Tenant will not leave after lease expired. Eviction? (fulton, GA)

[Jorge Gil]

We have a tenant who does not want to leave. The lease is month to month and we gave her notice 60 days ago!  

She is trying to find every excuse to stay in the property and on Sunday she emailed us a CDC declaration (she has not lost her income due to covid, has a job, social security disability and she is part owner of another property). We do not want to renew the lease, since the house is in very, very poor condition and she is usually late with payments and the rent is way low compared to others around. We are worried about the house since it needs desperate repairs.

We tried offering cash to leave but this did not work. We think she does not want to move because of the hassle since she has quite a lot of stuff.

Can we evict the tenant? how long will that usually take?  the tenant will try to find any excuse to delay or stay at the house. We are not evicting her for lack of payments but because the lease expired and we want our property back. 

Is this affected by the moratorium that is in place right now? 

Any guidance will be appreciated. Thank you!

[JD Martin]

CDC is only for non-payment of rent. If you are filing eviction because of unlawful holdover - which is what this sounds like - the CDC doesn't apply.

If you've accepted any rent since you gave her the 60 day notice beyond the day of termination, you need to restart the clock by giving her a new notice. You can't accept payments past your termination date without creating an implicit new arrangement. If you haven't accepted/received any money beyond the termination date, you should have no problem in eviction court.

PS: You don't have to have a reason why you want her out. You can have any reason from "I don't want to rent it out any more" to "I want to let my nephew live there" to "I want to preserve it for historical sake".