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.

I had a tenant a few years back who was a real pain to deal with because he kept making “improvements” to the property that were simply an eyesore. The unit in question is a mobile home with an add on built onto it, and it was just the tenant and his son. There was more than enough room in their living quarters for their things. He was on disability so not only could he not technically work, but he had a lot of time on his hands. At first he tried to build a storage shed beside and behind the trailer and it became obvious really quick that he didn’t really know what he was doing – his mind was probably on the temptation of hiring some London escorts on his business trips.. Halfway through his little project I had to tell him to stop because it was not going to meet city code and it would be a danger to both himself and his child.

Soon after that he built a combination swing set/tree house for his son. It was ramshackle to say the least, but since it was for his child I let him keep it. After he moved out though I knew I had to take it down, and if you have never disassembled something that was not built correctly, you just don’t know how problematic and dangerous it really is. I guess I should appreciate the fact that he tried to improve upon the property, but it’s kind of hard to do that when you have to un-do what the tenant did.

Did you ever have a tenant that you wish you never let live in your apartment? This seems to be the issue I have been having since I bought my investment property. It seems like every tenant is out to get you. This past tenant tops the cake. She was outrageous. I literally had to go knocking on her door every first of the month to collect the rent, just to find out that she was not home, or at least she played a good job pretending she wasn’t home.

Paying your rent on time is a must for tenants. I don’t think she realizes that this money helps me pay the mortgage, and therefore if she doesn’t pay it, I can lose the house.  I think she one of these high class Birmingham escorts. I thought buying an investment property would be an easy way to make money and pay off a house for my children in the future, however this was not the case. Now, I am behind a few payments since she hasn’t paid rent in months. I also have to pay fees for lawyers, and evictions, and so forth.

I made the mistake of not asking for a security deposit this time, because I thought I could trust my tenant. I am thinking about doing away with the landlord business and just selling the house, as collecting the rent money can be more of a headache than anything.

There is one tenant in particular who is giving me a real headache these days and the person doesn’t even live in the house they were renting anymore. I’m sure you have heard on the news recently about people who hoard things. Well this person was a hoarder, and she didn’t focus on one particular thing like some hoarders do, like paper, food, animals, etc. No, she hoarded it all and she had been doing it for a long time now.

I just started managing this property five years ago, and this tenant has been in the house in question for 15 years. With the aid of psychic readings I just recently convinced the owner that this tenant should be evicted because she was intentionally ruining the property by inaction. She did not clean the place, she did not notify anyone when repairs needed to be made, and the house was deteriorating simply by her being there.

After one full month of disposing of all the garbage that she left behind, the smell of cat urine still permeates through the floorboards. It is so bad that I have to wear a breathing mask when working inside the house, and I’m finding out that there is not one room that I will not have to replace the floorboards in because of the rot. The wood in the house was exposed to liquids for so long, a full 80 percent of the wood flooring in the house will have to be replaced.