About a year ago, I posted a question on BP that ended up being a trending topic. Here is the link to the original post if you want to go back and read it, but I will provide a quick summary if you don’t want to read through the whole thing.

https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/677478-would-you-take-a-tenant-with-a-prior-eviction

A tenant applied to one of our properties and she had an eviction on her record from 6.5 years ago. If she applied in 6 months time we wouldn’t have even seen the eviction on her record as it would have been gone. She was extremely good at communicating, and was completely on board when we asked her for two months of a deposit. She told us that the reason she had an eviction on her record was because she was living with her inlaws at the time and going through a divorce, and they filed an eviction against her to make things harder on her.

There was a ton of mixed comments on the thread, some saying they would never rent to a tenant with an eviction under any circumstances, others saying it sounds like there should not be any issue there.

A couple of the “big wigs” weighed in: @James Wise @thomasS @NathanG (I can't tag Thomas and Nathan as we are sadly not connected)

James Wise and Nathan gave the advice that we are trying to mitigate risk as much as possible and putting in a tenant with an eviction increases the chance of risk. Therefore, we should not rent to her.

Long story short……listen to James and Nathan.

This particular tenant wasn’t a professional tenant. That would be a vast understatement for her tenanting capabilities. She wrote the actual book on professional tenanting and teaches classes at Harvard and Yale on how to tenant.

She did not make a single rent payment for the 7 months that she lived there. It also took us that long to get her out.

She continued to communicate so, so well with us! Playing cat and mouse the whole time, telling us she has rent, come pick it up, story after story, after story. It took long enough for us to say we have had enough and offered cash for keys. She refused and so we went to file an eviction.

We went through the process of an eviction and when we were scheduled to file the exact court date the attorney notified us that he filed the eviction for the wrong address. This is kind of sheer dumb luck, but we had to start all over again from the start as a result.

After another eternity of legal stuff, the tenant was to be served with a notice to appear in court for their eviction hearing. Only issue….she was arrested for a different charge and so we couldn’t quite serve the notice until she was out of jail.

Once all that good stuff was done, we got her served, showed up in court, judge was happy to grant the eviction. She did not move out and so we had to schedule her physical eviction with the Sherrif’s dept. At the time they were quite backed up, so took a while for us to get the date.

In the end she was physically removed from the property under the oversite of the Sherriff’s office.

Later that day, went to go get her stuff and informed us how we destroyed all of her belongings, poured her mom’s ashes over her couch and poured black grease over her cat. Claims she has pictures of it all and is filing a lawsuit with her attorney. Of course there is no picture evidence of an event that never happened and never heard from her again.

The unit had been renovated before she moved in, and needed a complete overhaul after she left.

The good news out of all of this……

I learned an important lesson.

“Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other” – Ben Franklin

DON’T BE A FOOL!