A note to my tenants

The BBQ Pit
1

[My very first pit thread.]

Hello, you deatbeat shitheads. You know which ones you are. Have you ever wondered why some landlords are hardhearted? Probably not. You seem incapable of making any intellectual connection beyond that little trick (which you probably learned from your mother) wherein you listed your fellow crack buddies as references. Well, landlords get a bad rap for being mean because of people like you.

Remember that time when you let the water heater leak for six months, knowing full well it was leaking? I would have gladly shelled out $125 for a new water heater, but I was not pleased to pay for a new water heater and $3,000 in repairs for water damage. And then you asked me to return your security deposit when you moved out? Ha ha!

At least you were gracious enough to actually tell us you were leaving. As for those folks who move out secretly in the middle of the night, I would appreciate it if you would at least have the decency to take your perishable food products with you because it will be a few weeks before we realize you’re gone. There are few tasks more unpleasant than cleaning out a refrigerator filled with liquified fruit, rotting meat, and crusted milk, which you apparently prefered to remove from its original container in favor of pouring it onto the bottom shelf.

Also, apparently I wasn’t clear enough when we went over the lease at the beginning. Holes punched in the walls, broken windows and mirrors, missing appliances, and cigarette-burned carpet are not “normal wear and tear”. We worked very hard to give you a nice place to live; in a few short months, you have turned it into a slum.

I did say you could have one small dog. I did not say you could have two vicious, unhousebroken monsters. And who the hell are all those people living with you? How do ten adults find a place to sleep in a one bedroom apartment? Are they paying you rent? At least someone’s making money, but it isn’t me. I haven’t seen a penny from you this month. Again, I would ask you to review your lease agreement.

Perhaps you believe I’m rich because I own the house where you live. Note that my husband and I both work full time. Also note that we do not own your house free and clear: we pay the mortgage every month, on time. We also pay taxes, insurance, and some utilities. What would the bank say if we used some of the excuses you do? I understand that everyone has financial problems from time to time. I am not unreasonable. However, I am not likely to give a shit about your setbacks since you own a new car, a big screen TV, expensive clothing, and a new satellite dish. I can afford none of these luxuries myself.

I’m sorry your friend wrecked your car and stole your money. I’m sorry your crackwhore girlfriend spent your rent money. I’m sorry you got fired because you didn’t show up to work when you were in jail. I’m sorry you didn’t get paid because your namebadge was crediting the hours that you worked to another employee, but you get points for creativity on that one.

Tough crap, you derelict shitweasel. When you don’t pay your rent on time, I am giving you an interest free loan. I would be happy to evict your sorry ass, but doing so would guarantee that you will never pay me the money you owe, you would live rent-free on my property for months, and the legal costs would be outrageous. Just pay the rent. Pay the rent. Remember the rent? Pay the fucking rent.

I hope that when you leave here, the only person who will rent to you is one of those evil landlords. I hope your apartment is directly above his, so that you cannot walk across the floor without sending him into a homocidal rage. I hope your new place is well-stocked with carnivorous roaches and has faulty wiring. I hope it’s hot in the summer, cold in the winter and located in a neighborhood where you will be repeatedly victimized by gang violence. I hope it has no light fixtures, so you can’t use any of the lightbulbs you stole from me. I hope you accidentally set yourself on fire with your crack pipe. I hope your few remaining teeth become abcessed at the same time, but you have to endure the excruciating pain because no dentist will work on you unless you pay up front. I hope your syphillis sores become infected with flesh-eating strep.

P.S. I know you’re the one who stole my lawnmower. Asshole.

2

** 9.35** VERY nicely ranted. :slight_smile:

Sorry you’re getting fucked over by the salt of the earth. I guess next time you’re gonna research the bejesus out of those references, aren’t ya?

Cartooniverse

3

KILL MY TENANT
no respect for a land-holding man
only scum who pay when they can
free-loaders that hate what i am
then beg me to fix their can

ugly harleys on the front lawn
i come by to turn the sprinklers on
just tryin’ to keep up the place
get a knuckle sandwich right in my face

kill my tenant,
he ain’t worth the rent

section 8 pays most of their rent
but they can’t handle the 20 percent
selling speed just ain’t what it’s been
wanna see me make some homeless men?

rent’s in the mail, you know that it’s not
i got filth attempting to squat
think i’m kidding, 'til someone gets shot
i love slow targets on pot

just tryin’ to get appreciation
some return on my investment
go buy your own home
tom vu will show you how to
own big money and a yacht

how i long for midieval times
right to deflower virgins
was mine
no coalitions
telling me what to do
no pesky pinko ACLU

you can linch whomever you like
just be careful where you park that bike
i’m not impressed by pigs with no class
so get off your ass and go cut the grass
[sub]from ‘Fear of a Punk Planet’ by the Vandals[/sub]

4

As long as you’re ranting against disreputable tenants, may I add a suggestion for the benefit many of my fellow tenants where I live? It is this: PUT THE FRIGGING TRASH IN THE CHUTE! Not on the floor of the trash room. I pity the woman who lives across the hall from the trash room and has
to put up with that (and I doubt that she’s one of the offenders. And this is not a Section 8 building, but one that houses solidly middle class professional and business people. You would think they know better.

5

Cartooniverse: thank you for the lovely rating. I’m not an angry person by nature, but some tenants seem to exist for the sole purpose of aggravating me to death.

The odd thing is, a person can have stellar references, keep their present place clean, get good ratings from past landlords (yes, I’m aware that some landlords give good reviews just to get the creep out of their own place) and then freak out the minute he moves onto my property. It’s like these tenants suddenly start taking PCP or something. We keep our properties in above average condition for the market and our past tenants (the ones who didn’t disappear into the night) tell us we’re superb landlords and they’d like to rent from us again, so it’s not like we’re buttheads.

On the other hand, we’ve had tenants with somewhat shaky qualifications and offered them a chance; many of these turned out to be our very best tenants.

We had one guy who should have been the ideal tenant, at least on paper. When he didn’t pay his rent the month after he moved in, we stopped by to check on him. Some guy answered the door.
“Um, is John here?”
“He don’t live here.”
“Okay. Who are you?”
“Joe. I live here.”
“Um, this is our house, and we’ve never seen you before in our lives. Why are you living here?”
“John said I could.”

What the hell is that about? This guy just moves into our house and lives there? Who would do that?

We had another guy who, without our knowledge, sublet our house to his nephew or someone, who set the place up as a drug emporium (not the legal kind). The nephew was paying our tenant rent, and our tenant was simply keeping the money. Before this, the tenant had lived there for four years without any problems.

What’s most frustrating is that, as a landlord, my tenants have far more legal rights than I do. It’s very difficult to get rid of these morons without considerable expense.

javaman- I curse the non-trash-chuters in your building on your behalf. Personally, I’d spy on them to find out who was responsible, then place their trash outside their own apartment doors. Bastards.

6

HOLLY, I sympathize. I have an apartment in my basement, so my tenants literally do live right downstairs from their landlady. And I’ve been very lucky to have great tenants (though I’ve only had the house a couple of years). But in each case before renting it (three times, so far) I have looked the tenant in the eye and said “I don’t want to make it seem like I think you’re stupid or irresponsible because I don’t, but I’m going to be very clear about this so there’s no misunderstanding: I need the rent money to make the mortgage. As a single person, I can’t afford this house without it. So if you miss your rent one time, I will evict you and get someone in here who can afford it. There will be no grace period, no second chances, and this is not negotiable. The end.”

The “worst” thing that a tenant has ever done to me is throw a loud raucous party, and since I got pretty drunk at it I could hardly complain. :slight_smile: I’ve been very lucky, but my landlording career is young, and I shudder at the nightmares I hear, like yours.

7

Ah, Jodi, but you have it easy. If you did have to evict, you wouldn’t have to hire a lawyer! :wink:

Since your tenants live in your own basement, you’re unlikely to get screwed by the real boneheads. If a person is a real loser, he will not rent a place in such close proximity to his landlord. They hate to see the landlord’s face when rent comes due and they don’t have it. They disappear into the walls like the cockroaches that they are.

8

Another thought: Jodi, have you seen “Pacific Heights”? Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine buy and restore a house, deciding to rent two apartments in the place so they can make their mortgage payments. One of their tenants is Michael Keaton, who turns out to be The Evil Tenant From Hell. This movie is guaranteed to give any landlord nightmares. You must see it.

Fortunately, most bad tenants are far too stupid to do the things Keaton does in this movie.

9

Oh, I dunno about that Holly. Seems to me that Michael Keaton’s character was just an energetic young man with a taste for copper piping :smiley: :smiley:

Cartooniverse

10

Holly and all other fellow landlords, I DO feel your pain. My first adventures in renting were a true learning experience. I too own a large house and live upstairs, renting out the first floor. I just had the latest tenant move out on good terms, and now I am in that position that makes a landlord nervous, FINDING A NEW TENANT! I hate that. You never know what a new tenant will actually be like. What Holly said on that subject is so true.

11

Tenants like that suck, and should be easier to evict. It took 11 monthes to get the next door tenants evicted. They were retarded and the lease was for two ladies to live there. They had some guy living there that wasn’t in the lease. All night the guy would chase the ladies around the upstairs. You heard screaming and bed knocking until about 3:00 AM. The smell from their appartment was premeating into ours. They had a layer of trash on the floors that was about a foot deep. The landlady got the guy out of there and had the place cleaned and fumagated.

Having been a tenant for about ten years I had three landlords that would go through my rooms when I left the house. This is very illegal in my state, unless the landlord finds that an emergancy exists. Example: Water is running out of your room, and through the downstair’s ceiling. One place the landlady was hosting a party in the other tenant’s apartment, because the tenant had cable television. I also had items disapear which she found interesting. I know another landlady went through my apartment, because the rug I was deep cleaning, had her foot prints all over it when I got back from the store. The same appartment had the bedroom lights wired in series with the electrical sockets. Anything plug into an electrical oulet had to flow in series through the light fixture. The furnace filter was full of paraket feathers. The tenant below said that a lady had a paraket 4 years earlier. I purchased paint and painted every inch of that appartment before moving in, during which I wasn’t yet renting the place and a fix it guy was working in the bathroom. They wanted me to pay for the electric bill for before I start to rent from them. I would run that bitch over, if I saw her today.

12

Holly, I give your rant a perfect 10.

I am going to show it to a friend of mine who rents a house and has the same problems with dead beat walk of the living death fuckweaselshit mo-rons.

In closing, I would like to state that * Fuckweaselshit Mo-rons * would be a good name for a band.

13

Harmonious Discord: some landlords do suck. We purchased most of the properties we own from sucky landlords, because they let their places fall apart until any moron (that’s me) can afford to buy them. Then, we fix them up. In order to make any money as a landlord, you must:

  1. Know how to do stuff yourself. If you’re always calling the plumber, the electrician, the tile guy, the drywall guy, you’ll lose your butt.

  2. Reinvest in your properties. It’s amazing how many landlords will just let their places fall to ruin. These people are too stingy to buy a gallon of paint or a bottle of Pine Sol. They’d rather let the roof leak until the interior is ruined than to pay a few bucks to fix the problem. The crappier the place is, the crappier the tenants will be.

The place we just bought and are working on right now has such a tremendous cockroach problem- the giant, black, hideous kind- that the place is unliveable. That is, anyone who’d be willing to live there would not be a desireable tenant, to say the least. We used to live next door to this place; we couldn’t figure out why, no matter how often we had our place sprayed, those damned bugs were still overrunning our yard. It was, quite literally, like Creepshow.

All this because of a leaking kitchen pipe that would have cost the former owner maybe thirty bucks and thirty minutes to fix. In a few weeks, it’ll be finished and gorgeous (and bug-free), and we’ll be charging about $300 per month more than the previous landlord was able to charge.

I’d say that landlords like this are the scum of the earth, but they always screw themselves. They get what they (don’t) pay for.

I also used to live in a place where there were always strangers tromping through my apartment. Usually this occurred when I was in the shower. I cannot stand that! Hey, you shithead. This is my house! You can at least knock first!

And cockroaches, and light fixtures, and inducing miscarriages. Every time I interview a prospective tenant, I think about that movie. :shudder:

14

Add to your lease, immediately, the following addendum:

Sublet subject to landlord approval. (If they rent it out to anyone else, you get first shot to say yeah, or nay. Now if there’s someone there you don’t recognize you can act.)

Maximum number of tenants: ? (I rent to students and learned very early to include this baby in the lease. Sure there will still be SO’s staying over, but it will put an end to 10 people in a one bedroom apt.

And my personal favorite;
No roof access. (I can’t explain it but students have a real penchant for going out onto the roof at the first sign of spring sunshine.)

ALWAYS check the references, always. Ask the following three questions:

How long have you known XZY ?
Do you know them to be of good character?
Have you ever known them not to fulfill a financial obligation? (the length of the pause before the answer is what you need to listen for.)

When they fill out their tenant application is the only real shot you get at getting any useful info from them. Get their liscense number, SIN, last landlord, place of employment, parents phone number. This info will give you a lot of leverage at times of conflict. They will pause when they remember you have this info. I rarely have to use it, only threaten to phone home, or some such. You only get that one shot so make it count get all the info you can. It just helps to keep them honest.

I never rent to people with dogs, sorry, in my experience only home owners should have dogs, renters rarely really care for their abode when it comes to a dog. I own a dog, I know the maintenance isn’t fun, but I do it because I live here, and will continue to for a long, long time. Just say sorry, not here. I usually tell them I don’t feel it’s an appropriate place for a dog, (inner city, small yard) and they seem to accept that.

And after 15 yrs at this the most important thing to remember is school is never out for this. Everyday it’s something new. Try not to let the negative experiences jade you, it takes all the pleasure out of the good experiences.

Hope it helps, I feel your pain.

15

Is this a bad time to mention the landlady who used to sneak into my apartment to snoop around and steal my shampoo? But enough of ancient history.

Sorry about your atrocious tenants.

16

Jackmannii you didn’t leave a doctored bottle laying around?

One appartment I moved into had only one thing left behind. An extra large half used bottle of motion lotion. “Apply and blow on lotion to heat things up”. That was a funny find.

17

elbows:

We have these in our lease. We explain them carefully, with examples, when we sign. Why people feel they can freely ignore these clauses when we specifically tell them verbally and in writing what the rules are, I will never know. I think it’s because they’re stupid and/or evil.

We’ve never had a problem here with ‘roof access’, though. As for dogs, we only allow them in certain rentals- those with no carpet, just hardwood floors, for example, and those with big or fenced yards. We allow only medium to small dogs; big dogs create too much wear and tear on the house and lawn. We also made an exception and let our best tenant have a dog: she’s elderly, stone deaf, lonely, and slightly retarded. That dog is her only reason to live. Naturally, she takes excellent care of him.

Thanks for the tips. Too bad so many prospective tenants are stupid and/or evil; bad tenants raise the cost and lower the quality of housing for all tenants.

18

um, yeah, damn them bad tenants. that’s one thing i’ve never been. and if anyone here rents out apartments in NYC, i would love to prove that i’m a good tenant. i could prove it, say, starting August 1st? really, i’d LOVE to show you how good i could be. especially if you have a decently priced studio or one bedroom (though i’m not opposed to other options) :slight_smile:

19

ubermensch- I have a beautiful one bedroom with a pretty, fenced yard. Great, centralized location on a quiet, dead-end street, close to everything, nice neighbors, big trees. I’ll mow the lawn for you. Rent is $300 per month, all bills paid except electricity. Of course, you’ll have to commute to work from Amarillo, Texas. :slight_smile:

20

Boy holly, you need to chill and learn a few things from buddhism, like non-attachment to material posessions. Why would you want to own a rental property if it just ends up owning YOU?

Another good thing to learn would be “esho funi” which means “the unity of self and environment.” What that means is, when you expect your tenants to be bastards, you will attract only bastards as tenants.