Dealing With Bad Tenants Can Be A Nightmare
Issues with tenants are problematic for virtually every landlord at one time or another. But the right answer isn’t always resorting to reduction in rent in order to maintain your good tenants, or to simply evict the bad ones immediately.
The issue with the two answers above is expense: reducing rent obviously has a very immediate impact on profitability for your managed property, and evictions are costly in time and resources. Above and beyond your fundamental turnover expenses associated with lost rent, new paint, repaired floors & appliances, and marketing your space, attorneys’ fees for the eviction process can be astronomical. On top of everything, your vindictive renter could damage the property in retaliation.
When Bad Tenants Go From Ticking Time Bomb to Boom
Common decency prevents most people from damaging your property or generally being poor tenants when they have made an agreement with you. Unfortunately, the amount of bad tenant stories out there show that decency can’t be relied on to ensure the safety and profitability of your property. We have a particularly bad tenant story to that highlights what can happen when they are determined to cause damage on their way out.
The bad renter (B.R.) in this situation had made an initial deposit of $750 + 1 month’s rent in November. Sadly, this would be the last money the landlord would see from the tenant for 7 months. December rolled around, and the tenant’s check bounced. When asked why this restaurant owner with three children in private school had bounced a check for rent, they responded that they simply didn’t have the money. They then proceeded to have raucous parties with around 100 in attendance–the landlord was aware of the attendance, because the landlord lived next door. That was the measure of this tenant’s audacity. Having the police called to attempt to sort out their noise violations didn’t deter them from having multiple parties after this of similar chaos.
When their January check bounced, the landlord sued them for unpaid rent. In February, they took them to small claims (or landlord tenant court, as we think of it). After arriving at an agreement to leave the following month, do you think that they did? Of course not! They remained squatting in the house for another three months. They finally left the house in May, fully seven months after moving in with no rent paid.
The mess that they left was atrocious. A cleaner was hired and took two days to manage all of the trash & debris and clean the home
The cost of cleaning up after this filthy renter:
- $800 for trash cleanup
- $5,000 for floor repairs
- $1,000 to replace missing curtains–completely missing, removed from the windows for still unknown reasons
We’ll leave you with some more pictures of the unholy disorder left in this tenant’s wake so you can get an idea of how much cleaning really needed to be done. And stay tuned, because we’re going to publish some sneaky ways to get rid of bad tenants soon.
