Corporate wives can be the scourge of landlords, says Isabel Morton.

AS A LANDLADY (I have visions of curlers, aprons and rolling pins), I have experienced the delights of the rental market. It is not for the faint hearted.

Tenants are generally reasonable people, who wish to rent your property as it suits their needs and budget, and get on with living their lives.

But when tenants are bad, they are very, very bad. And I am not talking about the ones who leave your property in a terrible state nor indeed the ones who fail to pay their rent on time. They are just normal nightmare tenants.

I am talking about the ones with perverse personalities, who make weird requests and ridiculous demands. They are a far more stressful lot to have to deal with, let alone have living in your property.

I have had them all. And I truly wonder why I bother. Top of the terrible list is without question the diplomats. They have a lovely little out clause called "diplomatic immunity". Which means that they can pretty much do what they like to your property, not bother to pay the rent and disappear back to whichever country they came from.

Diplomats, particularly those from hot countries, are prone to leaving the central heating on 24/7 to such a degree that every piece of timber in the entire house shrinks with shock. And no one is going to risk causing a diplomatic incident by looking for compensation.

Next on the list of nightmare tenants is the corporate family. Daddy (or sometimes, but less often, Mummy) is relocated to Ireland as head bottle washer of some company and is invariably very used to getting their own way in everything. I had a recent experience of such a corporate family who viewed a fully furnished top end, large family home which I had on the rental market.

They loved it but wanted every last stick of furniture, paintings, lamps and accessories removed. They also demanded that a number of rooms be repainted because they didn't like the colours and wanted chandeliers and light fittings replaced with the corporate wife's favourite shades.

Needless to say they were not prepared to pay for the removal or storage of the entire contents of the property, let alone cover the disruption and eventual replacement of everything, as they felt we should be delighted and honoured to have them as tenants. We were not.

Curious to know if I was just unlucky to be inflicted with this one particular corporate nightmare, I contacted a number of letting agents and relocation services to get an insight into the modern corporate mindset.

They were all very diplomatic about their clients, however reading between the lines, I could tell that my experience was not entirely unusual.

In return for trailing around the planet in her husband's wake, the corporate wife makes certain demands.

Taking into consideration the fact that she can rarely have a career of her own, must be prepared to leave her family and friends behind and drag her children half way across the world to start a new life in a strange country, one should, I suppose, be sympathetic to her situation.

In an effort to provide her with a comfort blanket, the company sees fit to transport the entire contents of her home to Ireland.

The fact that her furniture may not be suited to the rented property appears to be beside the point.

There are numerous stories of huge American sofas and beds, which took two months to transport across the Atlantic, that can't get though the front door of the house in Ireland. Numerous windows and indeed entire door frames have had to be removed in order to facilitate the delivery of these gargantuan pieces.

The corporate wife is supposed to busy herself decorating and furnishing her rental home prior to doing a spot of corporate entertaining. Many wives see fit to punish their husbands, in the only way they can, for the sacrifices they have to make in order to enable him to climb the corporate ladder.

She will make sure to demand the impossible of her rental home, and he will go to endless lengths to appease her so that he can concentrate on his new job.

As per many landlords these days, my tolerance levels have diminished considerably since the capital value of my property has dropped by 20 per cent.

The rent-to-value ratio was never up to much in this country, but now that tenants feel that they can negotiate on the rent and make outrageous demands, landlords are becoming decidedly peeved.

By the time the rental income is taxed and the property redecorated yet again when the tenants have left Ireland, to cause chaos in yet another country, it would be cheaper and easier on one's nerves to leave the property devoid of corporate wives.