A woman asked a question in a property Facebook group that made a lot of homeowners abroad go quiet for a second. Her tenant had lived in her house for nine years. No written lease. When he finally moved out, the walls were filthy, doors were broken, and a couple of windows needed replacing. She’d painted the house twice during his stay, out of her own pocket, because the property was in another province and she couldn’t get there often enough to keep an eye on it. When she asked him to at least leave the place the way he found it, his reply was: “This is not Lusaka where people paint homes when leaving.”

If you’re one of the many Zambians living abroad who rents out a house back home, that story should sound uncomfortably familiar. You’re not in another province, you’re on another continent. You can’t drop by on a Saturday to check the drains or ask why there are suddenly six people living in a two bedroom house. You’re relying almost entirely on trust, and as this landlord found out, trust without structure gets expensive.

The most useful comment from the post came from another landlord who inspects her properties every three months and has it written into the lease. “If the person after reading the tenancy agreement is not comfortable, I let them go,” she wrote, adding that her properties have never sat empty because of that rule. That’s the mindset that protects a house when the owner can’t be there in person, and it comes down to a handful of things you can put in place before a tenant ever moves in.

Start with a lease agreement, always

It sounds obvious, but a surprising number of people rent out a property without ever putting anything in writing. No lease means no agreed record of the property’s condition to compare against when the tenant leaves, no agreed rules on maintenance, and nothing to point to if a dispute comes up. A lease isn’t paperwork for the sake of it. It’s the only record you have of what you agreed to and what your tenant agreed to.

Do your homework on the tenant before you hand over the keys

This is the mistake we see most often. Someone hands over a deposit, seems polite and gets the keys the same week. There’s no background check, no call to a previous landlord, no real sense of who’s about to live in your property for the next several years. A short conversation with a person’s last landlord tells you more about how they’ll treat your property than a deposit ever will.

Inspect the property, even from a distance

You don’t have to be in Zambia to have someone check on your house. A property manager, a trusted relative, or an agent can walk through every few months and send you photos. The landlord in the Facebook post admitted she rarely checked because the house was far from her, and nine years passed before she saw its real state. Regular inspections, written into the lease from day one, mean nothing goes unnoticed for that long again.

Set a limit on who actually lives there

This one catches people out constantly. A tenant moves in alone, then over time a partner, cousins and friends start staying there too. More people means more wear on the doors, the plumbing, the walls, none of which was priced into the original agreement. A lease that names who’s allowed to live in the house, and requires your consent before anyone else moves in, keeps the property from quietly turning into a boarding house.

Why this matters

If you’re renting out property back home and you’re not fully sure your lease actually covers you, that’s worth sorting out before you have a tenant like the one in this story.  A good lease agreement does the job you can’t do in person from abroad. It sets expectations before anyone moves in, gives you a reason to check on the property regularly and gives an honest tenant nothing to worry about.