What are your craziest tenant stories?

[Joaquin Camarasa]

I house hacked by the room for 4 years. As a landlord I’ve had some situations I never thought I would experience.

I would like to know the crazy stories of others. I definitely have improved a lot my screening process I feel like if I had got a doctorate in tenant screening.

My property is in a C area. So I had some interesting characters I decided to go with due to other tenants leaving in hard to fill months (November through January I found is where there is less tenant supply by far.)

I’ll be brief and share a quick overview of two of them.

1.- I’ll start with Mr. high, month of November hard to fill the room (low season).

The dude was on weed 24/7. Why I picked him you might ask? I gotta say he was hilarious and it brought a showtime to the house where I just had to sit back and eat the popcorn. Always a good payer, clean and a good guy overall. Everything was alright even though he was high, until the day he got a new girlfriend. You could see she could manipulate him easily. At some point he almost begged me if the girlfriend could stay with us for two weeks and he would pay extra rent. It was really tough to say no, so I accepted.

After two weeks, I was already fed up with her, she was dirty plus they had crazy arguments all the time. He requested some extra time for her. I would chat a lot with him about if it was good for him to continue the relationship. Of course I told him no, she can’t stay any longer, you need to find a solution.

Eventually they ended up breaking up with a whole discussion accompanied by some punching and scratching.

Mr. High ended up staying for a year and a half. He left afterwards, we still have a really good relationship to this day.

2.- Same pattern month of November, the year after, you would think I learned, but no 🤣.

We will call this character mr. Myths, the guy claimed he could speak several languages, be a professional tango and salsa dancer and that was a music producer that had his own company. I dance salsa and speak several languages. I could see his BS by far, but still I went ahead and pick him to make some cashflow on top of living rent free.) In addition to that, he claimed he was dating a model. I knew he was exaggerating all the way but still I saw he seemed like a good guy and I did not find much on social media about him. Also, the popcorn time was promising.

One week after moving in I went to chat with him and knocked on his door, he opened the door and that is when I saw the wall full of skulls and a couple of swords. I asked him right away what’s all of that. Then he told me all about being a juggalo. I had no clue what that was (Myself coming from Spain I had never heard it before, not sure if it is popular among other people) apparently they are the supporters of a peculiar band from Detroit. I didn’t know much about that culture so that worried me a little, I am not gonna lie. However, he was a nice guy, clean and respectful.

I was still waiting to meet the “model”. After some days she came visiting but they went straight to the room and I did not get the chance to see her. So I waited in the living room area just out of curiosity. I could hear the voice and I was thinking she’s got an attractive voice maybe after all the guy has game, about 40 minutes later they came out and I was right there ready with the popcorn. Man, maybe she was a model but that could have been 30 years ago, she was around her 60’s and on drugs. I noticed right away it would be still pretty interesting to see the way Mr. Myths would act around her like if she was a celebrity.

Mr. Myths ended up leaving after 6 months and he did not want to pay last month rent. I still keep some of the skulls as a souvenir. We did not end in good terms and I am not sure if he is still with the model.

Please, share yours I would love to know other tenant/landlord stories. I sometimes miss the popcorn days...

[Steve K.]

@Joaquin Camarasa A tenant I inherited was running the largest illegal sports betting ring in Denver. The FBI caught him and instead of doing extensive prison time, he decided to rat out his partners. The now ex-partners didn’t like that very much so they had some of their people pick him up. They threw a black bag over his head, drove him into the desert, stuffed him kicking and screaming into a small box, dropped several large prairie rattlesnakes in there with him, locked him up with the snakes inside and left him there. Amazingly, he managed to survive. 

During the ordeal he found God in a big way. He became a devout born-again, ditched all his gambling buddies and started spending all his time in church. As a new career, funded by the church, he committed himself to the lifelong mission of animating the entire Bible for children, cover to cover, story by gruesome story. There are some crazy violent stories in the Bible that are not at all fit for children! But that didn’t stop him from animating each story with vivid detail, crude artwork, amateur editing, and bizarre narration. Last time I checked he had gotten as far as Joshua’s conquest. 

His studio apartment was quite small and felt even smaller due to the ominous presence of a giant cross made out of heavy hand-hewn timbers, which he would haul around the courtyard and perimeter of the apartment complex nightly while wearing not much besides an actual crown of thorns, while drinking red wine and flagellating himself with a leather whip, reliving the blood sacrifice that redeemed us all as a way to thank Jesus for delivering him from the box of snakes (and freaking out the other residents in the apartment complex in the process, although weirdly they all just kind of ignored him). 

Oddities and nightly crucifixion re-enactments aside, he was a good tenant. He was friendly, helpful, didn’t bother the equally crazy neighbors that often, and always paid on time and in full. The only issue I ever had with him is he would often let homeless people that he met through his church crash with him (yes in his tiny studio apartment with the giant cross). This became a problem when one of them, who had apparently been there a few weeks, didn’t want to leave and claimed he had squatter’s rights via Colorado’s adverse possession laws, which of course requires 18 years of open possession or 7 years of paying property taxes/color of title, not two weeks of crashing on the couch, but you can’t argue with crazy. I found it hilarious that my tenant would look to me for help in this situation. Luckily for him he was able to resolve the issue on his own and promised to not have any more unapproved house guests, so I didn’t have to evict them both. I wouldn’t have believed his rattlesnakes in the box story except I didn’t hear it from him, I read about it in the Denver Post. 

He moved out a few years ago but remains my craziest tenant story, followed closely by several others, like the peyote cult leader who grew peyote in his closet (which he claimed was legal because his peyote cult had official church status) and tried to stab his roommate one night during an argument at a backyard bonfire party. Those guys did get evicted. Oh the joys of land lording!