Landlord Shmandlord

After finding my old tenants, I filed a small claims suit against them. The court date is set to February 20th, although the tenants haven’t been served yet. I spoke with the constable today and he seems to take pride in his ability to serve. He assured me that he has several tricks up his sleeve which he will use if necessary.

At this point, if I do not hear anything from the court then it means that they were served and the court date is on. If not, I’ll hear something within two weeks.

My fingers are crossed!

As you already know, I am having trouble with another set of tenants [read].

When they started receiving their checks from worker’s comp, it turns out the amount was less than they initially told me. Apparently, they’re only able to pay 60% of their rent each month. Obviously this is unacceptable, so I filed for eviction and the hearing will be on Friday February 2nd.

The key points in the situation are:

• They were behind on rent last spring. I filed for eviction, but ended up dropping the case before our court date because they started sending me checks every week. Within a few weeks they were caught up.
• I believe they have another source of income but are not telling me about it — they have three cell-phone lines and the two parents both smoke cigarettes.
• They need to start paying their rent or they will leave. Hopefully this eviction will get them back in shape

Ugh.

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Important note: I did not properly screen the first few tenants that I personally found. Since then I’ve corrected my ways. In total I rented three units to tenants that were not properly screened, of which these are the only ones that are still around. I will elaborate more in a future post.

Well, I have some very exciting news:

I’ve located my ex-tenants. They’re living at a hotel in the neighboring town. I promptly filed the small claims suit today. It turns out that in this town there are two options for serving the papers. First, the court documents can be sent through certified mail, but this requires that the recipients sign the return receipt. I know from experience that they never sign for any of their mail, so this method is out of the question. The second method is to have the constable do it. The court clerk said that the constable is very good at finding and serving people, so I have my fingers crossed.

Unfortunately there is no way that I or another third party can serve the papers. Now I just have to wait to hear what happens. I am confident that even if they were to move again, I’ll be able to track them down. They owe me a lot of money and I feel obligated to make them pay.

I am personally aware that they’ve done this to several landlords before me. Do people not follow through (I understand it is a hassle, but if nobody tracked them down then why would all tenants not do this?) If anybody has evicted tenants before, did you end up getting paid? Did you have to file a civil suit?

I’ll keep you up to date.