Sorry or the long post. TLDR at the bottom.
I am by no means a professional landlord. My wife and I have one rental property in Baltimore, MD, which we only decided to rent out because we bought in 2006 at the height of the bubble and we needed to move, and selling would have meant taking a substantial loss. We rented it out successfully for quite a few years while we were still in MD, but a couple years ago we moved to TX, making it much more difficult to manage. We wanted to sell when we moved away, but it would have been a 5 figure loss that we didn’t want to take, so we thought we would try to continue renting it. We had a handyman that we trusted who took care of a lot, and we would use craigslist to find tenants. In July of last year, our tenants leases (we rented rooms individually, with separate leases) were all up at the same time and we were having a really hard time finding tenants. We looked into selling again, but we were still underwater and would have lost probably 10k. At that point our handyman, Angel, came to us with seemingly great deal. He said he would take over the payments and management of the house until the mortgage was completely paid off at which point we would sign the title over to him. If at any point he failed to make a payment, the house would be ours again. We figured what the hell, sounds good to us.
So Angel finds a couple tenants and begins to pay the mortgage. All seems to be going well. Cut to the middle of last month, Angel calls us out of the blue and says he wants out of the deal and that April will be the last mortgage payment he will make, because managing the house is too big a pain for him. We’re like ok, the housing market is red hot, we can probably just sell it and at minimum break even, probably even make a small profit. He had even repainted the whole house and remodeled the bathroom. The tenants are on month to month leases, so we reach out and tell them we are selling the house and they have 30 days. One of them is like cool, and he finds a new place and moved out after a week. The second one, I’ll call her Sharon, stops communicating with us and blocks our phone numbers. We then find out that she has moved her girlfriend and her gf’s kid into the house and has put locks on the interior doors (so far I don’t think she has changed the lock on the exterior doors, but that may have changed by now). She still hasn’t paid her April rent, and I am pretty sure she has no intentions of vacating or paying any rent anytime soon. We did a background check and she has a ****ing INSANE police record. Charges like kidnapping and assault on a police officer among many many others. Like, we’re talking legit sociopath here. Real scary stuff.
Meanwhile, my wife made some calls to friends and found out that Baltimore has apparently recently passed a bunch of bills because of Covid, limiting a landlord’s ability to evict their tenants. So the process will likely take many many months. Making it more difficult is that the house is not registered as a rental, and in order to register it, we have to get an inspection, but we can’t get into the rooms to do the inspection because of the locks. My wife and I cannot afford to pay the mortgage on the house for more than a month or two, and the bank has denied our request for forbearance.
So my question is: is there anything else I can do? Any way I can expedite the eviction? Has anyone been in a situation like this before? We are stressing the f out. Please help.
TLDR; we have a tenant in Baltimore who is refusing to move or pay rent and we won’t be able to evict her any time soon. What can we do?