Tenants from Hell

There is an old saying that you should never do business with family. A good case in point is a tenant of mine that is the grandson of the owner. He is currently two and one half months behind on his rent and his utilities are constantly on the verge of being shut off. Everyone in the family knows that he does drugs, is irresponsible, listens to tarot card readings and that his mother pays the vast majority of his bills. Just recently, him and his girlfriend left town and were not heard from for three weeks. During that time his thirteen year old son was home in the unit all by himself.

If this were somebody who was not a family member, he would have been evicted a long time ago. I can understand the owner being a little lenient on the rules for the sake of her thirteen year-old great-grandson, but at the same time there are potential legal issues at stake because of drugs on the premises and child abandonment. I am left in the middle because I have to go by the owners’ wishes, which contradict mine, and if I do end up evicting him I have to play it softly so as to not cause a rift in the family.

I know that the tenant, my wife’s nephew, is responsible for his own actions, but I am going to be the one responsible for picking up the pieces. It is a situation I simply do not want to be in.

Managing commercial real estate can very problematic when you have the wrong tenants. A few years ago we had an auctioneer rent one of our commercial buildings and everything went fine for a few months. Then all of a sudden he stopped paying his rent and and didn’t call us to explain what was going on, I think he spent most of his time enjoying mature phone sex chat. After a matter of time I had no other option but to lock him out of the building. The biggest problem with this was, because he was an auctioneer, he had a lot of property in the building that belonged to other other people.

The auctioneer actually tracked me down the morning after I locked the building, yelling and screaming that he had to get everyone’s stuff out of the building and to their rightful owners. I calmly told him that the matter was in the hands of the lawyer at this point and that he should contact him. The process of dispersing all of the property to the rightful owners was a headache as well because the auctioneer did not keep very good paperwork of all of his transactions.

This was my very first lock out of a tenant and it turned out to be about the most problematic lock out that a landlord can have.