One Hundred Mornings

A tenant's strongest reference is a payment record, built one month at a time by rent that arrives on the day it is due.

Many landlords and agents check an applicant's rental payment history through tenant screening services linked to the credit bureaus. What they see is a long row of ordinary months. Paid on time, paid on time, paid late once, paid on time again. No single month in that row is impressive. Taken together they say more than any letter a previous landlord could write, because they cannot be talked up.

The same pattern holds for owners. A bond account with years of punctual repayments helps when the owner later applies for further finance. A municipal account that has never fallen into arrears makes the rates clearance at sale close to a formality. Each record is a hundred dull mornings stacked on top of one another, and none of them looked like much on the day it happened.