Catching Tenants Breaking Bad

[Shane Pearlman]

Hey PBers.

I'm a little scarred from tenants using my nice SFRs to build grow houses. It has only happened once, and through amazing luck, they turned out to be the nicest drug dealers ever and helped pay to remediate the special venting they had constructed through my roof without permission. Thankfully it was contained to the garage so the interior of the home itself was not destroyed (although we did have to gut the drywall from the garage). You can try to screen for that stuff, but the tenants worked for the CDC and had excellent history and financials. It was an A- neighborhood. Go figure!

I have a couple in a duplex and my spidey sense is tingling. I need some way in which to go into the property without giving them a day or two proper notice to clean out any operations. Any suggestions on how to check in the basement (no windows) of a rental without violating California landlord-tenant law?

[Linda Weygant]

My sister had a grower using her unfinished basement to grow pot.  He put plywood down on the concrete floor, then large clay pots on them and then, from what we could figure out, brought the hose in from outside, through the window and set up several pivoting sprinklers that sprayed the ceiling, the walls, the floors and every nook and cranny you can think of.  Her nice, $400,000 home was completely destroyed.  Even though Colorado is not humid, the level of mold that was in the drywall (what was left of it after some of it just sorta fell apart) and the insulation was nothing compared to what we discovered when we pulled up the carpet on the first floor.  The joists and floors were soaked through, buckled and molding as well.  The carpet was a complete loss as well.

I'm no electrician, but I don't understand why the water spraying onto the walls did not get into the outlets and burn the house down.

We had to take the entire basement out to the studs, and had to replace some of that too.  Had an engineering firm come in to evaluate the floor joists on the first floor and had to replace a bunch of that.  Then had to replace all the first floor floorboards and carpet.  Luckily, the first floor drywall was ok.  It was about a $70,000 rehab on a house that she had just rehabbed 2 years prior.

On top of that, she had 4 months of lost rent while she tried to evict him and a $3,000 attorney bill.

And people wonder why I laugh when they ask me if I'm 420 friendly.

Um.  Nope!