by Stu Silver/ Uncle Zally / Zalman Velvel

5 AM … the Kangaroo Convenience Store in Ocala, Florida. It’s early February, early in the morning, around  5, and a bit chilly, 52 degrees.  The sun is not up yet, but there are people up, around ten of us, including employees, stumbling around before the 5:30 morning rush hour at the Kangaroo.

There are the requisite seven kinds of coffee, all fresh brewed, waiting at the Kangaroo coffee counter : Premium, Colombian, Peruvian, Dark Roast, Alert, Hazelnut, and Decaf. I settle on Peruvian. Last week I tried Colombian. I figure, South America is a fertile ground for natural drugs, marijuana and cocaine, and what is caffeine -  just the weak sister in the Mother Nature cartel.

I grab a Bon Appetit strawberry cheese muffin, the moistest cake ever made. It is so moist there is condensation on the inside of the hermetically sealed clear plastic wrapper.

 My smartphone, the Droid X, rings out, informing me I have an email. I wonder, who is sending me an email at 5 AM?

 It’s Mary Johnson (name changed to protect her and me), sending in a rental application from one of our websites, www.CheapRentInc.com .

 There you have it.

 Have what, you ask?

 The answer to the question, “What the heck am I going to write about?” I never know until the drive back, and then it comes to me.

 What came to me was the expression, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” Along with that, I also hear the many who have said to me, “I don’t judge. I let God do it.”

 Well, let me show you something. See the picture on the left. See that  guy crying? That’s a landlord, or a mobile home park owner, who did not judge the people who applied to live in one of his rentals. He just let anyone in, and some of them broke his heart, along with his bank account and life savings.

 I thought it would be interesting for those of you that are not used to making serious judgments about other people, to see how a landlord, and mobile home park owner, makes serious judgments about other people.

Well, Mary Johnson is applying to rent a mobile home I just bought, and then fixed up. It is a 1992 singlewide, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, with a 2 car carport, a large porch, sitting on a 75’x100’ lot that I also own. I took the property in trade for $10,000 that was owed to me on a mortgage. The previous owner had a fire and  was awarded $30,000 for smoke damage by the insurance company, so he already got his money out. I put one of my best handymen on the repair, and after 2 weeks of smoke treatment with TSP and Kilz, a new coat of paint, new carpet, and assorted repairs, in other words, about $4,000, it was ready to live in.

 I advertised it for rent on CraigsList.com, at $595/month. Mary saw the ad, went to our website, and filled out an application online and emailed it to me at 5 AM.

 Let me tell you about Mary, judging from her application, and assuming she is telling the God’s honest:  She wants to move in 2 weeks from now. That’s good. We get apps where people don’t want to move in for 3 months. We silently ask, “What are we supposed to do, keep it empty and lose $1,800 in rent while we wait for you?” We don’t say it out loud. There is no point to creating more aggravation in a world that already has more than enough of it.

Mary lives locally. Good. That means we can check out her criminal past and evictions easily on the Clerk of the Court and Sheriff’s websites.

 Mary has been working with her current employer for 7 years. That is wonderful! There is a strong correlation between longevity on the job, and longevity with us as a tenant. The opposite is also true. People who change jobs often usually change rentals often, like in the middle of the night, after promising to pay their rent when it is late, with the most heart-breaking excuses.

 Look at this! Mary has been with her current landlord for 6 years. See what I mean between the correlation between job stability and tenant stability.

 Uh oh. Mary has no significant other. She is a single working Mom (divorced) with 3 teenage boys, 17, 16, and 13. She makes $2,000 per month, and gets $400 per month in child support. Is that enough money to survive and pay us rent? Let’s break it down. Figure rent plus utilities plus gas back and forth to work, $1,000/month. Food, another $1,000 (if her boys are skinny and she is eligible to free school lunches, and/or food stamps.) Incidentals? After taxes, there is not much money left for incidentals, like her car breaking down, or clothes for the boys. 

 Another major uh-oh. While Mom is away at work, who will be watching the boys? Answer, no one. What are teenage boys like when they are left alone with no adult supervision? I know what I was like – hell on wheels.

 We are next going to check her criminal, her eviction history, and her credit. We turn down 75% of the applicants for our affordable rentals because of prior criminal and eviction problems, or not enough income to pay the rent.

 What about her credit? Who doesn’t have bad credit nowadays? We are more concerned with criminal and prior evictions. Someone who has been evicted before has little fear of being evicted again. Criminals often repeat their crimes … especially when the crime involved drugs, and about 80% of crimes nowadays involve drugs in some way.

I’m not going to go further into Mary’s background. I just wanted you to understand what it is like to judge another human being, and why you must judge in order to protect yourself from financial ruin.

 If you are a sympathetic and empathetic person, you are going to want to help Mary. She was up at 4:30 AM entering a rental application on the Internet, probably while waiting for the laundry to go through the spin cycle, and cleaning the house, before she got the boys up for school. She is a single working mother trying to take care of her children by herself, just like the momma kangaroo on the left. The momma kangaroo’s baby is a future “roo” of the outback. Mary’s children are the future generation of this country.

 If we give Mary a chance, rent to her and her boys, and she does what she promises to do, like pay the rent on time, and take care of your property, we will earn around $4,300 on our investment each year. This is 30%. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

 If however, Mary and her boys let us down, this is the result: we are left with a trashed mobile home that may take $2,000 to fix, $500 in legal fees  in the eviction because Mary isn’t leaving unless a sheriff with a gun on his hip makes her, and we lose 2 – 3 months in rent, another $1,800, while we are evicting, then fixing, then renting back out, which totals $4,300 in lost income – our whole year’s positive cash flow. Translation: we didn’t make any money this year on our investment.

 Let me leave you with phrase from the Talmud, a 2,000 year old book of wisdom: “If society did not have judges, men would devour each other alive.”

 I am proud of our  record as landlords, and mobile home park owners. We  have helped many single working mothers by renting, or selling, them  affordable housing. We have been burned by some, also. Through it all, we have kept our  humanity.

 The sun is up now. It is a new day.

Judge wisely, Grasshopper.

Filed under Articles · Tagged