Landlord Shmandlord

There is a situation unfolding that has me very nervous.

The tenants who helped with the renovations are hitting some hard times. The father had an incident in early 2006 where he fell while working as a contractor, seriously hurting his wrist. He had a cast for a while and then seemed fine when it was removed, but apparently over the past few months it has become very painful. To make a long story short, he just had surgery a few weeks ago, and will be in a cast for the next four months. This presents the problem of how will they pay rent.

To flesh out the history, they own their own power-washing company. Power washing, I’ve learned, is a very seasonal business. Over the winter, they both do odd jobs to pay the bills. When the incident first occurred in January, he was unable to get another contract position and it was too cold to power wash. They stopped paying rent. I filed for eviction, and a week before our court date they explained to me that they were really in financial trouble. I let them slide on the rent for several weeks until power washing season. I was concerned that I would not collect, but they really were down on their luck and had no other options (if I evicted them, it would be unlikely they’d find another place to rent). Either way, I believed that they would pay me back and they did. Once the summer came they started giving me a check after every job, and were able to catch up within a few hundred dollars by September/October. They paid off the next two months by helping with the renovations (on which they did an amazing job).

This brings us to mid-November, whose rent they’ve only paid half. Again, the surgery was in the last week of November. Since then, they’ve been waiting for their worker’s comp checks to come in the mail, and of course it hasn’t. So I’ve been waiting, unsure how to proceed. As of today, they have still not received it, and I am basically at the end of my patience.

So what do I do?

Well, today I called the workers comp office to find out what’s really happening. The woman wouldn’t go into detail because I wasn’t authorized (I made it clear I was the landlord, to avoid any legal complications). But after speaking with her, it seems to have prompted my tenants to get in touch with her (they said they were trying, but for some reason couldn’t get in touch with her). Anyway, it looks like the first check is coming tomorrow to cover the past few weeks — since the surgery. From this point forward, checks will arrive every week. With the first check, they’re going to pay rent through the end of November. After that, they’re going to give me a quarter of the month’s rent each week from their checks.

I will still be a little behind, which I will collect when the wife gets her winter job (she couldn’t get it earlier because “she needed to take care of her husband”). Overall, I am cautiously trying to help them through. I certainly don’t want to get burned, and will protect myself. On the other hand, I would like to keep them as tenants (assuming they don’t get more behind. Enough is enough). They keep the place very neat, they fix things when needed, and they’re very nice.

We’ll see…

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Eviction, HardLessons, Tenants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.