Most owners describe a bad tenancy with one number: the rent that never came in. Then the unit comes back to you. You stand in the doorway on an October afternoon looking at carpet that has to go, a slider that will not latch, and a strike plate someone put a shoulder through. The rent is the loss you can name out loud. It is rarely the largest one. The rest of it is sitting in categories you never wrote down.
A bad tenancy is a set of behaviors, not a type of person
Before you can price the damage, you have to name the problem accurately. In our files, a problem tenancy is defined entirely by documented conduct: nonpayment or chronic late payment, lease violations such as unauthorized occupants or unapproved pets, unpermitted alterations, conduct that interferes with other residents' use of the property, damage beyond ordinary wear, and abandonment.
That is not a personality profile. It is a record. Every item on it can be backed by a ledger entry, a dated photograph, a notice, or a work order. If you cannot put a document behind it, it does not belong in the file and it should not be driving your decisions. Keeping the standard objective makes your enforcement consistent and your process defensible.
The five buckets
The actual loss sits in five places, and only the first one is obvious:
- Uncollected rent, including anything a judgment never converts into cash
- Legal and administrative cost: filings, service, counsel, and the hours you spend on all of it
- Physical damage above what the deposit covers
- Turnover: paint, cleaning, repairs, listing photos, showings, and the days the unit is dark
- Opportunity cost: the refinance you delayed, the second property you did not buy, the reserve you drained
Four of those five keep running after the tenancy ends. That is the part owners underestimate. A unit does not become rent-ready the day you get the keys back, and the money you spend making it rentable again was never part of the rent number in the first place.
Total up your own file
You do not need an industry average. You need your building. Write five lines on one page.
Line one: the months of rent you did not collect, times your rent. Line two: your rent divided by thirty, times every day the unit sat empty during and after the process. Line three: repair and replacement invoices above what the deposit covered. Line four: filings, service, and counsel, plus your own hours at whatever an hour of your time is worth. Line five: paint, cleaning, marketing, showings, and screening for the replacement tenancy.
Add them. Then divide by the number of months you have owned the property. That figure is your real per-month carrying cost for one bad tenancy, and it is the only number that lets you compare prevention against cure honestly.
The bucket that never makes the page
There is a sixth cost and it does not fit in a column. It is what the situation does to your judgment. Owners under pressure make the expensive mistakes. They take a partial payment without documenting what it does to a pending proceeding. They send a notice that turns out to be defective. They change a lock. Any one of those can restart a clock or create fresh liability, and none of them show up as a line item until much later.
What actually moves the odds
Screening is not instinct. It is written criteria applied identically to everyone. Verifiable income, verifiable rental history, credit obligations, and a complete, accurate application. In New York, lawful source of income is a protected class, so a housing voucher is simply a way rent gets paid and it is verified like any other income documentation. Here is the thing you can do today, for free: write your criteria down before your next showing and hand the same written copy to every applicant who asks.
The unpaid rent is the story owners tell. The other four buckets are what actually changes your year, and they are the ones a documented process is built to prevent. Run your own five lines this week. If the total surprises you, that is useful information. When you want to see what a written, uniformly applied screening process looks like in practice, ask us about ours.
This is general information, not legal advice. Landlord-tenant law changes, and the details matter — confirm anything specific with a qualified attorney.
General information only, not legal, tax, insurance, or investment advice. Source-dependent draft passages were intentionally withheld from this public version until they can be verified against current primary sources.