A baltimore city landlords thoughts (not mine)

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Written by a baltimore city landlord recently....perhaps the funniest thing I've ever read. Thanks Mary Jo, you raise a wise point. To Chris, Heather and everyone else who was asking about how these turned out, pardon the delay in response. In reward for your patience I shall regale you with what your life can turn out like as a landlord of such tenants as this. I went under contract with it in the early winter for it to close February the second, two-thousand-fifteen. I checked with the tenant to make sure she was happy living there as Nancy did in her Section 8 case. She said she did want to stay there, and complained of a lack of central heating from the previous landlord and that her electric heaters "didn't work", I gave her three brand-new space heaters to keep her from warm until I closed. She seemed to reciprocate my friendliness, in contrast with the lender-turned-owner-by-default to whom she owed at least two months' rent. When we signed and I asked for the February's rent, I told them clearly that because we were starting on the second of the month and not the first, I was going to waive the late fee which I normally charge if the rent is still outstanding past the first. They said they didn't have it yet and would pay it that Friday when the husband got his pay check, which they never did. I brought it up in March, at which point she pretended to have been confused by the word "waive", as if she thought it meant I had "waived" the entire month's rent, and claimed not to have it. After some deliberation, I decided to let it go and let them get away with February for free in addition to all the months they'd been owing before that. Now that the deal had closed, I gave her a choice on the heat: either have handymen busting up the floors and ceilings for a couple weeks to lay new duct work, or install new electric heating. She opted for the latter, which I then brought and installed on the next visit. That complete, the other issue was three spotty holes in the ceiling from previous leaks. Though she said they weren't active any more, I still decided to completely tear down and replace the roof. My painter prematurely repaired and painted over the ceilings, which allowed one rainfall to taint a brown fringe around where the old hole in the bedroom ceiling was before we finished the roof. Throughout, they never answered their phone or texts, forcing me to come up to Baltimore and bang on the door several times per week just to communicate anything to them. When I finally got them to answer the door, the wife claimed that the one cell phone she had was a "burner" and her brother or uncle or whoever the random people that they board in there. Consequently, and they missed appointments with my contractors and in some cases refused to let us in, often answering the door with red eyes when I tried to get people to look at the place and seeming to be on some sort of heavy stuff. By May, after visiting several times when only the wife was home who claimed she didn't handle the finances, and neither ever answer their phones, I came during the weekend and caught the husband on his way home. They claimed that his "knee was hurt" and he was out of work for a couple weeks, which their excuse for not paying the rent that month. I shook his hand, told him I trusted him and took a half-month's payment for the next month, having him sign an affidavit that he'd pay it the following month and make all subsequent payments on time. He did not, falling behind entirely. Only when I filed the FTPR did they suddenly start mentioning as a countermeasure new conditions of the house I'd already fixed everything of which I was aware - still in possession of all the heaters I gave them during the winter, in addition to the baseboard heaters I installed after it closing, she now began complaining about the "lack of heat" in court during the hundred-degree dry spell of July. Her friendly demeanor now having vanished, she answered the door with a stark expression saying, "I don't know what games y'all are playin'", and after five minutes of argument, allowed me to come in with the lead inspector who passed it. Just to go the extra mile, I had also fixed up the concrete of the front steps, all the drywall, and a leak in the basement soil pipe which they now brought up after being a month and a half behind and hadn't mentioned before, and which also required multiple visits by different plumbers. After my previous handyman had touched up the bathroom and rear stairs, I brought now another one to smooth out the kitchen, dig out the pipes and caulk the bathtub, and also ran new electric circuits upstairs via some rip-off electricians to add a second socket in addition to fixing one that they'd busted. By that time I had involved myself in that house personally more than any other, also sinking the most money by far into conniving electricians and duplicate labor. Having had enough of not being able to talk to the husband who she said got home late at night, neither answering their phones, I continued with the eviction after the two-month Failure to Pay Rent judgment, by which point she filed an escrow case just in time to delay it , allegedly paying into it just enough to string it along, and got a city inspector in there to now find an inch-wide hole the tenants had banged into the bedroom floor and the stains in the upstairs ceilings remaining from that one rainfall before replacing the roof. When I attended the November escrow case in which she tried via her sister's online "evidence" to show that I didn't own the house when we signed the lease, and I brought the HUD to prove otherwise. She tried to lie about the handyman having patched up the kitchen wall after checking the pipes, which I had evidence to the contrary, but the judge didn't seem to care to look at it one way or the other. He seemed sympathetic to my side and gave me a time period of my choosing - for which I suggested thirty days - to take care of the minor issues the inspector found: a chip off the steps, a basement leak and fixing a superfluous electric outlet in the upstairs bedrooms. As I calmly gathered my files after he made the judgement, I saw her out of the corner of my eye turn to me with a smirk of satisfaction like she just "stuck it" to me hard. Despite her lack of response to any phone calls and refusing my contractors entry when they came, I managed to fix all the significant issues by showing up with new contractors repeatedly until we could get in, leaving only the trivial handyman tasks - the hole upstairs, a kitchen drawer and the browning left on the newly-painted ceilings. No longer able to spend an hour and a half every day in the car going back and forth to Baltimore, I decided to hire a property manager through the recommendation of a gentleman I got to know from rent court. The new manager seemed like a slick-talker, saying, "I'll make your problems go away" and droning endlessly as if from a script. Noting this, I stuck with the recommendation. After briefing him on the above in late November and then sending him the histories of all my properties in great detail, I asked him to fix these last items before the January nineteenth escrow case, which he said he would. I inquired as to the result of that hearing and received no response from staff, who then suddenly sent me a quote from the contractors for these items a week after the hearing - which I presumed indicated they hadn't done it. It was thirteen hundred fifty dollars just to repaint that rear bedroom ceiling yet again and patch the hole. "Whatever", I thought, and sprang for it as a last "hurrah" just to get it over with once and for all. I approved the A.C.H. which they withdrew from my account after allegedly completing the job. The next time I spoke with the manager in mid-March, he informed me he had just come back again from the following court date. The job his staff had allegedly taken care of was not done at all and the new judge sitting in, who apparently didn't know I'd added electric outlets to all the bedrooms, fixed the front stairs, the plumbing, the kitchen ceiling and a number of miscellaneous issues after putting up the whole new roof, repainting everything twice and installing new electric heating, allegedly was going to indignantly give all the escrow money from the past year back to the tenant. The manager then told me in a manner boasting that he had "saved the day" that when the judge asked what he should do about this, the manager stepped forth suggesting that he split it between us fifty-fifty, me losing twenty-two hundred dollars to the leeches in the process. I stood holding the phone in silent awe as he asked me, "did you know that she's been waiting for these for a year? And I like her. I actually like her. She wants to live there." and lectured me on what claims the tenant spewed forth in a seizure of her new opportunity: he had gone to the court with none of our files, none of the back story, no memory of what we'd discussed repeatedly by phone, and with nothing that I'd paid him for done. Confusion mixed with bewilderment at what in the hell was going on. Half of the previous year's worth of driving up there and paying out the wazoo to go the extra mile and make these people happy, out the window. The half of the escrow we didn't lose we still would not see until after the next hearing, which would be a challenge given that we were now pretty deep underwater with the rest of the properties. I then explained it to him twice more on the phone, and took once again the time for an entire evening to type of in detail my history with the house, all the repairs up until then. I had hoped he was up to speed on this now, and could refer to the above history during our next conversation. When I addressed this at a subsequent conference call with the manager's office staff, still in dismay as to how something like this could happen, his staff then looked at it again and said that the slip-up was because "the contractor sent us the wrong quote". My mind fixed on the conspicuous lack of an explanation as to how they didn't notice, especially when they claimed it was done. They apparently had just been sitting on my money that whole time. When they sent me another quote, I still paid it for another contractor charging even more to patch the leak and re-do the ceilings, as well as cover up an inch-wide hole in the bedroom floor under the bed. And the inspector still failed it the next time. I thus went back to my old pile of business cards from real estate and landlord meetings for my own contractors, while the management company was asking if they should drill the locks out, as there was a "violation" issued to the property and they needed to be able to enter to fix it. Drawers managed to disappear, and that alone managed to delay proceedings. My last contractor, more diligent than most, went twice recently for their appointment and waited for an hour, and has repainted the ceilings three times - two of which were digging them out and replacing the Sheetrock. He patched the roof again in a different place, and then on another occasion just wrapped the entire thing all around with a tarp. I asked the property managers to also call back their last contractor who, at great expense no less, repaired the roof and ceilings as well, as he made even more from "repairing" that ceiling and should thus be just as responsible for it. They said they were "unable to get ahold of him". When I called the inspector personally, he said that the stairs and hole under the bed were still outstanding, then in the same conversation, actually looked at his papers and said, "Oh wait, no, that's all resolved." The items he had repeatedly claimed had failed in court were due to a lack of updating his records, and had me sending contractor after contractor to re-do what the previous ones had done. Now having cleared that up, he said that all that was left was the foot-diameter brown tinge on the ceiling. I asked for photographs, and sent the last contractor back to paint over it yet again. And so it went on. So far six separate contractors and at least twelve repairs of the roof and ceilings to date, and digging them out and replacing the sheet rock itself. In all, over forty visits by me and/or my poor contractors she wouldn't let in; thousands upon thousands of dollars; hours each day calling the city, writing management, finding new contractors, trying to track down the old ones who said they did it, getting them to try to make contact with the tenant who doesn't answer my calls or let anyone in the house. Including the half a year's rent the current manager lost, all the reworks of the roof and ceilings alone have now cost as much as the entire house is worth. I had budgeted for some slip and slop, and yet made one fatal assumption: the capacity for rational action, on the part of the tenants with whom I do business, to do in any measurable capacity of decency what is in their own best interest. The man who sold me the property after his houses, as he said, "sucked the life out of him", commented ominously in reference to the tenants that "these people are the scum of the Earth." I believe that's a bit harsh; after all, mankind has yet to sample and observe any actual population of scum growing on this planet to behave so wicked as to somehow deserve such an insult. As most fungal species at least have an honest life cycle and a straightforward means of pursuing it, a proper analogy is difficult to come by. Only careening your chest against the hard experience of actually dealing with these human beings can do justice to those few words that carry so much meaning. Every five weeks it's been another fail, more money, more contractors, and the same game. With the next inspection now being January fifth and the court date on the twentieth, I sit and watch the chances are piling higher of them lucking out with another new judge and me just losing it all. Chris and Heather, I hope that you are taking heed so that when and if my suffocation under the mass of refuse they have leveraged the laws of Baltimore City to deluge upon my shoulders comes to its ever-looming head, you will have a record that will reach you more thoroughly than the previous owner did me. What is the default recourse for a tenant when his or her eviction is pending? File for escrow, on the grounds that your house has "violations". And what is the solution to having a house that is unsuitable to live in? Why, the court enforces allowing the occupants to remain living in it, of course. And when you need money to solve such a problem, how do they enable you to do so? By depriving you of the very resource that you require in order to complete the repairs their inspector orders. Not hold it until you give them the contractor's invoice so they can pay him directly - heavens, no. That might actually make sense. They just withhold it entirely, forcing you to dig under your sofa, borrow from credit cards or steal the money from elsewhere in order to improve your own house enough to be able to kick the deadbeats out of it. By the time you've dealt with your tenth tenant or so, you begin to see certain patterns among them. They don't pay their water bill, which arrives at your door and you have no choice but to cover in order to prevent the house from going to auction. They can somehow afford the cable television that their uncle sits and watches all day, as well as whatever controlled substances that they are smoking in the basement each time I try to ring them with a contractor for an appointment, and they refuse entry, us having "caught them at a bad time". To put it simply, at their essence my tenants are not human. They are a collection of electrons and muons, a brilliant orchestration without modern historical precedent of all the conceivable elements that serve one purpose: ruin. They are an abstraction of dark matter negating the light of goodness in the universe. They crawl up from a well ascending from hell like goblins serving the Nether-King as if in some evil plot to ruin all general progress in improving the city. They hop from one dwelling to another in a parasitic pursuit of a host, enticing you with the promise of the simplest long-term behaviour of paying their rent at the beginning of each month and keeping your house clean, just enough to ensnare their unfortunate host, no matter how good his intentions or faithful his actions. They show their welfare stubs during their application to indicate that all they have to do is sit and breathe, and out of your own tax dollars will flow in the rent to which they agreed in writing. They then move in, somehow teleporting with them a monstrous heap of refuse the likes of which indicate that the city ran into a lack of space at the landfill and diverted its contents into your property by default. The tenants then still manage to accumulate more of the stuff month after month for the duration of their stubborn clinging grasp upon your property until you are finally able to get them out. The cost of all that junk, from whatever scene of the movie Labyrinth it originated, likely cost more to buy new than what they owed you in rent. It then costs you another six to eight hundred dollars to clear out. In case there are any newbies on this mailing list thinking of taking the plunge in buy-and-hold real estate in Baltimore, please pay heed to the fact that the city you are prospecting is a positive sinkhole of humanity. Baltimore tenants are vulgar bags of filth playing a zero-sum game against all will to advance civilization. It is implausible to expect them to do what is in their own best interest, such as putting money into an envelope and releasing that envelope into a box, as they somehow can't seem to pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. They are a canker sore on the mouth of a society and state that has been figuratively trying to suck on an allotropic lemon, a sore that won't go away for generations on end. You would fare a better chances kissing snapping turtles on the mouth in hopes of turning one into a princess than spending a single minute trying to imbue reason into any one of these people. They are the parasites of the state of Maryland, their presence a putrescent mass of wall-staring vomit. The cycle of their daily thought and action involves the implementation of but a narrow sequence of life skills that would make Joseph Stalin's karmic rebirth as an earthworm seem like the revival of humanity. While their actions may be deserving of nothing but the profoundest contempt, verbal rebuke is neither prudent nor useful in conveying any meaning to them. Their life is a monument to the shameful side of our planet, a revolting daily living suckle upon the fruits of their surroundings. They are like bleating, curdled staggering mutant dwarfs smearing your rental home's interior with the effluvia and offal accompanying their illegitimate birth into this world, responding to any rational inquiries for the responsible fulfillment of the most basic of agreements as would an insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired them having long fled with screaming abandon in recognition of what they have done. I may never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as some of the individuals I have encountered in my foray into Baltimore real estate investment. They range from monsters, trolls, ogres, and mere irregularities. One barfs at the very thought of their life habits. They have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid them. They act vile, useless, less than nothing. My quality of life has reduced by simply knowing that their behaviour is physically possible. They have become weeds, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And they smell accordingly. Able to give a more lucid answer about the inventory of the neighborhood crack dealer than the number of children they have sired, the most impressive accomplishment that the grand sum of them has ever contributed is to have managed to currently, until after submitting their application, not be in jail. It is arguable whether they consume more public resources through Section 8 and Social Security than they would by being on the inside. The evidence that justifying a complete overhaul of city policies is so rampantly abundant that to articulate it in stacks of written tomes would fill Luray Caverns. Should a flock of mutant hawks pluck any of these snail-skulled rabbit-eating tenants from your apartment complex by driving their beaks into their brains, they may very well choke upon the queasy, convulsing nausea of their trite, antisocial mindset. They are weary, stale, flat and ultimately unprofitable to comprehensible agreement of business, marriage or cohabitation on the planet of arbitrary length. They are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane thieves of any publicly altruistic work effort. They are foul ignoramuses upon which bottom-feeding fish and mammals look down. Even sheep shan't dare copulate with them. They are unreservedly pathetic, starved for handouts, and lost in a land that reality forgot. They speak lies as their first language, from the day they meet you with their tenancy application in hand. Having the actual gall to make demanding service calls for exterminators or refrigerator service while not paying a dime of rent, so that they may be comfortable and have all their human needs met day after freeloading day of their life, what effect do their delusional claims have? What fantasy do they hold that they would believe that their tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat spinning rabidly in a circle? The answer lay in their security in the knowledge that the most clunky, backward legal system the written word could ever conjure between human beings will honor such claims, that's what. Listening to their words puts perfectly good stereocilia to waste. They have no rhythm. They are ridiculous and obnoxious. They are the moral and financial equivalent of a leech that just materializes in the swamp beneath the foundation upon which you thought you purchased your property. They are a living emptiness, a meaningless void such that their presence somehow brings negative air pressure to a vacuum. They exist for the reason that as the height of their lives their parents managed to breathe long enough to reproduce. They are sour and senile. They are a disease of your real estate dreams, a puerile subpopulation of one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslappers that turn it into a nightmare. It would be complimentary to say that they are reminiscent of drool. They are deficient in all that lends character. Dank and filthy, asinine and benighted, they have the personality of wallpaper and are a classic source of unpleasantness. They leave misery and sorrow upon the responsible citizens of Baltimore wherever they go. Suburban neighborhoods within driving distance of your home are replete with fiends and cowards vexing the sheet rock of your property with a rare and strange form of halitosis. They resemble some sort of cross between smarmy lagerlout sods and bloody woofter gits. The pillocks live at such a level of existence that the most valuable thing they can do is to bugger off from sight - a service for which such pragmatic and generous landlords as Mark Owens pay them hundreds of dollars. They are the bane of even the grottiest, most artless base-court rodent. They are clouted, boggish, foot-licking hyenas of the jungle of Baltimore. If you ever want to know how to have more power than the police to be able to assert your right to live for free in someone else's house, just watch for a day any of these churlish boil-brained clodpolls, ponces and cockered bum-bailey poofters. Somehow the spirit of the law of personal property is beneath only the most craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naffs, dankish clack-dish plonkers and gormless crook-pates that are the undoing of your sanity. Any hopes of finding amiable human beings with which to conduct basic, honest business have gradually replaced themselves with the image of a dark carnival of dread-bolted fobbing, clapper-clawed flirt-gills. Would that any of these goblin-kissing, gleeking flap-mouthed coxcombs only pay their meager seven hundred dollars per month, it could not only have fixed up their entire house by now with new central heating along with a vanity kitchen and bathroom set, but also done the same for a neighbor or two. Yet in this world you can only control your own actions, and leave it to others to maintain their own degenerate, noxious and depraved state of affairs. In taking on this role complete with the unique privilege of executive arbitration between these tenants and the city government, one encounters a mutually synergistic mass of stupidity concentrating upon itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupidity gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Approaching singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. Collectively they are able to emit more stupidity in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Nothing in our universe can really shine quite like it. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. This is a revelation of unimaginable ranges of the stupidity meter, and after this, you may not hear from me again for a while as I have to re-learn how to talk. When you are around it for too long, you just feel yourself dropping toward the left on the evolutionary chart. It is a superhuman feat to both do business listening to tenants half-bake their drivel and still come home able to think straight. One can hardly believe how potently efficient this tenant-bureaucrat combination is at human inefficiency. I mean rock-hard, to-the-core malevolent stupidity. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. The product of such fine evolution in the opposite direction of goodness that they travel far beyond the level of stupid we are able to classify with the range of verbal symbols we have as a civilization developed, transcending into a different dimension of malevolence. Doddering betwixt the pillars of what conscious thought can muster in a representation of the form their actions reveal of their decrepit minds, having learned a trans-stupid, meta-decrepit life skill in order to survive. These are the types of people you will be dealing with. Truly these skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted, others have had an easy time of mastering after careful observation and years of practice. Had I not tried out this real estate investment thing like Kiyosaki and his ilk have touted since before the collapse of the housing bubble, I may never have fathomed the bottom of the gauge for human evaluation. If everyone knew that this was possible in the nature of man, no Carlton Sheets book would ever crack open. It just wouldn't be "right" - a bit like parking in a handicapped space in hell. Mary Jo, Chris, Heather and everyone starting out, should you still decide to continue I bid you the best of luck in the emotional, social and spiritual struggles that comprise the entirety of buy-and-hold real estate investing. Just in case you are still wondering, while your mileage may vary, my tenants are harmful, suppressive, hypocritical, cultic, meretricious, jargon-spouting, harassive, restrictive, destructive, greedy, mendacious, violent, clueless, mind-numbing, criminal, satanic, spastic, secretive, barratrous, demented, loathsome, crazy, evasive, narrow, splenetic, bilious, belligerent, deceitful, cowardly, malignant, devious, stifling, unethical, opportunistic, uncaring, clumsy, clueless, tasteless, malevolent, avaricious, diseased, unsympathetic, insane, contemptible, self-righteous, dim, self-entitled, dystopic, grim, vengeful, idolatrous, flagrant, self-destructive, controlling, deceptive, illegitimate, brain-damaged, socially poisonous, conspiratorial, manipulative, fraudulent, despicable, weird, imbecilic, libelous, fundamentalist, byzantine, abusive and, to any well-meaning would-be real estate entrepreneur, not good. In other words, if you want to invest, you might want to play eenie-meenie-miney-moe with penny stocks or something. That's all for today's episode. P.S. Anybody wanna be my new property manager? -- S