Dealing with tenant who trashed apartment

I posted a video a few days ago that was basically just a walk through of an apartment to show how it had been left after a move out. I posted it to tease this video. The walkthrough video can be found here: https://youtu.be/xoElZhobbaI

Real estate investing is great. I love it because I get to fix up a lot of neglected properties, rent them to good people, enjoy immensely more freedom of time than I had at my old engineering job, all while making wayyy more money. I also interact with a much wider cross section of society than most ever get to on a regular basis and I really enjoy that.

The downside; however, is that there are traps that you can run into that can set you back or slow your progress. Allowing the wrong tenant into one of your units is definitely one of those traps. Scaling requires change and sometimes a bit of experimentation is involved. In this case, I experimented with delegating my tenant screening and the outcome, unfortunately, was a setback. I ended up with a roughed-up apartment, and more importantly, wasted time.

This video overviews the whole experience from start to finish. Hopefully it can serve as a lesson that you learn vicariously through me if you're in the real estate business, or as entertainment and a new perspective if you're not. May you never have to deal with a trashed apartment!

I overview how to screen tenants, what my tenant screening criteria is, and the reason why it was not applied in this situation. Screening section 8 tenants is a bit different and I overview what matters for them to be good tenants as well.

In any case, I hope you enjoy!