There is nothing worse than showing your client a house or condo which is currently being rented by a student.

“Tenant” and “student” are often thought to be interchangeable, but I believe there is a difference between a 21-year-old girl renting a 1-bedroom condo near University of Toronto, and a 42-year-old businessman on contract in Toronto for two years renting your investment property on Wellington Street.

The signs are there.  You just have to look…

Oh sure….they all look like that!

There is your typical student, smiling for her proud mother.  But what mother doesn’t know (or doesn’t want to think about) is how her precious student-child spent her last four years away at school!

What I find interesting about Toronto, is that there seem to be far more students living in condominiums in our downtown core, since the University of Toronto is so spread out, and since there are so many other colleges (think about how large George Brown has become) or small specialty schools, ie. Harris Institute for the Recording Arts.

I have one rule when it comes to renting out my investment properties: I do NOT rent to students!

Well, I suppose I have two rules, since I only rent to females (sorry dudes, but I know how messy and loud guys are, and how quiet and clean girls are).

But when it comes to the buying and selling of real estate, there is nothing worse than showing a condo that is rented by a student!  Even worse is a four-bedroom house rented by four students!

It doesn’t matter how nice the building or neighborhood is, or how great the property may be, the reaction from the prospective buyer is always the same: “Ooooh…..ummm….is this rented by a STUDENT?”

Here are my top nine signs that a property is rented by a student.  Why nine?  Well, ten is just so predictable…

#9: The Scarface Poster

I guess I was away that day in university when every single guy was taken out of class and forced to buy a Scarface poster.  It’s almost as if there is no creativity or independant thought left in university, and just as one smart kid does the assignment that the other one-hundred kids copy, there are only a handful of posters that students put up.

Even less imaginative are those stupid series of Beer posters like the one below:

#8: Empty Pizza Boxes

There are always a few empty pizza boxes on the floor of a condo being rented by students, and you just hope that it’s only been there overnight.

While much of our city’s youth lives on Pizza Pizza, most people don’t know how to physically take the empty boxes and put them in the recycling room down the hall.

There’s nothing worse than showing a condo on a Friday and seeing pizza boxes that you know have been sitting on the cold, damp tile floor since the previous Saturday night, aka Sunday morning…

#7: Neon Signs

Only a nineteen-year-old girl studying general arts at U of T would have a sign like this on her bedroom wall.

Aside from “LOVE,” other fashionable neon signs for the Hills-watching college crowd are “TRUST” and “LIFE.”

#6: Fish Tank

A fish tank says, “I’m mature enough to look after the most unsophisticated living-thing in the world.”

A fish is the pet-equivalent of owning and looking after a plant, except thankfully, you don’t need to water a fish…

Having a fish tank is for the more mature student; perhaps a grad student; one that can’t look after his girlfriend or take his clothes off and put them directly on the hanger, but can look after a pet that has a memory of nine-seconds and can be fed once a week.

#5: Liquor Bottles

Didn’t you know?

It’s cool to collect garbage!

Students love to show off how much they can drink, and by keeping every single empty bottle of booze they’ve ever consumed, they can get rid of needless items such as a dining room table and simply keep a few hundred bottles in its place!

#4: Many, Many Bottles of Cologne

I have been using Swiss Army since I was about eighteen years old.  The brand has actually been discontinued, but I know some Russian dock-workers who hooked me up with a whole crate of the stuff back in ’02…

Aside from having a bathroom that hasn’t been cleaned in three years, most male students like to stock at least ten brands of cologne.  Not because they use them all, but because they might use them all!

It’s important for your personal scent to be verstatile, especially when you’ll be attending an event that likely reeks of stale beer and where people get so drunk that four of their five senses cease to work.  Hey, maybe you’ll be lucky and the fifth one will be smell!

#3: Many, Many Shoes

It almost makes you ask, “How many people actually live here?”

We’re not talking about a girl’s walk-in closet that is filled with forty pairs of mint-condition shoes, all on a custom-made, hand-crafted shoe rack.

We’re talking about ten pairs of ratty running-shoes, notably Vans, Adidas, and Airwalk, that crowd the front hallway along with a couple of pairs of winter boots, even though it’s the summer.

Forget about utilizing that thing called a “clo-set.”  Just leave the shoes out for everybody to trip over, and pretend that those $400 UGGS that you begged your parents to buy, don’t actually cost $400 the way you treat them…

#2: Photos Taped to the Wall

Why spend money on a picture-frame when you can just scotch-tape these photos to the wall?

This is far more prevalent among female university students, who would probably forget who their friends were if they didn’t have sixteen photos of them taped to the bedroom wall, or around the edges of their mirror.

It’s classy to have drinking/bar photos such as the one above (that I found on Google of three strangers…), as well as photos of you and your friends playing softball while drinking, drinking while tree-planting one summer, drinking at the cottage, and of course, drinking while pretending to know how to play that guitar…

#1: Fridge Magnet Words

We all wish that we thought of this product before anybody else, because whichever idiot came up with the idea of making random words into fridge magnets and selling them to university kids is probably a multi, multi millionaire…

The first time I saw this, I thought it was kinda cool.

But by the one-hundredth time I saw it, later that same week, I wondered if it was even lamer than the Scarface poster.

Ingenious phrases such as, “Sunshine Can Heal Thought Powers Faceless Enemies” have been created on fridges of people you may even know, as you pass by them one day begging for change…

Did I miss anything?

Could this top-nine list have been a top-ten?

Well, I’m sure it could have been a top-100.

The signs of the student renters are there, and personally I have no idea why anybody would ever rent their investment property to a student.

Allowing a student to set-up-shop in your house or condo is just asking for a depreciation of your largest asset.

And when it comes time to sell, just think about how your property is going to show to prospective buyers.

Now if you’ll exuse me, I think there is some stale pizza in that box in the corner of my living room that needs my attention, ie. stomach…