Tenants stopped paying rent

[Michael Schinasi]

We have one rental house in a NC college town. We rent the house legally to 4 students (in some places renting to more than 3 unrelated people is not allowed by the city) and have always done this on a “all for one and one for all basis.”  That is, we do not have 4 separate leases but one lease with all 4 names on it. All the residents are collectivly “the tenant.” Each one is responsible for the whole house so that we do not have to get in volved in who owes what (how they divide up the rent or utilities or, at the end of the lease who has done damage); they must work things out among themselves.. We have done this because we dd not want to be known as a rooming house, which might come under different laws.  The lease clearly states for example, that if one person is late with rent and a late fee appllies it is the responsibility of everyone in the house; the late fee is not a percent of the rent not paid by one person but on the entire monthly rent.  We tell them that they all are the tenant (in the singular) though there are 4 residents, similar to a family. 

 Now, one resident has left town with a personal problem and he has stopped paying rent. His father called me and explained that the cost of his care is very high, though he did not explicitly say he was not going to p[ay.  Another resident has also stopped paying rent. He wrote to me a couple of days ago and said he knows he was late and asked for another day to pay it. I gave it to him. The parents of the two people who stopped paying were the ones who since the beginning of the lease sent me rent checks no behalf of their children. This month they have not sent anything and we are now 4 days beyond the 5 day grace period on late rent. I have written by text to sayt we would like to have the 1/2 rent that has not been paid along with the late fee. I do not think I have harassed them buy I have written a couple of times in a none threatening way saying we would like to have the rent and that a late fee would apply. They are generally uncommunicative and do not usually reply to my messages.  Today I used Venmo to write to the two who have already paid and explained that the whole house is responsible for satisfying the rent that has not been paid plus the late fee of 5% of the monthly rent for the whole house. The last time I spoke with one of them I said that if they were not happy in the house we could put up a sign outside of it,  rent it to new tenants and allow the present ones to leave without a penalty, though we do want the rent to continue until the house is rented once again. He rejected the offer. Am I correct in thinking that I cannot evict just two of the tenants—the ones who have not paid--because we have only one lease signed by all of them. If I want to evict we would have to evict all of them. I told the two of them who have paid that if we had to evict I would try to inform the judge that they faithfully paid 1/4 of the rent. So far we have no sign that the tenants are doing anything about this situation. Is there anything else I can do?