I'd like to think I'm a decent landlord. I have only raised my rent to one tenant in the past 13 years, and only because my mortgage became higher than what I was charging. I think my mortgage on that house is currently about $30 more than I'm charging that family.

I work with all of my tenants on timeliness of their payments. They are pretty regularly behind, but as long as they communicate with me, it's not a big deal. I've never charged a late payment fee. I've only had one tenant become so far behind in payment that I've asked him to leave. Even then, he was totally cool about it and there was no actual eviction, so it didn't count against him in any way credit-wise.

Most recently, one of my tenants lives in a house with oil heat. That family has hit a rough patch and had some health issues, so I have bought about 450 gallons of oil for the house in the past few months at no charge to them.