What Rent Data From All 50 States Says Landlords Get Wrong

My three long-term rentals sit in Conroe, Texas. New construction, boring on purpose, and they mostly leave me alone so I can go handle whatever broke at a glamping site two hours east. That’s my entire long-term portfolio. So when Ed Barone opened an answer with the phrase “a landlord with three units,” I sat up. Ed co-founded RentRedi in 2016 with his son Ryan and now runs marketing there. Close to 200,000 landlords and renters use the platform, so they watch rent move at a scale I never will. I see three doors. They see the pattern behind them. I sent six questions. A few answers confirmed what I already believed. One sent me back to a spreadsheet, and one I’d argue with. Your Late Rent Problem Might Be a ZIP Code Problem Late-payment rates on the platform swing by as much as 4x from state to state, at around 5% in places like Utah and Hawaii and up to 20% in states like Mississippi. Ed’s read: A landlord with a handful of units treats every late payment as a verdict on somebody. Either the tenant is a problem, or you’re too soft. Sometimes it’s neither, and some of that gap tracks to where the property sits. I don’t take that as a permission slip. Late rent is still late rent, ...