Does a tenant twenty feet from my kitchen window change my screening bar?

I've had a unit under my own floor for six years and the thing that broke was never income. It was schedule.

My worst tenant in that unit paid every month, on time, never late once. He also worked a swing shift and started cooking at 1am with a radio on. My criteria didn't have a line for that because criteria can't have a line for that.

So I didn't tighten the numbers. I tightened the conversation. I show the unit myself now, and I say out loud during the showing that I live upstairs, that the floor transmits sound, and that I'm going to be a present landlord who fixes things fast and also notices things. Some people hear that and stop responding. That is the screen working, and it happens before anyone fills out an application, which keeps my written criteria clean and applied the same way to everybody who does apply.

On income I'm the same as my off-site duplex. Raising the floor just made me wait longer for the same person.

The part I'd think about is what a vacancy costs you when the unit is the reason your mortgage works. If the basement rent is covering a real chunk of your payment, two months of empty is not a neutral event while you hold out for the perfect applicant, and that pressure is exactly what makes people bend their own rules in week seven. I'd rather set a bar I can actually hold and then hold it.

Same criteria, better lease. That's where I landed.

The reason is that everything you'd tighten to fix proximity is a proxy for something you can just write down instead. Worried about noise? Quiet hours clause and a specific sound rule. Worried about guests parking you in? Parking assignment in the lease, one space, named. Worried about the shared laundry? Hours and a rule that the machine gets emptied when it stops.

Proxies drift. Rules don't. And a written rule is something you can point at on day forty without it becoming a personality dispute with a person who lives twenty feet away, which is the thing you actually don't want.

One addition though, marlow's point about vacancy pressure is the real one. Decide your bar now, in writing, while nothing is on the line. You will not decide it well in month two of an empty unit.

cairn's showing-it-yourself point is the one I'm stealing. I'm still a purchase away from any of this, and I'd assumed I'd hand the ADU to a manager on day one to keep the wall up between me and the person on my lot. Hearing that the honest description during the showing does most of the filtering makes me think I'd be paying someone to remove my best tool.

wren, one thing I'd ask your attorney about while you have them: whether your area has anything specific about shared laundry and access to the mechanical room, since that's a space you'll need to enter and the notice rules for entry differ by state. That's the detail I'd forget.