I got screwed out of $400 because a tenant broke her lease early and "decided" that she didn't owe me money for January rent. Kicker? She'd been paying with cashiers checks, and I don't have her home address. Other tenant is great, but the key thing to take away from this is the following:

1. If you can't designate a property manager and still make a profit, do not do it. You won't always be available, and tenants WILL ask for stupid crap, or need someone to come fix it, etc. Either make the money the property manager would, or pay them to deal with the BS, finding a renter, suing old renters that decide to skip on rent, leave the apartment filthy , etc. There's just a lot of hassle you don't want to deal with if you don't have to.

2. Tenants will break your shit. There's no way around this. How do you break a dryer knob? I don't know, but they did it. Clogged a toilet that can flush a fucking donkey, and even the roto-rooter guy has trouble with? Ayup, that's happened. Leave trash rotting in the house and require hours of cleaning to get things back to normal? Yep, that too.

3. You will have abnormal wear and tear. Normal replacement for carpets is not the timeframe you should expect. Likewise, if you had a nice tile floor, you now have a chipped tile floor. If you had a nice stove, you have a "slightly used" stove. It's a tax write off for a reason.

If you can get good tenants, or put extra "you break it you buy it" clauses in there, then you might be covered, but you'd be surprised at how often, and how far, people are willing to go the extra mile to avoid their responsibility. Even the people you don't expect.