How can I tell if a tenant has vacated my rental home?

Investors often want to know how do they handle an on-going eviction. They think the tenant has left, but how do they really know the tenant is gone?

You could drive by the house and look in the windows to see if there are signs that they are still there or gone. Is it really vacant? What’s the situation? What I have been told and advised to do by our attorney, what I would recommend to you to do, is go through the legal process. You never really know if the property has been abandoned or not. Remember the tenant can always come back and say “I didn’t leave the house” or “I still had stuff in there”.

I recommend that if you have a tenant that’s not paying, have policies and procedures in place to deal with that. File the eviction on the tenant and go through the legal process. After you get awarded possession of the premises, we recommend always do, here in Texas we have what’s called a writ of possession. It may be called something different in your location. But get legal possession of the premises back. We get a writ of possession to our constable comes by, and actually says there’s nothing of value in this property.

So when they do that, we can take any trash out of the property, so that the tenant does not come back and say, oh I didn’t leave the property; I was just on vacation and I had $10,000 in jewelry there that’s gone now. Now it’s your word against theirs. They call that the Rolex role. They always seem to have a lot of expensive jewelry when they can’t pay the rent. But nevertheless if you do not have legal possession of the premises back and you cannot verify that the house was abandoned, you could be putting yourself into some serious litigious situations now that you are defending whether or not the house was legally abandoned. You may wanna check. See if the power is turned off. See if the water is turned off. Those are other indications. I would be very weary of going into a tenant’s property when you think they’re gone and you’re not sure. If the tenant says they left, I would recommend get it in writing so that you have proof that says they left, maybe in an email or in a letter. But don’t just take their word over the mail that says over or over the phone that says that they left because that could get you in trouble.