Posting has been light because we came down to Florida last week to get our house ready to put on the market. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to extricate the tenants, who had previously agreed to vacate on the 31st of July. We’re finally playing legal hardball with them, but it’s been a lot of wasted time to date, and we have tickets back to CA tomorrow.
Just if you were wondering why posting has been light.
Best reason to sell the place, because you can’t trust they won’t break in to squat a little longer. Could be worse, the home could be in St. Louis right now.
Don’t know if you have the same laws as Southern Calif. where I used to live, but: a friend of mine was manager of a building, and had a lot of trouble with tenants who wouldn’t leave. He told me that the minute he had a written agreement from them to leave by a given date, he was allowed to immediately change the locks on the doors and tell them their stuff would be on the lawn the next day if they didn’t move it themselves.
Obviously, your case will vary. Just sayin’.
I’ve been writing a bit and this is one of the subjects. Professional tenants is one of the terms I’ve heard labeling people that know how to stretch it out to the last minute. Lost rents, legal fees, stolen appliances/furniture, and vandalism can easily cost into the low thousands per incident. One situation that I was helping resolve cost the owner in the $5K range with various suggestions from other victims that she got off light.
My particular focus is how these legal “protections” for tenants hammer the poor. The only resource a landlord has to make up the financial loss is the good tenants that do pay their bills. A couple of estimates from people in the business is that the good tenants pay an average of 50% more in rent to make up the differences. A property renting for a grand a month could be in the $700.00 range without the all too predictable losses, while leaving a similar profit for the landlord.
There are also landlords from hell, and one of my house mates worked for one. They were renting 60+ units with a goal of returning no security deposits. Last year one of the employees skipped a few walk-throughs, leaving the company open to returning three security deposits, and the boss went ballistic. Even though their business model is renting to college students at wildly inflated rents, and not returning any security deposits, their bank balance hit $67 a few months ago. In theory they also had about $20 grand worth of security deposits sitting in a separate bank account that by law they aren’t allowed to touch, but in reality that account was empty too. It seems the boss was playing fast and loose with a whole bunch of debts from his other scams. She could’ve sent him to jail with a phone call.
It also seems he has trouble retaining employees with any ethics. A few months ago their maintenance guy confessed to killing his wife, having claimed that she OD’d in a hotel room. The hotel guests had said they heard a huge fight and then nothing, and when the toxicology reports came back in a few weeks he confessed to smothering her with a pillow.
Two weeks after that my house mate listened to a bunch of irate, drunken calls that came in over the weekend about their cleaning lady, with the angry man demanding to know why they would hire a child killing bitch. So she Googled, and sure enough, their cleaning lady had confessed to drowning her 8-year old daughter in a river in Tennessee back in the 1970’s, escaped conviction because the body was never found (the search was going on as of 2012) and because she started making up stories about selling her daughter to pay off drug debts. She later served four years in prison for trying to stab her 11-year old son to death in a cemetery.
Chillingly, there was a day care center next to my house mate’s office, and this cleaning lady always like to sit and watch the children play, talking about how cute they were.
But despite all that, the tenants were worse. She had one young man who kept calling to complain about his neighbors who were coming into his apartment, and she’d also get terrified calls from his neighbors after he’d confront them about it. He walked around his apartment with a knife because he could hear them moving around in his own place, and then he went on about the auras, insisting that the things he kept seeing were real. His rent was being paid by the city under some federal disability program, and his disability was obviously undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. So I told her to call it in, and she tried but got the government run-around.
And then there were the college drug heads, and so many other utterly dysfunctional renters, whose levels of dysfunction would be hard to describe.
“Even though their business model is renting to college students at wildly inflated rents, and not returning any security deposits”
Ahhh college slum lords. I don’t really miss those days. Only got my deposit back one and a half times. Some good advice to college kids; don’t move in until they clean up after the previous tenants and be sure to take lots of pictures. College rentals tend to be rather dumpy but landlords always claim all the damage was done by you, their last tenant.
be sure to take lots of pictures.
The same good advice applies to renting a car. If you see any signs of damage, report it and take photos before leaving the rental agency parking lot. Failure to do so can get expensive.
If it’s not a good time to sell the place, you need a reputable management agency. They’ll take ~10% off the top from the rent, plus they won’t try as hard as you would to minimize maintenance costs (they get it fixed and send you a bill when the AC or water heater or whatever die) but they’ll screen tenants, collect rent, toss out deadbeats, and in general do all the things you can’t from 3000 miles away.
Note that “reputable” though. Check with Better Business Bureau and any online reputation you can find, as a bad management agency can pad repair bills, rent your house to meth cookers, or otherwise make you really sorry you’re in the landlord business.