Welcome to the Five Minute Prime Podcast. Quick actionable tips to master personal finance and real estate investing. In just five minutes a day, we'll help you build wealth and achieve financial freedom. Tenants will destroy your property. You've heard it. Maybe you've lived it, a turnover that costs more than that tenant ever handed you in rent. But the landlord standing in the wreckage and the landlord who walked away clean weren't dealt different tenants. They ran different systems. Hey Prime Investors, Martin Maxwell here. Welcome back to the Five Minute Prime podcast. There's a unit I'm turning right now. New tenant signs the lease in an hour, and before I hand over a single key, I spend exactly 60 minutes in that empty unit. I'm not cleaning, I'm not staging, I'm building a case file for a dispute that might not happen for another 18 months. That hour has a name, the move-in hour. And it is the single thing that decides whether the next deposit fight is one you win or one you eat. It's not the tenant, it's the hour you skipped. Let's kill the scariest version of the myth first. Ask a room of landlords about pets, and you'll hear horror stories like clawed doors, soaked carpet, a backyard turned to a minefield. Now look at what the surveys actually find. Average pet damage runs somewhere around $200 to $400 across an entire tenancy. In one landlord survey, the worst damage reported averaged about $430, less than a single month's rent. 85% of landlords who allow pets do see some pet damage, but most of it is minor. Only about one pet owning renter in eight does damage pass $250. And here's the part that should move you. Tenants with pets stay longer, roughly six in ten renew. So the applicant you've been screening out is often a tenant who'd have stayed the extra year and saved you a turnover. Now, does real damage happen? It does. About one landlord in five, by those same surveys, has eaten a repair bill north of $5,000. I'm not going to stand here and tell you it never happens. I'm telling you it isn't random. The $5,000 tenant did not fall out of the sky. Somewhere upstream, a system had a hole in it. A screening call that never got made, a walkthrough that never happened, a lease clause nobody enforced. And if you've already eaten one of those, this episode is not about that unit. You can't re-screen the past. It's about the next tenancy. That one you still control completely. The move in hour. So let's build the system. Back in episode 18, the first manage episode I ever recorded, I said landlording was never a personality trait. It's a system. Here's one piece of it. Four parts. Three, you run at the property, one in your budget. Part one starts before the tenant even exists. Episode one, twenty-five, I gave you the five-layer shield. The screening system that keeps fraud out. Screening is layer one of damage prevention two. When you make that two-back landlord call, the landlord before the current one, because the current one might lie just to get a bad tenant out the door, you ask one extra question. Not did they pay. You ask, how was the unit returned? Call that the sixth layer. The protection a credit report can't give you because damage history only shows up after they're approved. Part two is the move in hour itself, the walkthrough, room by room, with a written condition checklist. Every wall, every floor, every appliance, every fixture. And you photograph it, timestamped photo and video the day they move in before a stick of furniture lands. Then both of you sign the checklist, both of you keep a copy. California just wrote the standard into law, AB 2801. It tells you exactly what good looks like. Three sets of photos, move in, move out before you fix anything, and after the repair, call it the three-photo rule. You don't live in California, run it anyway. It was never a California rule. It's just the standard, and California happened to write it down first. Here's why this is the whole ballgame. Bad documentation is the number one reason landlords lose security deposit disputes. Not bad tenants, bad documentation. When a deduction gets challenged, the question is always the same. What's your evidence? A time-stamped move-in photo and a signed checklist. That is evidence. Your memory of how the place looked 14 months ago is not. And it settles the argument that eats every deposit. Wear versus damage. Scuffed paint, a worn carpet path, a few small nail holes, that's normal wear. You absorb it. Holes in the drywall, a burn in the countertop, a cracked sink, that's damage. The deposit covers it. The move-in hour is what proves which side of that line you're standing on. Part three, one scheduled visit between move in and move out. Filter change, smoke detector check, written into the lease so it's never a surprise. You're catching the small leak before it's the big ceiling. The bill that actually hurt. Now, I want to fix the number you're afraid of because most landlords are scared of the wrong one. You picture tenant damage, you picture a repair bill, drywall, paint, a busted appliance. So let's walk a real turnover and put dollars on it. Property managers surveyed by the National Apartment Association put a typical turnover between $1,500 and $3,500 a unit. And one in five says it runs higher than that. Walk one, patch the drywall, repaint, $600, deep clean, $300, new listing photos, and the ad $200. That's $1,100. Annoying, not fatal. Then the unit sits a month and a quarter empty on an $1,800 unit that's $2,250 in rent that simply never showed up. So the turn costs $3350. And the tenant damage, the drywall, everyone loses sleepover Mahesa was $600 of it. The vacancy was double everything else combined. The drywall was never the story. The empty unit was always the story, which means turnover is a when, not an if. That's part four. You reserve for it. A make ready line in your monthly budget. So the next turn is a planned withdrawal, not an emergency. And the cheapest turnover is the one that never happens, which is exactly Thursday's episode, the rent increase playbook. When you finally got a good tenant, what you do at renewal decides whether they stay. Push the rent wrong, and you've just bought yourself a vacancy and a $1,500 turn. We'll walk that math Thursday. Here's your challenge, and the timing is not an accident. We're in the peak signing season. May into August carries about 70% of all moves. You may literally have a lease to sign this week, so run the move an hour. Checklist room by room, time-stamped photos of every wall, floor, and appliance. Both of you sign, both of you keep a copy, no signing on the calendar this month, then walk a unit you already own and photograph it today. A mid-tenancy record beats no record at all. Then the part everyone skips. File it. Not in your camera role. Your camera role will be 12,000 photos deep by next spring and you will never find it. A dated folder, cloud backup, labeled with the property address and the move-in date. Because the person who needs those photos is you, 18 months from now, standing in a small claims hearing, trying to remember a wall. Make that person's job easy tonight. Tenants will destroy your property only if your system lets them. The tenant is not the variable. The hour is. This is Martin Maxwell, Prime Investor. Go build your case file.