Help! My tenant is a drug dealer.

[Jocelyn Doumani]

My husband and I purchased our first investment property. We renovated it and found tenants to move in on the first of this month. Today, someone randomly reached out to us and warned us about this tenant. That he is a nightmare tenant. That he also has a record of trashing properties and that he is a serious drug dealer.

Any suggestions on how to move forward with this situation? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.

[Anna Sagatelova]

Hi all, PM here.

If a PM was responsible for the screening, their screening procedure absolutely should include past residential history with contact information for each landlord. You should ask them about their full process and go with a PM that has a comprehensive screening procedure that goes beyond a background check.

In any case, you have a lot of people here saying that a background check tells you more than a random stranger/neighbor, and I'm here to say that is not always the case. There are plenty of drug dealers out there with no criminal record. I'm not saying you should trust every accusation, just that a clean background check is not alone a reason to dismiss a neighbor's complaint. It's just very unclear who this person actually is. Is it a former landlord? A former neighbor? A former roommate? A competing drug dealer?

Finally, read the lease this tenant signed. Aside from when it expires/whether it's M2M, do you have a "drug free housing" clause/addendum? That can be a way for you to evict immediately, if the issue turns out to be real.