Landlord Shmandlord

I have all my paperwork ready to go. I’ll post when I get back home.

Court went very well this morning against my Pain in the Wrist tenants.

We both signed a “Consent to Enter Judgment” agreement. This allows the tenant to remain as long as they follow the terms outlined in the agreement. If they do not, a judgment is automatically filed against them and the landlord can promptly file a Warrant of Removal without going back to court. The tenants would then be physically removed a few days later.

There was nothing for me to lose by going with this agreement. The tenants brought one month’s rent to the hearing — this was on top of the three-fifths of a month’s rent that they’ve already paid over the past few weeks. While they still have a bit of catching up to do, if if turns out that they are unable to comply with the agreement they will be evicted by the court officer within two weeks.

The terms of the agreement are:

• Tenant to pay landlord one full month’s rent today (the tenants were given this money by a relative)
• Tenant to continue paying landlord weekly. This money goes toward “arrearage”.
• Tenant to pay the full rent each month in addition to the weekly payments.
• Any money that landlord receives goes first toward current rent, followed by arrearage only after the current rent is paid.
• If the tenant fails to make a payment a judgment is automatically entered and the landlord can file a Warrant of Removal.

The big question you most certainly have is: how are they going to be able to pay _more_ than their rent each month when they’ve been having trouble keeping up with the rent alone?

The answer to this question lies in a person whom I met today: the county legal advisor. The legal advisor is present at all eviction hearings and will help any tenants who come to her for help. My tenants spoke with her earlier this week, and she has been working with them on several different tactics to get out of their trouble.

First off, they’re trying a county homeless prevention program which helps people in need. It is uncertain how much money the program has left this fiscal year, but the legal advisor believes that there is at least some and will request it.

Second, my tenants were approved for some form of rental assistance program — not Section 8. The group has apparently been completely non-responsive after sending out the acceptance letter, including when I spoke with them. However, the legal services attorney was pretty confident that she would be able to get them to speed up the process. She will be working with my tenants to get them out of this mess as quickly as possible, which means getting their rent paid in a timely fashion.

There is one other note that I want to address. Despite my earlier advice, I did not use a lawyer for this eviction case. I didn’t because the circumstances were very different than last time, where I was very afraid of my potential liability due to the dogs. This time, I wasn’t using eviction to protect myself from civil suits, but instead to help collect rent. If I were to hire a lawyer, I would definitely have to shell out at least a few extra hundred in legal fees. I could collect the fees from the tenant, but this would unnecessarily complicate the situation. Instead, I was using the eviction to help encourage the tenants to pay the rent, and in fact wasn’t sure we would even make it to trial. I also felt comfortable with the paper work because I had already had experience with the process. I would still recommend that a landlord hire an attorney for his or her first eviction proceedings.

Anyway, I am very content with the way things went right now. I am just hoping that the legal advisor will finish helping them out of this mess.

Picture: mike_ormsby

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.

Looks like Prlinkbiz and Kimber over at No Limts Ladies tagged Shmandlord this week. Thanks a lot! Time to continue the very, very, long line of taggers.

I too am not sure how it started, but the idea is to list 5 “secrets” about yourself that your readers don’t already know.

So, here it goes:

1. I grew up on a farm, raising sheep, chickens, horses, and goats. It was a lot of fun.
2. In my spare time I enjoy playing the guitar and recording songs. I love listening to the resulting music much more than anybody else.
3. I live in Philadelphia now. There is construction going on outside my window. They jackhammer in the middle of the night.
4. I have three computers at my desk: one running linux, one running OSX, one running windows.
5. My girlfriend and I are in the process of watching Arrested Development on DVD. Very funny.

Ok, so now I get to pass it off.

1. Building an Empire
2. I will teach you to be rich
3. Do-It-Yourself Landlord

4. The Landlord Blog

5. i bought a duplex
   

Here is an overview for the new readers…

The reason why I started this blog was to cover a dog situation that arose. It turned out that some of my tenants were the owners of two trained attack dogs. When I sent them the Notice to Cease, they promptly stopped paying rent. The game was on…

After several weeks of dealing with the slow government, we finally had our day in court, where I got a judgment..

Oh, but that wasn’t the end of it. After I filed the Warrant of Removal, my tenant tried to pull a quick one by filing an Order to Show Cause, which was denied.

Finally, I went with the court officer to lock out the tenants, only to find that they completely trashed the place. They ripped up the carpets, broke the windows, left holes in the wall, and left an insane amount of garbage. It took a long time to clean.

Now, I am in the process of tracking these guys down, since I am still not sure where they went. They owe me a lot of money, and I fully intend to collect. Stay tuned to see what happens…

Thanks charlietyack for the image.

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…

Check out this great list of “Most Unusual Buidlings”. It’s amazing what people come up with.

I love the innovativeness of Zillow, and especially their new features (mainly Make Me Move).

It will be interesting to see how far they can take this. Can Zillow become a one-stop shop for buying/selling real estate, almost like what ebay did to the used-item market?

IE,

1. I put up a house on Make Me Move.

2. Joe is interested and responds to my offer through Zillow.

3. For a flat fee (a few hundred dollars?) Zillow acts as the coordinator of the sale, similar to what a real estate agent does now. They would verify Joe’s pre-approval and financial eligibility, schedule the inspections and closing, work with the title agent on the title search, etc. Ideally, there would be a very mechanical process that would have build-in provisions to handle the inevitable problems that would arise (ie, house doesn’t pass inspection, buyer can’t get mortgage, house blows up before closing, etc). Again, this is similar to ebay in some ways, in that ebay can handle deal-breaking issues that arise like buyers who don’t pay, items that don’t meet description, etc.

4. The sale goes through. No percentage would be paid, just a flat fee. (Also, Zillow wouldn’t collect their fee until the deal goes through)

I think one of the additional keys will be to open up their listings to other systems. There needs to be an open MLS-type site where I can go, see everything that is available, and initiate a purchase. This listing system must be comprehensive, which is why existing closed systems like MLS must be incorporated.

Obviously there are a lot of logistical issues, but it seems to me that this type of system is doable and that both the buyer and seller would really benefit (cheaper costs, comprehensive listings, standardized process).