Many landlords think that the more money your tenant makes, the better.

But after 22 years of being a landlord, I found that's just not the case. In fact, some of my best tenants were blue collar workers or what other investors call hard hat tenants and not high earners. So in the rest of this informal Coach's Corner edition of the podcast, I'll explain why I like these types of tenants and why you might want to try them too. Hey, everyone. My name is Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach Carson. And in this show,

I teach you how to use real estate investing to become financially free so you can spend your time doing more of what matters. I want to tell you a quick story that taught me this lesson. So it was about five years ago and my wife and I were getting ready to rent a single family house. This is actually one that we used to live in. And so we still self-manage it. And when we put it on the market, we got a lot of applications. So we have more than we needed. But by the end of that week, we decided we were going to evaluate everybody at the same time. And we kind of narrowed it down to two people, both of whom who qualified. So they met our minimum criteria for income and met our minimum criteria

for credit. They both had good job history. But one of them was a very high earner and they made

a lot of money. Let's just say that they had graduate degrees and we were able to make like,

you know, multiple six figures and they were sort of in between, you know, they sold one property.

They might be building another property, but they just needed a place for a couple years, and this was a good spot. The other couple was, I'm not going to give away their actual profession for their privacy, but they, let's just say they work with their hands and they're skilled at what they do, but it's more of a, you know, blue collar job, and they worked hard, did it just fine, but they made less revenue than this other

person did personally, but also enough. Long story short, we decided to go with the second couple,

the couple who was the more blue-collar job. And here's my reason. Number one, they made enough

money. So we have three criteria that we always look for that I'll repeat here in this

episode for a good tenant. We want someone who pays on time, someone who stays a long time,

and someone who will take care of the property. And in this case, we felt like this tenant was

the best suited to do that. And I'm going to explain more why that is the case here in a moment.

But fast forward, they've been there about five years now. and they just renewed for another couple years. And I think they'll be there for a total of seven years at least. Maybe they'll move on after that point. But it has been a very, very successful, awesome tenant. We've loved having them there. And hopefully they've like being in the house as well. So I want to unpack this situation a little bit.

First of all by saying, I hope if you've watched my channel at all on property management or landlording, you've probably heard that it's smart to have tenant screening criteria in writing

that you apply to everyone the same. So this is things like credit income. They have a prior

eviction record. They have good screening criteria from their prior landlords, things like that. And you can actually get a copy of my written tenant screening criteria. If you want to use that as a starting point, you can look in the podcast or YouTube description below. There'll be a link there. You can get that for free. But the point is that is a really good starting point. And in some cases, if you're running your property and you have one applicant who qualifies, it's pretty straightforward, right? You just, you choose the qualified applicant.

And this situation is a little bit different. We set a deadline of about a week from the time

we started promoting the property, hoping that we would get multiple applicants. And we did.

And at that point, we wanted to choose the most qualified applicant. And the point I want to make here is that the most qualified isn't always the person who makes the most money. So if my goal here is to have somebody pays on time, the person who made more money certainly had that criteria. They would probably pay on time. But because I was able to choose between multiple applicants, I felt like the second applicant was more likely to stay longer or stay forever, you know, stay as long as possible and take care of the property better.

And so I want to explain why this is the case.

This is an idea I learned early in my career.

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