What's Your WORST Tenant Experience? How Did You Deal With Them?

[Winter Heintz]

Happy Friday! As I go through screening potential renters for my unit, I'm intrigued by all the horror stories I hear. My previous tenants were great, always paid on time and took care of the property. They were less than ideal at cleaning and always wanted more animals but nothing I couldn't handle. 

One of my co-workers, let's call him John, told me a story about how he had a terrible tenant who never paid rent and did drugs in his property. Of course, the guy didn't want to leave. So, John was a realtor and he found a creative way to ANNOY the tenant so much that he eventually moved. He took a "For Sale" sign and put it out front of his rental. John told his tenant it just wasn't working out so he had to sell it. John asked a few of his realtor buddies to act as interested buyers. He would have them filter through so often that the tenant eventually packed up and left. 

I want to hear YOUR tenant horror stories and what creative ways have you dealt with them?

[JD Martin]

Quote from @Greg R.:

Quote from @JD Martin:

Quote from @Greg R.:

I've had a couple STR guests smoking meth/ fentanyl in my properties, which is pretty crazy because these are high end luxury units. Doesn't happen often but it's happened twice. I know because one tore down smoke detectors and they both left foil, straws, and other used supplies behind.

Regarding LRT, I usually don't interact much w/ the tenants or do the screening, my wife does. Can't remember what happened but for whatever reason I was at this property and showed it to a couple of young single guys. They were active duty in the US Marine Corps., and I am a Marine Corps. vet, so we hit it off. I bypassed the normal screening that we usually do, because, they're Marines and they'll be great tenants - right?

On the first day they moved in there was something minor that needed repair, so I go over there to take care of it and I'm greeted by a 80-90 pound german shepherd who was not at all welcoming. I was puzzled because the lease stated no pets allowed and they confirmed that they didn't have any pets or animals. 

A moment later I saw one of the guys and asked him what's going on w/ the dog. He said that they decided not to tell me about it because they thought I would discriminate against them, so they went and got an ESA cert online (not worth the paper it's printed on), and said that now I can't do s*it about it. Those were literally his words, and this happened on the first day of the lease when they were moving in. 

From there all kinds of drama, complaining that a fence was a few inches too close to parking space and was code violation, threatened to call fire dept, etc., etc. Literally complaining about every single thing on a regular basis. I was finally able to get rid of them, but they were a complete and major pain in the butt. 

 😂 I'm a USN Gulf War I vet, and I'm a military supporter, but I'd say easily half of the guys I served with were complete jackasses so no way would you get a pass from me just because you were in the military. Lesson learned, right? 

I used to tell people: as soon as someone tells me they're a cop or a preacher in a conversation that didn't call for that information, I check for my wallet. Maybe I'd add squid, grunt, jarhead and zoomie to that list 😀

Yeah, lessons learned. This was about a 10 year younger version of myself who clearly misplayed that situation. The school of hard knocks is not one you want to visit often, but it does provide very valuable lessons. No shame in being transparent about something knuckleheaded I did in the past. 

No doubt - right up my alley. Not too many people on BP have a podcast talking about losing $100k. Virtually every lesson I ever learned in life cost me a lot of money. I've got two PhDs - one from a regular university and one from Hard Knocks university
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