Problem Rental House

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We purchased a home in 2017 and we’ve been pretty happy with everything. My neighbor’s are great, people aren’t afraid to let their kids play outside during the day, and when I go for my evening walks everyone is friendly and says hello. But there’s one house close to mine that’s a rental and for whatever reason the owner keeps renting it out to terrible people.

The first set of renters were trashy but they didn’t cause any serious problems. I don’t live right next door, so I missed out on the kids swearing up a storm as they played basketball in the front yard, but other than not mowing their lawn regularly they weren’t a problem for most of us. They did leave the rental house trashed when they left, but I guess that’s just the cost of doing business.

The second set of renters were very, very trashy. After they moved in, I started noticing a lot of trash in my yard. They had a habit of overstuffing the garbing bin to the point where it couldn’t close and they didn’t always take care bagging their trash which meant a lot of us had their trash in our yards. I’m pretty sure someone there was dealing drugs as they frequently smelled like marijuana and cars would stop there at all hours of the day for a few minutes before going on their merry way. The trash problem got bad enough that the city came out and posted something on their door. I don’t know if they were evicted or they voluntary left, but they were gone a few days later.

The third set of neighbors moved in three days ago, and this morning one of them shot the other. I don’t know the details, the news said it was a domestic problem, but a little before 8:30 I was one the phone with police telling them someone has been shot and people are screaming. So we’re not off to a good start so far.

I don’t have a problem with renters as a whole. I rented for many years and we’ve got other rental homes on my street occupied by people who don’t cause any problems. I realize when you choose to rent your property to someone it’s something of a crap shoot, but now the owner of that house is three for three for bad renters. And now I’m trying to figure out if any of us has any options regarding the home owner and who they choose to rent their homes out to. This is getting ridiculous.

2

My only advice: Stay as far away as you can from people who shoot other people.

On the good side, they’re probably gone now.

3

Sounds like the owner has terrible judgement in who they rent to, but you and your neighbors don’t have many options in that regard. Do you even know who the owner is? I’m getting absentee landlord accepting Section 8 vibes, and if you can confirm that they are taking Section 8 renters, you could file a complaint against them with HUD. Getting that Sec 8 money does require adhering to regulations including screening tenants and ensuring that safety and sanitation standards are met.

4

You can try finding the rental listing for this house. Look at Craigslist and other rental sites for your zip code. Maybe there’s something in the description which will give you a clue. You can look up the owner of the property from the county clerk website.

To avoid issues in the future, the neighbors might want to be proactive about registering complaints. Call the police if they are making noise after hours. Call the code compliance office for any code violations. Do it regularly and the owner will hopefully get more involved to avoid further issues. I would recommend that you don’t deal with the renters directly. Who knows how they will react. And you are just some random neighbor that they don’t care about. But if you get the police and city involved, that’s a more significant hassle that the renters and owner can’t ignore.

Does your neighborhood have an HOA? They often get a bad rap, but this is an instance where they can typically step in and force compliance.

5

I’m sorry. This made me laugh out loud. That is some English Level Understatement.

6

I spoke with my wife, who is usually more pessimistic than I am, and she floated the idea that, “Maybe whoever got shot deserved it.” She brought up the possibility that the new renter was moving away from an abusive person and they showed up at the new house and started causing trouble. I have no idea what happened and this is certainly a possibility. It’s still not a good way to introduce yourself to the neighborhood.

7

This landlord might also be the type who doesn’t ask questions as long as the cash in green. There’s an absentee slumlord in my city who bought up a bunch of apartment buildings in a (formerly?) middle-class area and the neighborhood is rapidly declining as the law-abiding neighbors are moving out as soon as they can find buyers for their homes (who may well be allied with this slumlord or others, IDK). People who had the misfortune of needing to live in this area have also come forward and said that zero maintenance is done, and among other things are dealing with collapsing roofs, no utilities, etc. It’s live there or be homeless in many of their cases.

My parents live next door to a house that has been a rental property for many years. Interestingly, the least problematic tenants were the ones who had to take their domiciles elsewhere (that’s the best way I can put it) when TPTB found out that more than 20 people were living in this 3BR ranch house. Everyone noticed all these Hispanic men around the place, and you guessed it - they were immigrants/refugees who were doing shift work at a local meatpacking plant, and also sleeping in shifts in bunk beds all over the house. Whoever was on the lease DID pay rent, but you can’t have >20 people living in a 3BR rental property, not legally anyway.

8

My Daddy was a slum…meh…rental property owner. He often rented one outta the way place to produce pickers. They were, for the most part Hispanic transients. He was amazed how many they could bunk up in that old house.
He said they never complained. Kept the trash to a minimum. Didn’t break windows.

He was fine as long as they paid every 2 weeks(their choice).
Then they’d all just disappear one day. He’d go out there and hear crickets instead of Mexican hip hop.

9

I’m gonna show some mercy towards the landlord.

Mr VOW and I owned rental property for years. I tell you this: we screened people to the very best of our ability.

But I swear, the minute all the paperwork was signed, alien pod people took over their brains, and they all turned into the Renters from Hell.

I could write a book (big, heavy, 1000-page type) of our renter war stories. It wasn’t that long ago I told SDMB about the renter who left her husband behind, in the garage, when she moved out. He was dead, of course. The cleaning team put the box in a plastic bag and set it next to the trash. I didn’t feel right having him at the curb, so I took him home with me. He stayed in my garage for years.

Ease up on the landlords, okay? Too many renters think being a landlord means you are rolling in money, and you can go without a rent payment for a month, or two, or five.

When COVID hit, I’d watch the news and hear how the government was allowing renters to slide on making their payments. I damn near cried for the poor landlords! I knew those tenants would NEVER be able to pay all the back money they would owe. Landlords have mortgages, and the bank will not listen to COVID sob stories of your renters! How many landlords lost their rental properties during the pandemic?

We ran credit checks. We called references. One potential tenant said he owned a concrete pumper truck! And he worked part time as a Deputy Sheriff for the County. That sounded so good to us!

Unfortunately we didn’t find out about his cocaine habit until later.

If your home is next to a place you know is a rental property, call the cops if you see suspicious drug activity, for noise complaints, for the trash mess. Talk to City Hall about any code violations (like the trash mess). Then give copies of everything to the landlord, so he has the evidence to start eviction proceedings.

I need to find the TUMS.

~VOW

10

Wanna run that by us again?

11

Wait, what ?! You kept a dead body in your garage for years?

12

Oh @VOW tell them before I do.:blush:

13

I love it when I get to do a GOTCHA.

The dead guy was cremated. The box of his ashes (cremains, to be correct) sat on a shelf in my garage for years.

~VOW

14

Sometimes referred to in the vernacular “He needed killin’.” Your wife is from Texas? /jk

15

We have a similar situation developing two doors away.

A good house stood empty for a couple of years, and then suddenly renters moved in maybe three months ago. Their three-car garage instantly filled with junk, and they have parked their numerous junker cars (with expired registrations on most) in front of everyone’s house but their own. The house has a pretty “forecourt” or walled-in patio in front of the front door, and it’s being used to store partially-disassembled motorcycles and assorted car parts and trash.

The renters arrive and depart with their car stereos turned up to 11, and they seem to linger on this block while driving, as though trying to piss off as many neighbors as possible.

A couple of weeks ago, they had visitors who, as they left, tried to do “doughnuts” in the T intersection in front of our house, and they crashed into a big ornamental terra cotta pot in our driveway that had been there for twenty years. It was completely smashed up. Mr. brown wanted to go to the neighbors’ house and have at them, but I dissuaded him. The driver and passengers in the car looked like complete lowlifes and we don’t need to get into a feud with creepy creeps who live two doors away. It wouldn’t replace our pot, and the jerks wouldn’t get hauled to jail.

Because of the constant engine-work going on with all the junkers and motorcycles, the driveway and the street in front of this house has become blackened with grease. We’ve come to call this house “the grease-pit”. We notice that dog-walking neighbors cross the street rather than walk on the sidewalk right in front of the grease-pit.

16

I imagine finding tenants is a bit of a crapshoot, you can shave the dice but sometimes you’re just going to come up snake eyes. With the first set of tenants my sympathy went out to the landlord, when the second were bad I started wondering about the type of people they rented to, and now there’s a third tenant in the row so now I’m seeing a distinct pattern. I still like these neighbors better than the last because they haven’t trashed my yard.

She’s an Arkansas native, I’m the one who spent so much of my life in Texas.

This is what code enforcement is for. Especially if the car is parked there all the time and doesn’t move. As much crap as people talk about HOAs, these kinds of neighbors are one of the reasons they exist.

17

In my area one can call the police non emergency number if a car is parked with expired registration and they’ll come and issue a ticket and maybe tow it away.

18

When something similar happened on the next block, neighbors managed to track down the owner (or the property manager?) and the tenants were quickly removed. It’d been going on for many months, but no one wanted to be the “bad guy” until it finally became untenable. It sounds like your situation is already untenable.

19

Mr. brown did call code enforcement on the worst of the vehicles, which was parked in front of our home. It was a beat-up van with a junk-hauling trailer attached. And someone did come and do something about it, we assume, because the van was moved and we now see it parked some blocks away, in someone else’s HOA zone.

Oh, I forgot to add, the police have been called to the grease-pit a couple of times in the short time the renters have been there. We’ve also seen the police cruising past the place very slowly once or twice, carefully checking the place out.

I did track down the owners of the grease-pit, and I sent them a letter detailing what has been going on, including the crash into our pot. The owners live a couple of cities away. I don’t know if it’ll do any good.

20

I’m in my 50s and have been a renter my entire adult life, and I’ve heard so many horror stories from property managers and home inspectors. I know renters tend to get a bad rap, and frankly I completely understand why — and it’s exactly what y’all have said, that you never really know who you’re renting to until after the lease is signed. I’ve been in my current house for 9 years: a year or two ago I got to chatting with one of my next-door neighbors for the first time, and was secretly quite happy when he was surprised to learn that I’m a renter. In addition to never damaging the place or being late with the rent, I also put my own money and sweat into taking care of the property, maintaining some curb appeal, etc. I mean, it’s my home! My current property manager didn’t look into my rental history at all, though: all he did was run a credit check. People with good credit can be horrible tenants! I think at this point he knows how lucky he got with me.

The same thing tends to happen with property managers, as soon as I inform them that I intend to move: previously friendly, reasonable people often turn into complete jerks once I’m not their “customer” anymore. Que sera… :slight_smile: