Keep a Defeat Ledger

A small landlord spends most of the year thinking about the next vacancy and almost none of it studying the last letting that went wrong. That is natural, and costly. Memory is kind. Within a few weeks the tenant who stopped paying has become plain bad luck, and the warning signs in the application have faded. A short written note on each bad letting, made while the details are fresh, keeps them. The payslip that did not match the deposits on the bank statement, and nobody asked why. The previous landlord's reference that went to voicemail twice before the lease was signed anyway.

Read together, notes like those tend to show a pattern that no single one shows alone. Often it is the habit of saying yes too quickly whenever a unit has stood empty for a while, treating the vacancy as a bigger threat than a bad tenant, when a bad tenant usually costs far more than a month without rent. Seeing that in your own handwriting is uncomfortable, which is exactly why so few landlords write anything down. Without the record, each repeat of the same mistake arrives looking brand new.