartment that rents for $500. I can prove this easily enough by inviting twenty tenants to one of my apartments and asking each one individually: “What’s this apartment worth?” Ten of them will guess about $450 and the others will say something between $400 and $485. No one is likely to agree with the current rent I’m charging. In their mind, it’s too high!

The quicker new landlords learn to under¬stand this basic adversarial relationship between the payee and the payor, the better they will fare. It’s easy to understand why tenants and property owners seldom make the best of friends.