Tenant unresponsive, rent unpaid, suspect abandonment

[Victor Drazen]

Hi all,

Just acquired property, already a big problem: one of the tenants is AWOL and I can't get a hold of him. It's 2 days (or 3 days?) before I can serve a pay or quit notice as far as I understand.

I've been trying to research reasons for me to be able to enter the property to verify if he has moved out or not, but I haven't come up with much concrete.

I just need to know if he's still living there. He mentioned he may be moving out, but at the time it seemed like he was talking about after the lease, not after the property sale (now I"m not so sure). Also every time we have inspected the unit after the first viewing he had his stuff packed up as if ready to move out (again, thought this was in prep for lease end in Sept, he is a strange fellow).

What levers have you found helpful? Can I give him a 48-hour notice by mail that I intend to come in and fix a legitimate issue? That I intend to show the property to a buyer/renter? Do I already have enough pretext to suspect and therefore enter to verify? From the places I can see (deck), he still has some [valueless] property left behind, so it does not appear to be totally cleared out.

To be clear, I'm not using this to evict him, I just want to confirm if he's still around. He technically isn't doing anything wrong until the last legal day he has to pay - should I just play it safe and wait until day 9, serve pay or quit, then enter on day 11 on suspicion due to "nonresponse to pay or quit?"

Thanks