Just Because You Can Get Away With It Doesn’t Make It Okay
I have a friend who is in a temporary relocation situation (for two years) and she and her spouse decided to rent out their house for the duration of their absence after not being able to sell it. They found what they thought to be the dream situation - a family relocating to their hometown and looking for a house to rent for two years. Perfect! Or so it seemed. The new tenants signed a two year lease and moved in in September.
Well, here it is, November, and it has been nothing short of a nightmare. At first it was okay, but then the tenants paid rent late, then with a bad check, and now not at all, and when my friend’s father went over there to collect from them - they moved out. Yes. My friend’s father told the tenants he was coming Sunday to get a money order for the rent, and Saturday, according to neighbors, they packed up and left. Leaving the house a shambles and the yard an absolute nightmare.
So, good riddens (and my friends have managed to get some of November’s rent since then with much effort) but what shocks me is not that this happened, but just the attitude these tenants have had about it. They signed a two year lease, then broke it without any warning, and they don’t think they should have to pay for the whole month of November because they moved out during November. Um… what planet are you people from? They “claim” they will pay the rest of November (not holding my breath) but they had the audacity to tell my friend’s spouse they didn’t think they should have to. People, what happened to paying your rent on the FIRST of the month for the entire month, huh? Oh wait, you wrote a bad check for that. Right.
And to just add insult to injury, my friends called a local lawn service they’ve used in the past to do landscape work to clean up the yard for them so they can get it ready to try and sell again (as I said, my friends have relocated and live several hours away now and can’t do this themselves), and they found out that the tenants had hired the service to take care of the yard and then not paid them and wouldn’t answer the door or the phone when the landscaper tried to collect. My friends paid the landscaper what the tenants owed as well as to clean up the yard now, and are just beyond upset at the events.
Ugh. What is wrong with people? What upsets me even more is that my friends will probably not be able to really do anything to these people because of all the time and court costs etc it would involve. Maybe I am wrong, they are looking into options, but still. Just because you think you can get away with taking advantage of people does not mean you SHOULD. Even if you don’t have money. People like this give the rest of us who struggle paycheck to paycheck a really bad rep. It is not even just the actions… but the “I’m entitled to do whatever “attitude that is so disturbing to me.
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November 29th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
That is ridiculous. As a former renter (and as a decent human being) I cannot imagine leaving a home in the state that these tenants did. In fact, we left our last apartment 1/2 a month in advance (albeit paid in full) and spent a good two hours shampooing a carpet that would inevitably be ripped up anyway.
Good people, people who respect others and themselves, don’t do things like that. What’s worse, these poor tenants are the reason why landlord-tenant relationships can be unnecessarily strained due to stereotypes and stigmas.
Best of luck to your friend. If it were me, I’d take them to small claims just on principle alone (assuming I could comfortably cover the costs and had enough evidence to likely collect from the tenants).
November 29th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
That is awful. She could sue in small-claims court, but you can’t get blood from a stone.
I’d do it anyway, just for the principal.
Another good reason to sell instead of renting out our house.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Although this is a frustrating situation, your friends should really try to look at the bright side. My parents were in a situation where their tenant stopped paying rent and it took us months to get him out of the apartment. we sued for the unpaid rent and got a $17,000 judgment, but have not been able to collect a penny so far. The good thing is that these tenants moved out pretty quickly and your friends were able to cut their losses. Really, that’s the most important thing and they should not lose sight of that.
Yes, I think your friends should sue these people. Legally, they may be entitled to recover, not just the rent for November, but for the full term of the lease (unless they are able to rent or sell it before the expiration of that lease term). They should also be able to sue for the cost of any damage beyond regular wear and tear. If they did not get a deposit to cover at least some of their damage, hopefully they will learn a lesson from that and not make that mistake in the future.
My advice to your friends:
Look on the bright side - it could have been so much worse. But go ahead and get a judgment against these people and try to enforce it. It can’t hurt.
November 29th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Ug ug ug ug, another reason why I am so scared to rent our house out, even to people that we know. I am a nervous wreck.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
That’s awful! It gives us renters bad names! I cannot imagine doing that to my landlord.
My MO has always been to suck up to the landlord, so he lets you do things like paint and landscape.
November 29th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
My tenant told me point blank when I met her that “she has horrible credit but she always pays her rent on time”. This was my first time being a landlord so I was very worried. She moved in 4/1/06 and to date, I have not had one late rent payment or one bounced check. She is already talking about renewing her lease for year 3!!!!
November 30th, 2007 at 12:38 am
Ugh!! The nerve of some people!!
I feel so sorry for your friends. What an awful experience especially when they live so far away. Such a PITA and a major inconvenience.
I hope they find some great tenants soon.
Did they give your friends a security deposit?
November 30th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Sad, and it always seems to happen to nice people. My husband and I have been left holding the wrong end of the stick a couple of times, and the only consolation I can find is thinking to myself - at least we are nice people, with principles. Small comfort some days.
November 30th, 2007 at 2:10 am
It is hard being a landlord because things like this happens. Reading about it just makes me mad. I’d take them to court. What about the security deposit?
November 30th, 2007 at 7:36 am
My husband just sat on a jury in civil court that awarded an owner $124,000 for pay from tenants. The tenant was a whack and was from Nigeria. True story.
November 30th, 2007 at 9:28 am
My sister and her husband bought a house with tenants already in it as an investment.
The tenants soon stopped paying rent, and by the time they got them evicted (nearly 9 months rent-free, partly because the judge their case was assigned to didn’t want to throw them out right before Christmas - I kid you not) there were 13 adults and 5 (?) kids living in the 3-bedroom home. Thirteen adults, and they couldn’t get rent money??
The house was destroyed inside, and my sister and her husband got a blight ticket for the amount of trash piled in the yard.
They got nothing from the tenants, except evicting them, and had to put $10,000 into fixing the house.
Some people just don’t get it, do they?
November 30th, 2007 at 10:04 am
It just goes back to the callousness of America. Some people just don’t care. They want what they think they have coming to them.
How frustrating for your friends. I’m with the other poster, at least they are gone. They could have hung around for months and months not paying and totally trashing the house.
November 30th, 2007 at 10:36 am
ohhh, that totally stinks! I don’t understand how people can do things like that.
Did your friend get a deposit? Most places I see (especially if it’s a house) require a deposit equivalent to one month’s rent.
November 30th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
That’s disgusting! Wow. I hope they can sell or rent it better next time. :/
November 30th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
My friends did get a deposit, and they’ll be okay in the end. And like a lot of you have said, they are happy that these people are gone vs not paying rent and squatting for months and months.
My post was more about how upset it makes me that people think they can just do this kind of stuff and get away with it.
The former tenants are now saying they will pay the rest of November if my friends will sign a document saying they won’t sue them or bring any legal action…. not gonna happen.
The other aspect that stinks for my friends is the loss of “expectation” if you know what I mean. They thought they had rent coming for the two years they were gone to pay the mortgage on the house etc… now not so much. They relocated for school for my friend’s spouse so it is already very tight budgetwise in their household. they’ll get through it but it stinks.
definitely could be worse and they know that.
But it still stinks
November 30th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Former landlady here. I agree they should pursue rent for the remainder of the lease. Nearly every lease is written so that the tenants are liable for the entire amount for the full lease if they move out. Whether they will ever get the money is another story, but since it could be $10,000 or more, I think it is definitely worth the court costs, which should be minimal for an open-and-shut case like this. We had a similar situation, but worse. We had to evict the tenants when they stopped paying rent, then sue them. They found a very unscrupulous lawyer who countersued and would bombard us with any and every claim under the sun (it was really ridiculous). Our insurance company would defend us from some of the claims, but not all, so we had two lawyers working on the case. In the end, the insurance company pushed to settle, because they wanted a jury trial and it would have taken four days minimum to litigate all their stupid claims, and it wasn’t worth it for the money that was involved. It was very frustrating to ultimately not receive any justice. Ours was an extreme case, but yes it can get much worse than tenants leaving with no notice and not cleaning up. Our mistake was not doing a credit check. As new landlords, you must always run a credit check on every applicant, and absolutely, positively not rent to people whose references and credit are not good. It took us a while to find new tenants, and we turned many people down while the house remained vacant, but we finally found great tenants and when they moved out we sold the house for a good profit.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:04 am
Oh, they have my sympathies. A very similar thing happened to us, only with a “friend” who rented our house from us. It ended up costing me well over £3K just in lost rent. The garden was a disaster - we had a huge, beautiful Ceanothus tree, which she cut down and set fire to, destroying the entire yard in the process, including my neighbours’ fences.
I was so angry…
You are right - some people just take shameless advantage of the nice people in this life. I really hope things work out in the end for your friends, though - ours finally did.
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:26 pm
That’s awful - I really hope it turns around for them and they find some lovely tenants who actually have a conscience, will look after the place and pay all their rent.