If you own a piece of property and rent it to someone else to inhabit, whatever they do is their own problem. Right? Not so fast.

In many instances, you as the property owner are responsible for what goes on in the property that you rent, even if you have no knowledge of the wrongful conduct and you have nothing to do with causing it.

Environmental law is a perfect example of how this works. Under many environmental legal statutes, owners and operators of premises are both equally liable for violations. Thus, if a property owner is renting property to an industrial tenant that pollutes, the property owner is every bit as responsible for cleaning up the pollution as is the tenant. This is so even in cases where the property owner lives 500 miles away and doesn't have the foggiest clue about what the tenant is or is not doing.

And this doesn't necessarily just apply to industrial properties. How about landlords whose tenants operate public nuisances? If you are a landlord whose tenants are operating a brothel, you might very well have civil and perhaps even criminal liability.

If your tenant is operating an illegal daycare, once again you might incur liability to either the government or the parents of the children who should not have been there in the first place.

Frequently, the law imposes a burden on a property owner to stay in touch with the property and have some level of understanding about what it is that's going on at the property. You can't take the position that its not your problem because you are "only" the landlord. The truth is that usually everything is your problem, exactly because you are the landlord.

While the notion of an absentee landlord is one that we often here about, the more absent the landlord, the more trouble the landlord may ultimately get into. If you are not too far away, make scheduled and unscheduled visits. If you are very far away, someone needs to do this on your behalf.

Even if the landlord can avoid civil and criminal liability for the misdeeds of his or her tenants, not knowing what's going on at the property that you own can still be problematic. First, in many jurisdictions it's hard to get rid of tenants. So if you have a tenant whose misbehaving, you want to have this information as soon as possible because the bad tenant will no doubt stay for a while before the Courts will evict him or her.

And even if eviction is possible, unsupervised and completely unruly tenants can be very costly. People who are not inclined to follow the law, are often also not inclined to reimburse property owners for huge amounts of damage that they might cause.

What's the bottom line? The bottom line is that you can be an absentee landlord as long as you occasionally check in and make sure that there are no problems. If you fail to follow a practical approach, you may be civilly liable, criminally liable, and you may end up being out of pocket a huge amount of money.

The information provided in this column is written by Stuart Lieberman,a practicing environmental attorney, and is for general information purposes only. It is not legal advice and should not be used in place of legal advice.

Stuart Lieberman, Esq., and IRED.Com, Inc., will not accept any responsibilty for any reliance on the information in this column or any damages whatsoever resulting from reading this column.