[youngButEager]

Imagine showing vacant apartments to prospective renters since 1993 -- for 23 years. Lots of units, lots of prospective tenants.

In 1993 I had no pool of 'before move-in/after move-in' experience with tenants. 23 years on, I have a large number of 'before move-in/after move-in' tenant experiences.

So when a tenancy went bad, over time I started making a mental note of

1) the social cues the tenant made when I first met them

2) what their behavior was after move-in

I started seeing patterns. After 23 years of "before move-in/after move-in" experiences, I developed predictors.

In my mind, I suspect that Judges, teachers, cops, hiring managers, any profession where you have a lot of "before/after" experience with lots of people -- have developed similar wisdom, similar predictors.

It's probably a survival skill humans have -- if you get burned over and over, you start connecting "is there any way I could have used this person's before behavior to protect myself from their after behavior?"

Here are some of the screening-out cues I use:

1) during the initial showing of the unit and meeting, does the person forget something I just told them ("It's a one year lease")? Did they exhibit more than one memory lapse like that?

2) was the person inarticulate in writing (on the application), or in their speech?

3) on the continuum of demeanor (behavior and body language) from "street people behavior" to "my professional peers" -- was the prospective tenant closer to "street person" demeanor or closer to "professional peer"?

4) does the person smoke cigarettes? Over 23 years most of my pot-smoking tenants smoked cigarettes. It makes sense I guess, smoking cigarettes for nicotine, smoking pot for thc.

The list of 'cues' I have is not perfect; people are still moving in and smoking pot inside my properties in violation of the lease.

[thomyorkie]

I understand that you've had some bad experiences with people who also happen to smoke marijuana, but you are painting with much too broad a brush.

You must ask yourself: how accurate are you in your assessment of who smokes marijuana and who doesn't? For some of your tenants, I'm sure it's obvious that they partake. But, I'd wager many of your 'good' tenants do as well, and you have no idea. It's really not hard to hide marijuana use from your landlord. And from what it sounds like, the tenants who don't make any effort to be discrete with their marijuana use are also the tenants who don't care if their car is blocking another car. Perhaps a DGAF attitude would be a better thing for you to screen for than marijuana use.

[youngButEager]

'DGAF' is not always evident in the short time we meet, interact with a new tenant. Unlike a job interview process (several stages of contact: phone, in person several times, etc.) it's not practical for landlords to spend that much time with each prospective tenant.

The 18 tenants I've evicted in the past year and half -- they ALL slipped 'under the radar.'

My "cues/indicators" list above is 100% NOT all inclusive.

Until you've dealt over many years with pot smokers, in quantities, you really, really have no idea how defiant/grouchy/uncooperative/troublemaking they can be, behaviors you can only witness over a period of a lease.

Here's another example. 31 yo male, he should know better, right? About the useless 'crutch' of drugs and alcohol as the foundation for personal recreation?

Smoked up a storm. He befriended surrounding tenants, and so no one complained. NOTE: in our non-smoking properties, keeping in mind that very few people smoke these days and make an effort to only live in non-smoking apartment properties, if a non-smoker is exposed to 2nd hand smoke, do they complain to Management? Oh my god. Especially pot smoke. We get complaints like "the person below me is smoking pot, you said this was a non-smoking property, I don't want to get high from their 2nd hand smoke" -- we get COMPLAINTS. It's understandable, very few people smoke or want to be in close breathing proximity to smokers these days.

Well, I had to catch him in the act, he chummed up with the surrounding tenants "in range" and somehow got them to not complain. It wasn't easy. Caught him over the course of 2 weeks on our security cameras.

We didn't tell him "Joe, we have video evidence you're smoking" we just served the 3 Day Notice. He refused to stop. Went to eviction court, he lied to the Judge. HE'S UNDER OATH. "Judge, I stopped smoking weeks ago." Lied to the Judge while under threat of perjury. DEFIANT.

Then my attorney brought forth the photos and entered them in the record. The Judge looked at Joe. I'm thinking 'it's perjury, is Joe going to jail?' The Judge must have been in a good mood. He looked at my photo evidence for 20 seconds, BAM the gavel dropped, "judgment for the plaintiff."

Pot smokers are T-R-O-U-B-L-E.

It depends on how long they've been smoking. Those 3 years I smoked it as a teen, it was in the final year I started with bad behavior, and bad experiences I finally realized were not me.

So I don't really care how much a pot smoker says "it's fine, I'm fine, it's harmless."

My philosophy with ANYONE who uses pot, and this is solely because of my 3 years personal experience and the screwed up behaviors from pot smokers over 23 years of landlording:

get away from me. Stay away from me. I don't care if you compromise your personal life by thinking intoxication is a good foundation, just don't do it around me.

That stuff is a disaster in many ways BECAUSE the damage is so incremental, that the build of up negative consequences is invisible to the user.

I have personally walked the path and I now also have 23 years of screwups, pot smoking tenants causing weird problems no other (sober) tenant causes.

Let me say, I feel deeply sorry for anyone who leans on drugs and/or alcohol for 'recreation.'

If you find yourself frequently intoxicated for 'recreation' - from pot, alcohol, whatever -- MOST people are going to have problems from it. You can throw the dice with it over the long term if you want.

[thomyorkie]

> "Pot smokers are T-R-O-U-B-L-E"

There is an error in your reasoning process which has been pointed out several times now (not just by me). I encourage a bit of introspection.

[youngButEager]

No. No error.

Pot smokers make bad decisions MUCH more frequently than sober non-users.

I am in a position to observe that -- lots of non-users and a few users, at our properties

It doesn't matter if 100,000 non-experienced people tell me my opinion (based on personal experience across 23+3 years) about pot smokers is wrong.

I actually have THE EXPERIENCE.

But, as I've said, and as I tell prospective tenants, it is not for me to tell you how to behave. My job, if you are a fan of repeated intoxication, is to keep you out of my apartments. That's all I do.

And in the past year and a half, 18 people have slipped under the tenant screening radar -- and got evicted for smoking on the premises.

We go to so much trouble to help people realize "hey, these people are really serious about this 'no pot' rule, this place isn't for me"

18 people in a year and half. Despite the fact we TOLD them, UP FRONT, no pot smoking (or cigars or cigarettes) on the premises. Before we even take a deposit.

Think about that. 18 pre-warned-and-now-evicted pot smokers. THAT'S THE POT. That's the bad decision making.

And you don't see or experience that. So I understand it's hard to grok, these pot smokers.

[thomyorkie]

> "I am in a position to observe that -- lots of non-users and a few users, at our properties"

This is the crux of it. You simply cannot know for certain who the non-users are. I guarantee you over the course of your 23 years, there were tenants who you assumed fell into the non-users group but actually didn't.

[pizza]

I may be younger than you have been renting out apartments for, but it seems to me that the first 3 cues in particular might not be that effective in discriminatory power?

1) I'm estimating memory lapse / brain fog etc in the general population is much more prevalent in non-pot-smokers for general reasons -- hell, depression affects something like 5-10% of Americans which iirc is many times over the fraction of people who would wake and bake prior their apt. showing. Yeah, memory problems are a strong signal when you know a specific person is blazed, but across the whole of the population this is going to be a filter with a really high false positive rate.

2) kinda seems like a proxy to their parents' wealth, maybe that matters to you but really should the equivalent of an SAT score really predict the ability for a tenant to keep to the contract?

3) there could be a couple of effects at play here. Kind of another proxy to parents' wealth. People might also put their guard up once they notice you sizing them up. But conveying professionalism as a game theoretic 'signaling' strategy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

Cigarettes though? probably not a bad indicator. I think as a whole they probably do more damage to the building and other tenants, too.

[superswordfish]

That list of "cues" is hilarious. Guaranteed you know professional people who hide it from you because, well, you know why. And to reiterate, you need to unwind. Holy crap.

[sushiwarrior]

This really leads like a list of reasons for your prejudice and stereotyping/profiling people. You only actually have positive confirmation for the ones who disrespect others and violate the rules of the lease, while you may have many people who consume regularly and are still able to respect others. By doing things like respecting the fact smoking inside makes a huge smell (and take edibles/use a smokebuddy/vaporize/go for a walk and smoke) and respecting parking rules, or even other social rules such as not smoking cigarettes (a more outwardly "rebellious" behaviour), these individuals don't make problems, can interact nicely, and you totally forget about them.

This all just reads like a 23-year long confirmation bias building up.