All Forum Posts by: Jason M.

Thanks for the replies! It's been a great help. If I hear from him again I'll be sure to get a lot more information and be extremely cautious. I don't really need their help anyway.

Forgive me for the possibly naive question. I recently put my rental property back online for rent and have received a few calls for it already. One call in particular was new to me.

A gentleman called me asking questions about the house, saying he worked for a firm of some sort (I hate myself for not writing it down at the time). He said he finds rentals for tenants and needed more info on my rental for his own posting of the property. His questions were innocent enough. Nothing that seemed weird to me.

He said he wasn't an agent or a broker, he just works for a firm that finds rentals for others. He also asked me that if they found the "perfect tenant" for me would I be willing to pay a finders fee. I declined to comment on that one since I wasn't sure the proper response. I'm just curious what kind of firm does that, who isn't a realtor? 

Thanks.

Hey, Just wanted to share my photos of a bathroom floor I had to redo due to water damage by my previous tenant. The bathroom in the upstairs hallway had an old, ugly laminate floor, which allowed water to seep into the underlayment and subfloor causing mold.

I'm a big DIY'er and I decided to tile the floor so that I don't have any future water damage to this area. I cleaned up the floor, ripped out what was too far gone to repair and laid down new cement board and tiles. It takes a lot of elbow (and knee) grease to do, but in the end it'll be worth it and it all cost < $200 for the supplies needed (I already have all the tools). I also decided to redo the floor in the master bath, which had the same ugly floor (but no damage). Because it didn't make sense to have a decent floor in the hallway and an ugly one in the master.

Unfortunately, since I couldn't prove the tenant caused the damage I just have to eat the cost (and write it off in taxes later).

Thanks for the replies. I'll be eating this one (5 years of on time rent was a big payoff) and putting down a tiled floor (I'm a DIY'er so I know fully how to do it myself and it won't really cost that much).

I knew the lack of any before photo's would limit my options but it's not really possible to take a 'before' photo of a sub floor. The tiles do not show any wear-and-tear on them, even after about 8 years of being there.

I'm not sure if the tenant was running an unofficial day care or not. She had been in the house for almost 5 years. So that's more than enough time to damage the floor, IMHO.

I discovered the damage when I noticed one of the laminate tiles had shifted a little. I went to pry it up to replace it with a spare and the whole tile came up w/o any effort, that's when I noticed it was pure black underneath and the surrounding tiles all came up with very little effort too. The floor was still actually moist and I hadn't used any water in that bathroom yet.

My tenant just moved out recently and I discovered water damage under the floor of a bathroom. I don't have a "before" picture proving it wasn't there before hand. However, I do know that the tenant was caring for small children during her stay which would have resulted in a lot of baths for kids and lots of overflowing or splashing water from the tub.

I'm lucky the sub floor is two layers with a 3/8" top layer that I can tear off. The pic below is after I tore up the top layer and did a quick wash with bleach and water on the bottom. The lower layer is not as bad, and may clean up with some more bleach treatments but overall I'm going to have to replace part of the sub floor. 

I may just rip up the cheap laminate and tile the whole floor with a decent ceramic/porcelain tile to prevent this from happening in the future (plus it'll just look 100% better), but I realize that will be my cost and not the tenants.

Thanks for the correction, Kyle! Honestly, I hadn't even read up on what the technical/legal term squatter meant and just used it to describe this person generically.

Thanks Nicole! I had a feeling I would have been in-the-right to have him kicked out pretty easily but was just curious for the future. That link looks immensely useful! I'll be sure to bookmark it. Thanks a million!

And you better believe I changed the locks the other night. Even when I did that the squatter ended up sleeping on the deck in the back yard for a night. Thankfully he came by last night and hauled his stuff away (which was all also in the back yard, where I put it).

Hi. I'm new here and wanted to share a recent issue I had with my renters. I'm looking for a little knowledge. I apologize if this gets long winded.

I'm a novice landlord and have been renting my townhouse for over 5 years. My last tenant officially vacated Nov 1st 2014. She was the ideal tenant for almost 4 years. Never late and hardly ever had any maintenance issues (that were her fault) and she left virtually no damage to the house after leaving (except for normal ware and tear on walls, etc). But she tainted all that in the last 3 days before moving out. By not moving out on time, leaving all sorts of junk in and outside the house. She hasn't paid her water bill or transferred services back to me. And the worst thing was she left me a squatter!!

She was the only official tenant on the lease and never told me this other guy moved in. He had been there for at least a year.  I did discover he was there about a year ago when I went over to fix an issue but I let it slide (i know; I shouldn't have).

Thankfully, it only took me a week to get rid of the squatter (literally as of last night). I've heard horror stories of it taking almost a year to get rid of squatters. But if the person was never on the lease (and he never paid rent according to my tenant) does he have any legal rights if he had decided to fight me on this?