Inherited Tenant Contacting Me Too Much

[Rebecca Shine]

Hi Everyone,

I have a question about a tenant I inherited.  I just closed on my first property last Tuesday.  I inherited a tenant, met him that day, and he seemed nice.  He lives by himself in the one bedroom unit in my new house, and I'm planning on house hacking so I'm moving into the other unit.  He does have a clause in his lease that allows me to end his lease with a 60 day notice because of the sale of the property, however, I was hoping to keep him until the end of his lease so I could have the automatic rental income, move in, and get my bearings as a landlord first.  The day I closed I gave him a packet with a new lease and a termination agreement to terminate his old lease.  I was very clear about telling him to email me if there was an issue, and to call me only if there is an emergency.  I just prefer to have a more professional relationship with the tenant instead of being friends.  However, since I am house hacking, there is also a neighborly aspect that gets added to the equation.  He blew right by the 'only for emergencies' part, and has been texting me everyday so far since we met, and nothing has been about landlord/tenant issues.  At first I was nice, just wanting to get to know what type of person he is (because I didn't screen him I didn't know anything about him and he's living in my house), but he's texting me about things that clearly did not require communication.  I started moving some of my things into my unit, and I noticed every time I come to the house and he hears me inside, he comes outside of his apartment to say hi, which is fine, but not what you usually do with neighbors.  Last night he did the same thing, came out of his apartment to say hi, and he was so inebriated that he had to lean against the wall in order to stand upright.  I continued to move in my things and then he preceded to call me twice and text me four times saying he heard someone upstairs and wanted to make sure the place was safe.  The texts themselves were clearly drunk texts, as they didn't make sense, so I did not respond.  Today he texted me about how I'm already receiving mail and quite frankly it's getting irritating.  At this point I haven't responded to his last six messages (all non-landlord related texts) I don't want to make him angry because I will have to run into him, but I want to draw the line and say stop.  Has anyone successfully dealt with this before?  He has not signed my lease yet, nor have I, so I could still technically end his old lease and kick him out, but I want to see if I can salvage it.  Any advice is appreciated.

Thank you!