Anyone who has been a landlord knows there's nothing worse than having a deadbeat tenant. You always wonder when or if the rent will be paid. It's miserable and rarely profitable.

Now… imagine having a renter who is all but guaranteed to pay on time.

That's practically the case with Government Properties Income Trust (NYSE: GOV).

The real estate investment trust (REIT) rents out properties to the United States government. Unless the clowns in Congress shut the government down, the rent gets paid on time.

The company owns 71 properties in 31 states and the District of Columbia, including:

Covering the Dividend

The best way to measure the dividend safety of a REIT is to compare its dividend payment to funds from operations (FFO), which is similar to cash flow. Remember, a REIT must pay out 90% of its earnings in the form of dividends. But earnings are not the same thing as cash flow or FFO.

We want to see if the FFO is enough to sustain the dividend, since FFO is a better representation of the amount of cash a REIT generates. Earnings can have all kinds of noncash-related expenses in the calculation – and that will have no bearing on whether the company can pay the dividend.

In the first six months of the year, Government Properties Income Trust generated $1.18 per share in FFO. During that period, it paid out $0.86 per share. Last year at this time, the company's FFO was $1.10, while the dividend payout was the same. So it has more of a cushion than it did last year.

Government Properties' quarterly dividend has been the same since October 2012. It has paid a dividend since October 2009. That first dividend was $0.50 per share. The company cut the dividend to $0.40 the next quarter. Since then, the dividend has intermittently risen by a penny per share.