About

Everything written for small landlords is selling software

There is no shortage of writing about renting out a house. Nearly all of it is produced by companies that would like to charge you a monthly fee — either software that screens tenants and collects rent, or a local management firm whose blog post about "accidental landlords" ends with a consultation form. That material is not useless. It is simply built to stop at the point where the funnel starts, which is several steps before your actual question.

Three questions started this site, because each one has a real answer and none of the first-page results contained it.

The deposit deadline, the carpet, and the turnover bill

"The tenant handed back the keys on the 3rd. When does my itemized statement have to be in the mail?" Every page says the deadline is somewhere between 14 and 45 days and depends on your state. None of them says which day the count starts from — surrender, the end of the lease term, or the day you learn the unit is vacant — even though that distinction is written into the statute and decides whether a statement is late. In several states a late statement does not merely lose you the deductions; it exposes you to a penalty of two or three times the deposit.

"The carpet was seven years old and the dog destroyed it. What can I charge?" The universal answer is "you cannot charge for ordinary wear and tear", repeated in a hundred variations, and it is true and useless. What a landlord needs is the arithmetic underneath it: a carpet with an assumed service life, the share of that life already spent, and the remaining value that is the most anyone will let you withhold. That is a two-line calculation nobody wants to print, because printing a number invites an argument about the number.

"What did that turnover actually cost me?" Paint, cleaning, the lock rekey, the listing photographs, the days empty, the application screening you paid for on three applicants who went elsewhere. Everyone in the industry knows this figure is the reason a small rental makes less than the spreadsheet said. It appears nowhere, because the pages that would carry it are written to sell you the software that supposedly reduces it.

So the pages here try to do two specific things that the existing material does not.

1. Give the numbers. Turnover as a line-item budget. Repair-or-replace as useful-life arithmetic. Late fees against what a court will actually enforce. A reserve expressed as a figure per unit per month rather than a shrug.
2. Write to someone with two units. Not two hundred. No portfolio, no staff, no software, no maintenance vendor on retainer — one person who has to decide this evening whether to accept an applicant whose income is 2.4 times the rent instead of 3.

Warren Ashby, two houses in the Midwest

Two rented houses in the Midwest, both handled without an agent since 2016. That is the entire basis for this site, and being straight about its size matters more than dressing it up.

I'm Warren Ashby. In those years I have done three turnovers, screened somewhere north of forty applicants, replaced one furnace, and lost one deposit dispute — lost it because my move-in condition report was a list of six sentences and a handful of dark photographs, which is worth approximately nothing when the other person shows up with their own set. The page on condition reports exists because of that afternoon. Losing taught me more about how the deposit rules actually work than the two turnovers where nobody objected to anything.

What I am not, plainly: not a lawyer, not a real estate agent or broker, not a licensed property manager, and not a certified anything. I have no professional standing in this subject at all. I also do not have your state, and that matters here more than in most subjects — deposit caps, notice periods, cure periods, and interest rules are written state by state and sometimes city by city, and a confident national answer to any of them is a wrong answer to most readers.

So every guide is built in two layers. The first is the mechanism: what a notice to pay or quit is for, why service method decides whether a filing survives, what an adverse action notice does, how a deposit deduction has to be documented. Mechanisms travel. The second layer is the number or the deadline, which does not travel — and there the page tells you which statute to open and how to find your state's version rather than handing you a figure that happens to be Ohio's.

Statutes at the source, invoices labelled as mine

State law is read at the source, not summarised from another summary. Deposit rules and notice requirements are quoted from the state code on the legislature's own site, with the section number in the text, so you can open it and confirm nothing has moved. Where a rule varies — and most of the ones that matter do — the page says so and shows you how to look up your own, instead of quoting one state as though it were the country.

Federal rules are cited by name. Screening runs on the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which is where the adverse action obligation comes from. Advertising and applicant selection run on the Fair Housing Act and HUD's published guidance, including the 2020 guidance on assistance animals that most "can I charge a pet deposit" pages skip. Lead paint disclosure is a federal rule with a specific pamphlet and a specific form. These are named and linked, not paraphrased.

Local ordinances get checked in the place they actually live. Rental registration, licensing, and pre-tenancy inspection are city and county matters, and a surprising number of landlords fail them without knowing they exist. The guides tell you what to search on your municipality's own code site, because there is no national list.

Numbers are labelled by where they came from. Service-life figures for roofs, water heaters, and HVAC come from published industry tables and are marked as estimates, because they are. Anything that comes from my own invoices is identified as exactly that — two houses, one metro area, one landlord's prices — and is never presented as a national average. A figure with no sourcing is a figure you should not plan around.

Dates sit on everything: when the page went up, when it was last gone over, and when each quoted statute was actually read. That is not tidiness. Deposit caps get raised and notice periods get rewritten between one legislative session and the next, and in a subject where being late is punished in multiples of the deposit, a rule I checked eighteen months ago is a liability rather than a fact.

The jobs this site hands off

• It is not legal advice. Reading a page here does not make me your lawyer, and I am nobody's. On anything involving a court filing, a habitability complaint, or a deposit dispute of real size, an hour with a landlord-tenant attorney in your state costs less than the mistake does.
• It does not tell you how to evict someone. The pages on notices and nonpayment describe what the process consists of and where the procedural traps are, so you can recognise the point at which you are out of your depth. Removing a tenant is a court process, and self-help — changing locks, cutting utilities, removing belongings — is illegal everywhere and expensive nearly everywhere.
• It does not cover buying, financing, or valuing property, and it does not cover maintaining the house you live in. It starts at the moment a tenant is in place, or about to be.
• It does not answer whether you should form an LLC, or anything else about entities, tax structure, or bookkeeping software.
• It takes no referral fees from screening services, insurers, landlord software, or management companies, and no link on this site pays me anything. A product gets named here only when you are going to run into the name anyway.

Found something that no longer holds?

Statutes get amended and dollar caps get raised without anyone bothering to tell a two-house landlord. If a section number here has moved, or a figure no longer matches what your state's code says today, flag it for me. I would far rather post an amended page with the date of the amendment on it than leave a deadline sitting wrong.