Evidence quality 4.38/5
Eight-dimension review score against the quality rubric . Each dimension scored 1–5.
- D1 Source grounding
- 5/5
- D2 Source authority
- 4/5
- D3 Arithmetic
- 4/5
- D4 Uncertainty
- 4/5
- D5 Scope
- 4/5
- D6 Prose
- 5/5
- D7 Perception honesty
- 4/5
- D8 Caveat completeness
- 5/5
≈ As likely as
Perceived
The "passive income" framing dominates how people imagine renting out a property: buy or keep a flat, collect rent, do little. First-time and "accidental" landlords — people who inherited a place, moved for work, or kept a starter home — rarely have a quantitative sense of how often a tenancy turns into a serious loss. The feared scenarios (a tenant who stops paying, refuses to leave, or leaves the unit badly damaged) are vivid and widely joked about, but the perception that they are rare edge cases sits against survey data showing that a majority of people who actually own rental property have already had to evict someone. There is no rigorous survey of the perceived probability, so this is an intuition estimate.
Source: editorial intuition, not polled
Actual
~56 in 100 US residential rental owners have had to evict a tenant at some point (2024 survey)
US residential real estate investors / landlords (Clever Real Estate 2024, n=764)
Show derivation
Anchored on Clever Real Estate's 2024 survey of 764 US residential real estate investors: 56% "have had to evict a tenant at some point," 51% "have dealt with bad tenants," and 52% "had tenants significantly damage a property." These are lifetime-cumulative rates among people who own rental property, so the scope is subgroup_lifetime (US landlords), not a whole- population figure. The point estimate (0.56) uses the eviction-ever rate as the clearest single marker of a serious bad-tenant event. The true "at least one serious problem (nonpayment, eviction, or major damage)" rate is higher than any one of these because the events only partly overlap, but the union is not directly measured, so it is deliberately not summed. Low (0.30): a careful, well-screening owner renting a single unit for a handful of years faces materially lower cumulative odds than the survey's active-investor sample (90% of whom said they had lost money on an investment; 44% depend on rental income). High (0.72): long-tenured, multi-unit investors, for whom the union of eviction, nonpayment, and severe-damage events pushes well above any single reported rate.
Caveats: The headline 56% is lifetime-cumulative among current rental-property owners, an…
The headline 56% is lifetime-cumulative among current rental-property owners, and the sample (Clever Real Estate 2024, n=764) skews toward active, heavily- invested landlords — 90% reported having lost money on an investment and 44% depend on rental income — so it likely overstates the risk for a casual "accidental" landlord renting a single flat for a few years. That is why the low uncertainty bound sits at 0.30. All figures are self-reported and retrospective; owners who quit landlording after one bad experience may be under-sampled, which could bias the rate in either direction. The Eviction Lab national rates are tenant-household-per-year and are an explicit lower bound (missing New York and California records); they are used only to corroborate that eviction is routine, not as the headline denominator. The main personal levers — tenant screening, local rental market, number of units, and holding period — move the odds substantially but lack clean, single-number multipliers from a named source, so no personal_factor_multipliers are asserted here. This is declared [US-ONLY]: eviction difficulty and tenant-protection regimes vary enormously by country, which changes both how often a "won't leave" situation arises and how costly and slow it is to resolve — comparable landlord-incidence surveys do not exist for most other jurisdictions.
Related risks
Other risks on similar themes — for exploring related fears.
Hail roof damage
What are the odds that hail will seriously damage your roof during your lifetime?
Visa overstay deportation
What are the odds of being detained and deported from the US after overstaying a visa?
Rental listing scam loss
How likely is a first-time renter to lose money to a fake-listing scam?
Pick challenger
Clever Real Estate’s 2024 survey of 764 US residential real estate investors found that 56% had had to evict a tenant at some point, while 51% had dealt with bad tenants and 52% had a tenant significantly damage a property. Another 61% said they were still tracking down missed rent payments every month. The “passive income” story that draws people into renting out a flat sits awkwardly against those numbers: among people who actually own rental property, a serious tenant problem is closer to a coin flip than a rare edge case. The point estimate here uses the eviction-ever rate as the clearest single marker of a bad-tenant event; because eviction, nonpayment, and severe damage only partly overlap, the true share who have hit at least one of them is higher than any single figure, though it is not directly measured and is deliberately not summed.
The structural data agrees that eviction is routine rather than exceptional. The Eviction Lab at Princeton records roughly one eviction filing for every 17 renter households and about one in 40 renter households actually evicted per year between 2000 and 2016 — and it states plainly that these national figures underestimate the true prevalence because records from major states including New York and California are missing. A landlord holding a unit across several tenancies accumulates that per-year exposure over time. The cost when it happens is not trivial: the NBER study by Humphries and colleagues, working from landlords’ own lease ledgers, finds that filing an eviction costs the equivalent of two to three months’ rent, that nonpayment is common and frequently tolerated before any filing, and that most evictions involve tenants who were unlikely to resume paying.
Two caveats keep this from being a simple “half of landlords get burned” headline. First, the survey sample skews toward active, heavily-invested owners — 90% said they had lost money on an investment and 44% depend on their rental income — so a careful owner screening tenants and renting one flat for a few years faces materially lower odds than 56%, which is why the low end of the range sits near 30%. Second, this is US data. Eviction speed, tenant-protection law, and the ease of removing a non-paying occupant differ enormously between jurisdictions; in much of continental Europe a “won’t leave” situation is harder and slower to resolve even where the base rate of nonpayment is lower. The levers that actually move a given landlord’s risk — screening, local market, number of units, and how long the property is held — are real but do not come with clean, single-number multipliers from a named source, so this entry states the population rate and leaves the personal adjustment qualitative.
Related tidbits
About half of US rental-property owners have had to evict a tenant, and 40% wish they'd never started. That bad-tenant risk is why "rent it out vs sell and invest" tilts toward regret on the keep-and-rent side — 40% vs 25% for selling.
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
-
[1] Clever Real Estate — Residential Real Estate Investing in 2024: More Rent Money, More Rental Problems
Residential Real Estate Investing in 2024: More Rent Money, More Rental ProblemsSee all 2 Likelier entries citing this source →
- Statistic
Among 764 US residential real estate investors: 56% have had to evict a tenant at some point; 51% have dealt with bad tenants; 52% had tenants significantly damage a property; 61% still track down missed rent every month; 90% have lost money on an investment; 40% wish they never started- Excerpt
“"More than half of respondents (56%) have had to evict a tenant at some point [...] more than half saying they've dealt with bad tenants (51%) [...] had tenants significantly damage a property (52%) [...] 61% of landlords say they still have to track down missed rent payments every month [...] Nearly all real estate investors (90%) say they've lost money on an investment at some point [...] 40% say they wish they'd never started investing in real estate." ”
- Source data from
- 2024-07-01
- Accessed
- 2026-07-09 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Survey of 764 US residential real estate investors, fielded May 18–June 9, 2024. The native/normalized point (0.56) is the reported eviction-ever rate, used as the single best-measured marker of a serious bad-tenant event. The 51% bad-tenant and 52% severe-damage figures independently land near half, corroborating "about half of rental owners have hit a serious tenant problem." Rates are not added together (they overlap). Sample skews toward active, heavily-invested owners, which informs the downward uncertainty bound for casual single-unit landlords.
-
[2] The Eviction Lab, Princeton University — National Estimates: Eviction in America
National Estimates: Eviction in America- Statistic
Roughly 1 eviction filing for every 17 renter households (2000–2016); ~1 in 40 renter households evicted over the period; 2016 eviction filing rate 6.12%, eviction rate 2.34% against 38.4M renter households- Excerpt
“"roughly 1 eviction filing for every 17 renter households between 2000 and 2016. Approximately 1 in 40 renter households were evicted over this period." In 2016: 38,372,860 renter-occupied households, 2,350,042 eviction filings (6.12% filing rate) and 898,479 evictions (2.34% eviction rate). The Eviction Lab notes its national estimates "underestimate the overall prevalence of both" because records from major states including New York and California are missing. ”
- Source data from
- 2018-04-07
- Accessed
- 2026-07-09 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Eviction Lab data is a per-year, per-renter-household rate (tenant side), not a landlord-lifetime figure — used here as structural corroboration that eviction is a routine, high-frequency event in the US rental market. At ~6% of renter households facing a filing each year, a landlord holding a unit across multiple tenancies accumulates meaningful exposure over a career. The figures are explicitly a lower bound (missing NY/CA records).
-
[3] National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER Working Paper 33155) — Nonpayment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market
Nonpayment and Eviction in the Rental Housing MarketSee all 2 Likelier entries citing this source →
- Statistic
Filing an eviction costs landlords the equivalent of 2–3 months of rent; nonpayment is common, frequently tolerated, and often followed by recovery; 15% of those evicted would have resumed paying rent- Excerpt
“"Filing an eviction costs landlords the equivalent of 2-3 months of rent [...] Nonpayment is common, is frequently tolerated by landlords, and is often followed by recovery [...] the majority of evictions involve tenants who are unlikely to pay going forward [...] 15% of those evicted would have resumed paying rent." ”
- Source data from
- 2024-11-01
- Accessed
- 2026-07-09 · archived copy
- Calculation
- Humphries, Nelson, Nguyen, van Dijk, and Waldinger (2024), using lease- level ledger data from landlords. Cited for the mechanism and cost of a bad-tenant event — an eviction costs a landlord 2–3 months' rent and most evictions terminate rather than recover — not for a population rate. The paper's underlying tenancy sample is drawn from high-eviction neighborhoods, so its raw nonpayment frequencies are not treated as a general landlord rate.