8 Landlord Horror Stories

[Eric Medemar]

I think it would be more difficult for me to come up with good tenant stories, the horror stories come easy.

1. One of my tenants who I was evicting lived in a unit where I payed all of the utilities, he moved out in the middle of the night, but left the door unlocked and the homeless decided it would make an excellent shelter. So they moved in and decided to turn the heat up over 95 degrees for 15 days. My gas bill was over $1000.00. Luckily for me I turned it into the insurance company and they took care of most of it.

2. In that same unit I had another tenant move out in the middle of the eviction process and this time the copper thieves broke in and stole all of my copper plumbing for scrap metal. They destroyed a $1000 shower by punching a whole through it to get copper for scrap, they got about $2.00 for the valves they stole.

I have thought about putting up a little red emergency box on the wall with a $20.00 inside. The $20 would be behind glass and it would say, In case of crack emergency break glass, but don't steal my plumbing.

3. I bought a home that had recently had a homicide, nobody told me until after closing. A grand kid had killed his grandmother and shoved her in the gravity fed furnace (REALLY BIG Furnace). Well I bought the home in the summer and when my new tenant turned on the funace in the winter he ended up vomiting all over the home because the smell was so bad coming out of the furnace. They had pulled out her decomposing body but never cleaned up the mess that was left after her body was left in the furnace for about 3 weeks.

4. One evening at about 7pm, I received a call from my tenant who was taking a bath and smelled gas. It didn't smell like regular natural gas, it smelled like gasoline. She went outside and someone had doused her home (my rental) in gas. Later after talking to detectives I found out her boyfriend had started selling drugs in that area and the local dealers didn't like it so they were sending them a little message.

5. One morning I woke up and turned on the evening news, to live coverage of a local homicide that had just happened. Evidently a man had just been shot and died inside an area home. Not unusual for the area, the unusual part was about 2 minutes into the story the reporter was interviewing neighbors in front of the home of the homicide. It was a home I had bought about 2 weeks earlier.

6. I had just heard a story about a lady who had been shot to death and left burning in a vacant lot. So I went on the news to see the street name that this had happened. Finally for once it wasn't on a street where I owned a home. The next day I went to a home that I owned in the same area and realized that the vacant lot was off a street that backed up to mine and the body had actually been found burning 3 feet off my property line.

7. I was in front of the judge with a tenant who had brought a pile of pictures along to say that her home was infested with mice and that I hadn't taken care of the issue. I had my guys go over their numerous times with every mouse killer in the world, so this seemed odd to me. So I personally went over to the home after court because the judge demanded that I go take care of the problem. I asked the tenant where she was keeping her trash and if she was feeding the mice and she said that she was keeping the trash outside and she didn't know where the mice were getting the food. When I arrived at the home I went into the kitchen and low and behold a giant trash bag full of food was in the middle of her kitchen and 10 mice scurried away. Now wonder the traps and poison were not working she had a feeding station in the middle of the kitchen.

8. I had just evicted one of my best tenants who had always paid on time, she had recently gotten laid off from her job. She had a really good office job and was a really nice, and courteous lady who all the neighbors spoke highly of. Well she had left a couple of boxes behind in a dark room in the basement. I think she didn't know that they were there. I was inspecting the home and grabbed one of the boxes and too my horror. The box was filled with naked photos of her, pictures of her having sex with numerous men, and pictures of her having sex with many woman. In the second box I found every sex toy under the sun. From the looks of the pictures she was actually running an escort service out of the basement I thought. So when I got back home I google grand rapids escorts and she was #1 on google.

I could go on and on with these but I better get to work. I think I like wholesaling real estate a bit better than being a landlord just for these reasons.