Judgement for Unpaid Rent

[Sharon N.]

How do you go about collecting a judgement for unpaid rent? Have you ever been successful?

[Joel Owens]

Sharon I see you are in Georgia.

First question is do you have a judgement yet on the tenant??

If you file to evict and then tenant does not answer to the court you can get the writ to evict but not a judgement.

In that case you have to take them to small claims court and win to get a judgement.

Now if you already have the judgement against them you have a few options.

You can file the paperwork yourself for bank levy or wage garnishment.

Or

You can use an attorney that charges hundreds per hour.(this is usually NOT the best course of action)

All the attorney will do is hire a collection company that has more bark than bite and rarely collects any money.

The other option is to use a judgement recovery company.They usually pay the court costs and filing fees and then split 50/50 of whatever they recover.Sometimes they will buy the judgement outright for real cheap.In this case you get your cash right away and move on.

Judgements depending on the smarts of the tenant can take 3 months to years to collect.Some tenants are judgement proof.

This can happen when:

1.The funds are retirement funds in a bank or social security where money can't be taken.

2.The tenant works a job where their income is at a level where they cannot be garnished by Federal Law.Even when you can garnish you can only take 25% each time.If their are other judgements already garnishing then the 25% gets split up among the garnishments.

85% of judgements never collect a dime because of the work involved.

Even if the judgement company you employ chases the tenants for money the tenant may pay or they might just file BK if they have other debts.

A chapter 7 costs thousands so it would depend on their other total debts and how much your judgement is for.This is why it is important to carefully screen tenants.They need to have good credit,a good job with long work history,etc. or something where you know you can collect if they default.

If you have multiple tenants staying in one place and they all make minimum wage it will be hard to collect on them later versus one person showing great income.

Hope it helps.