How would you best approach this situation? (Shed Demolition)

[Jason Maguire]

Hey BP Team,

Looking for some insight on a weird obstacle I’ve been facing.

I have a rather larger shed in the backyard of my duplex building that we want to demolish because it’s an eye sore on the property & some other minor issues. The issue is that my tenant has an old school car (maybe a 1950’s) in the Shed. The Car is my tenants, deceased fathers who has passed over 10 years ago and my guess is the car & everything in the shed hasn’t moved since then, including tools drilled into the walls.

We spoke to our tenant last month letting him know that we were going to demolish the shed & that he needed to start working on getting everything out of there including the car occupying the shed. Every week we’d follow up once or twice, also including meeting in person once or twice when we were at the prop for side projects to see how he was making out & we’ve been met with multiple excuses or just no responses from my tenant.

We tried to give him ample time as we know he had to find a home for the car which he supposably did find, even offered to tow the car for him with no extra charge or anything like that just to get it out and still nothing and offered to help him move things and provide a tarp for temp storage.

How would you guys' best approach this situation to get my tenant to act? We also tried saying the Shed will be demolished on X Day, but even that doesn’t seem to be pushing him & I don’t want to escalate the issue into a full-on dispute by demolishing the shed with their stuff still in it or me touching the items myself.

I’m leaning towards just not renewing his lease (maybe that'll get the car out) when it comes time, but is there anything else I can do to incentivize my tenant now without further escalating the issue into something crazy?

P.S- We bought this duplex in JAN2021 with inherited tenants- to make the situation stickier, my tenants living at the property used to own the property like 25 years ago hence why belongings like a car are still on site. Obviously buying in these situations in tricky, but I did get a great deal & both tenants have never missed a single payment.

Any thoughts? Sorry for the long post- wanted to capture everything :)