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There are some sad facts about this country, but it’s a long list and we only have time for one today. That one sad truth is this: immigrants to America tend to be far more responsible, honest, hard-working, and ingenuous than their native-born brethren in America.

Now there are a slew of sociological reasons for this phenomenon, and for the sake of brevity I’ll restrain myself, but consider this: in order to get here, whether legally or otherwise, immigrants have to go through a LOT of bull$hit, which weeds out the lazy. Their American neighbor next door is handed a welfare check every month, and decided at 15 that working (and education, for that matter) is for the birds.

As an aside, illegal immigrants actually make…

This is an easy point and shouldn’t take more than one examples to illustrate.

At 11:08 on a Saturday night, while publicly imbibing immense quantities of the toxic liquid cyclohexanol (known more commonly as tequila), a tenant called me on my cell phone. Hysterical, and squawking out syllables that only vaguely resemble any known human speech, I made out the following phrases: “rat,” “basement,”  “standing on chair,” and “baby in crib.”

Now, I pride myself on my powers of deduction, so being something of an amateur sleuth (tequila accords superhuman reasoning skills), I pieced together that she saw a rat in the basement, she’s evading from it by standing on a chair, and she’s worried about her baby upstairs in its crib…

In the world of real estate, there is nothing worse than a lawsuit. They are the bubonic plague of free markets, carried by rats and infecting the hardest-working first. The only winners are the attorneys, and most of us would rather not see attorneys make money (or live, for that matter).

Lawsuits are most successful where there is existing public sympathy, and everyone loves scandals like lead paint chips. Only children who sit around munching these things day in and day out will actually develop health problems (anyone remember the principle of natural selection?), and yet these lead paint lawsuits continue to plague those (like myself) foolish enough to actually invest money in dead-end neighborhoods.

Toward this…

If neighborhood residents are so depraved and pathetic that they will tear apart an air conditioning condenser unit to steal the parts and sell them to buy vials of crack, then there is really only one lesson to be learned: people in that neighborhood don’t deserve air conditioning.

Actually there are several lessons here, but it’s hard to see past that first one.

But beyond dismissing these individuals as half-civilized creatures who never bridged the missing link (a point I’m not quite ready to concede), let’s examine this phenomenon from a slightly less… emotional perspective.

A more insightful lesson might be that the worst neighborhoods are easily overimproved, and overimprovement is a landlord’s nightmare.…

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Introduction

The market is soft, so you might be thinking now's the right time to buy a rental property and hold it. And you'd be right, it IS a good time to buy and hold, but there are a few things you should know before writing any big checks and diving in headfirst. Here are few ways to protect yourself from litigation and other legal issues related to real estate and being a landlord.

Legal Protection Strategy 1: Real Estate Ownership Type

All too many smart people make an easy mistake when they first start buying real estate as an investment: they buy it in their own name. This has some serious legal implications, as it will immediately show up as an asset if someone decides to sue you. Furthermore, if the tenant of that property sues you,…