The 3-Point Rule That Saves Landlords

Author

Roger Blankenship
December 10, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

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Screening Tenants the Smart Way

Better tenants, fewer headaches. It’s that simple.

If you own rentals long enough, you’ll eventually learn that the greatest threat to your sanity is not a roof leak, a broken A/C, or that possum living in the crawl space. It’s a bad tenant. Everything else is an inconvenience. A bad tenant is a life choice.

Most new landlords overcomplicate screening. They create a twelve-page form, interview like they’re hiring for NASA, and then—because humans are sentimental creatures—they end up renting to whoever “seemed nice.”

Aristotle would call this a category error.

So let’s simplify. You can run credit, verify income, call employers, check references—all the normal stuff. But the real key to good screening is a simple guideline I use:

The 3-Point Tenant Screening Rule.

It goes like this:

If a tenant can consistently demonstrate 3 solid points of stability, the odds of them becoming a problem diminish dramatically. They won’t become saints, but they won’t become headlines either.

Here are the three points I look for:

1. Steady Income (Not Aspirational Income)

Steady doesn’t mean glamorous. It means predictable.

I don’t need them to be rich. I need them to be employed by an entity that deposits money into their account on a regular schedule. I don’t care if it’s a logistics company, a hospital, or the DMV—as long as they get paid predictably and show a history of actually paying people back.

2. Solid Rental History (Or No Rental History at All—Yes, Really)

Good rental history is obvious. They stayed somewhere. They paid. They didn’t set the drapes on fire.

But “no rental history” can also be fine—fresh grads, people living with family, or those coming out of long-term homeownership. These folks are not “unproven”; they’re simply not in your system yet.

What you don’t want is someone who has moved every six months for five years. That’s not mobility. That’s turbulence.

3. Responsible Personal Behavior

This one is the hardest to quantify, so you have to be a bit of a detective.

Responsible people follow through. They arrive on time. They fill out forms correctly. They speak respectfully. They seem… grown up.

If they can’t manage the application process, they certainly can’t manage a lease.

Now, there’s another layer to all this—one I don’t usually say out loud, but since it’s just us here, I’ll share it. I tell my students, a bit tongue-in-cheek, never rent to the Three P’s:

Painters, Preachers, and Policemen.

I don’t automatically decline any of them, but after decades of landlording, I approach these three categories with extra caution.

  • Painters – famously inconsistent income streams and a tendency to spend like sailors when the checks do come in.

  • Preachers – good intentions, big hearts, and dreams so magnificent they rarely fit inside their paychecks.

  • Policemen – underpaid, stressed, and deeply familiar with the eviction process—sometimes more familiar than you are. If things go sideways, you may find yourself on the wrong end of tactical brilliance.

Again, I don’t rule individuals out. I evaluate them with the same fairness as anyone else. But pattern recognition is part of wisdom, and wisdom is part of screening.

The goal isn’t perfection. You’re not building a monastery.

You’re building a rental portfolio. That means:

  • A tenant who pays on time

  • A tenant who communicates

  • A tenant who doesn’t turn your property into a Dickensian subplot

Three points of stability.

Three P’s to evaluate carefully.

And a much happier landlord experience.

Better tenants, fewer headaches. It really is that simple.

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