Decide Once, Execute Daily

Say a landlord owns a handful of flats and the rent on one of them is late again. If she has never decided what happens when rent is late, she has to decide it now, under pressure, with the tenant's excuse in one ear and her own bond repayment in the other. And she will probably decide differently from the way she did last time.

The landlords who sleep better make those decisions once, on a calm day, and write them into the lease and into the way they run things. Rent is due on a stated day. If it has not arrived, a polite message goes out, then a formal letter of demand, and the tenant knows that order before anything goes wrong. The ingoing inspection is done with the tenant present and signed by both. The deposit goes into an interest-bearing account the day it arrives. None of this needs a fresh debate each month, because the debate already happened.

This is less about being strict and more about being consistent. Tenants can live with firm rules far more easily than with rules that shift with the landlord's mood, and a landlord who has treated every tenant the same way is in a far stronger position if a dispute ever goes further.