California Eviction, chances of recovering judgement

[Joel A.]

So I've been dealing with one of those ‘tenant from hell' types for the last couple years in my SFR in Moreno Valley, CA.

He’s been violating city codes by illegally operating an auto repair business on the premises.

He’s been notified to stop several times by the city, myself and my property management company. He was several months behind on rent and continued to defy the city’s demands to comply. I served him a 60 day notice to vacate last January and proceeded to file for eviction in March 2021.

Since then it’s been a long ordeal of waiting, attorney fees, lost rent, city citation fees, and going back and forth with the city, management company, and the tenant. The tenant was being advised by an attorney throughout this process by delaying responses and filing bogus motions to prolong the eviction. Below is a summary of what happened, so that other landlords can get an idea of what an eviction in California might look like… particularly in Riverside County.

January 2021- Served 60 day notice to vacate

March-2021 eviction filing, tenant given x amount of time to respond and waited until the very last day to respond.

May- tenant files for motion to quash, hearing set for June 11

June 2021- tenant files for covid19 related financial distress

June 28- Covid hearing

July 22 - trial set for August

August 11 trial- tenant claims habitability issues and claims $7k of work done on the property. Our lawyers agree on a settlement amount with the tenant agreeing to a payment plan, as long as we seal the eviction from his record. We get a judgement stating tenant is to leave within 60 days. We were supposed to have the writ of possession sent to the sheriff by October.

Sixty days pass, and no writ from the court, and the tenant doesn’t follow through with the payment plan. The courts are reportedly way behind due to Covid.

October passes, November passes, then finally in December the court says they sent the writ of possession to my attorney’s office. Unfortunately my attorney says he never received it. So they wait a bit, and three weeks go by and it looks like the writ got ‘lost in the mail.’ So now my attorney had to file for a lost writ of possession and request a new one. So I’m back to playing the waiting game for who knows how long.

While I wait for the new writ it looks like the tenant will have lived in the property a year for free without paying rent. My loss on the property is approaching $30k including lost rent, attorney fees, city citation fees, not to mention a lot of wasted time. I plan to file a small claims case to try to recoup some of this, but unfortunately my property manager says in his experience it’s very hard to actually recover money in a judgement. He says to expect no more than 5-10% recovery, if anything at all.

My question is what % of judgements are landlords actually collecting/recovering in cases like these? Curious to see what other landlords have been experiencing in similar situations.