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Updated over 2 years ago on . Most recent reply
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What's Your WORST Tenant Experience? How Did You Deal With Them?
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?
Most Popular Reply
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- Rock Star Extraordinaire
- Northeast, TN
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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 😀
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
🤣
- JD Martin
- Podcast Guest on Show #243
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