- Joined
- Aug 26, 2008
- Messages
- 731
If you manage your own properties for a while, you will eventually have some really strange stories to tell. This is one of them.
One of the properties I purchased last year came with some inherited tenants. It's a single family suited house. The basement tenants had been there for a few years and seemed OK in my meetings with them (two brothers, one working mostly out of town and one disabled). The garage is rented to a fellow who's been using it for storage of excess inventory from his hobby store. He's been there 3 years, I've met him a couple times, he's OK. There is also a storage shed on the property that I use to store tools, staging materials and inventory of things like electrical parts, doorknobs & locks etc.
After a couple months, the main floor was vacated and we started to do some much needed renos. In the meantime, what I didn't know about the basement tenants was:
[list type=decimal]
[*]The disabled tenant had moved out.
[*]The disabled tenant had a "friend" replace him to share the suite and the rent.
The working tenant was staying with his girlfriend most weekends he was back in town, so he actually wasn't living there. He continued to pay the rent, however (took his lease commitment seriously).
[/list type=decimal]
Next we had a couple of suspicious things happen. First, the garage was broken into. It didn't appear that anything was stolen, but it was hard for me to tell. I notified the tenant and he didn't get back to me right away. A week or so later, some paint went missing from the upstairs suite. At first I thought my contractor was just being forgetful when he said he couldn't find the paint I'd dropped off for him. Still, we didn't think much of it; we got some more paint and moved on. I figured it would probably turn up in the contractor's van in a week or so.
Fast forward a couple weeks and I get a call from my contractors that the police are staking out the house waiting for someone and won't let them onto the premises until they've caught their guy. Of course the police won't say exactly who they are looking for, but in the course of things I determine that it's neither of my tenants on the lease and their "person of interest" is definitely residing there. Uh-oh, that's not good.
Mr. Genius (as I've nicknamed our mystery tenant) eventually shows up in a stolen car, being chased down by another cop. He gets pulled over a couple doors down from my house and gives the officer his ID which shows my house as his address. While the officer has his ID (with his ADDRESS on it) and is back in the car looking the guy up on his computer, Mr. Genius decides to make a run for it and bolts from the stolen car. Any guesses as to where he runs? Yes, he ran home, to where the other group of police are waiting for him!
It really must have been his day, because Mr. Genius actually managed to give them all the slip and escapes from the house and eludes capture. They eventually caught him later that day. At this point, all the doors downstairs were left open and my contractor went down w/ police to check things out. He found a bunch of boxes that he recognized as belonging to the garage tenant as he'd seen them there when doing some work on the garage previously.
I arrived about an hour later and had a look around as well. Yes, there's a room full of stolen boxes from the garage. Checking out the rest of the suite I find the missing paint, plus some rollers & trays and a few odd hand tools that came from the storage shed. It seems that Mr. Genius has been very busy: he's been repainting his suite, with *our* materials! And he's doing a decent job of it too, he has things nicely taped off, dropcloths in place and is about 3/4 done the kitchen/living room/hallway. It gets better: Not only has he been painting, but he's stolen some new light fixtures from the inventory in the storage shed and has replaced most of the old lighting in the suite!
Now, it's obvious this troublemaker has to go, but the question was whether to evict him now or wait until he finishes the job?
Thankfully, the police answered that one for me as Mr. Genius was not offered the option to leave their custody. I had a very frank conversation with the legitimate tenant (who's completely unaware of all this) and explained his responsibility for the activities on the rented premises. We arranged for a reasonably amicable termination of his tenancy - he agreed to leave ASAP, take Mr. Genius with him and agreed to forfeit his entire damage deposit.
In the end, we came out not too bad, the remaining reno work was easy to finish and the suite re-rented quickly. Even so, the whole incident totally maxed out the whack-o-meter . . .
Lessons learned:
1) People are weird.
2) Just because the rent is being paid, doesn't mean everything is OK.
3) Communication is important. Tenant wanted to do the right thing (honour his lease) but should have communicated with me about his situation and the "roommate" (there's no way Mr. Genius would have made it through our screening as a new tenant). Would have been better for both of us to have worked out an amicable termination of his lease than deal with the situation that emerged. I think he knows that now.
One of the properties I purchased last year came with some inherited tenants. It's a single family suited house. The basement tenants had been there for a few years and seemed OK in my meetings with them (two brothers, one working mostly out of town and one disabled). The garage is rented to a fellow who's been using it for storage of excess inventory from his hobby store. He's been there 3 years, I've met him a couple times, he's OK. There is also a storage shed on the property that I use to store tools, staging materials and inventory of things like electrical parts, doorknobs & locks etc.
After a couple months, the main floor was vacated and we started to do some much needed renos. In the meantime, what I didn't know about the basement tenants was:
[list type=decimal]
[*]The disabled tenant had moved out.
[*]The disabled tenant had a "friend" replace him to share the suite and the rent.
The working tenant was staying with his girlfriend most weekends he was back in town, so he actually wasn't living there. He continued to pay the rent, however (took his lease commitment seriously).
[/list type=decimal]
Next we had a couple of suspicious things happen. First, the garage was broken into. It didn't appear that anything was stolen, but it was hard for me to tell. I notified the tenant and he didn't get back to me right away. A week or so later, some paint went missing from the upstairs suite. At first I thought my contractor was just being forgetful when he said he couldn't find the paint I'd dropped off for him. Still, we didn't think much of it; we got some more paint and moved on. I figured it would probably turn up in the contractor's van in a week or so.
Fast forward a couple weeks and I get a call from my contractors that the police are staking out the house waiting for someone and won't let them onto the premises until they've caught their guy. Of course the police won't say exactly who they are looking for, but in the course of things I determine that it's neither of my tenants on the lease and their "person of interest" is definitely residing there. Uh-oh, that's not good.
Mr. Genius (as I've nicknamed our mystery tenant) eventually shows up in a stolen car, being chased down by another cop. He gets pulled over a couple doors down from my house and gives the officer his ID which shows my house as his address. While the officer has his ID (with his ADDRESS on it) and is back in the car looking the guy up on his computer, Mr. Genius decides to make a run for it and bolts from the stolen car. Any guesses as to where he runs? Yes, he ran home, to where the other group of police are waiting for him!
It really must have been his day, because Mr. Genius actually managed to give them all the slip and escapes from the house and eludes capture. They eventually caught him later that day. At this point, all the doors downstairs were left open and my contractor went down w/ police to check things out. He found a bunch of boxes that he recognized as belonging to the garage tenant as he'd seen them there when doing some work on the garage previously.
I arrived about an hour later and had a look around as well. Yes, there's a room full of stolen boxes from the garage. Checking out the rest of the suite I find the missing paint, plus some rollers & trays and a few odd hand tools that came from the storage shed. It seems that Mr. Genius has been very busy: he's been repainting his suite, with *our* materials! And he's doing a decent job of it too, he has things nicely taped off, dropcloths in place and is about 3/4 done the kitchen/living room/hallway. It gets better: Not only has he been painting, but he's stolen some new light fixtures from the inventory in the storage shed and has replaced most of the old lighting in the suite!
Now, it's obvious this troublemaker has to go, but the question was whether to evict him now or wait until he finishes the job?
Thankfully, the police answered that one for me as Mr. Genius was not offered the option to leave their custody. I had a very frank conversation with the legitimate tenant (who's completely unaware of all this) and explained his responsibility for the activities on the rented premises. We arranged for a reasonably amicable termination of his tenancy - he agreed to leave ASAP, take Mr. Genius with him and agreed to forfeit his entire damage deposit.
In the end, we came out not too bad, the remaining reno work was easy to finish and the suite re-rented quickly. Even so, the whole incident totally maxed out the whack-o-meter . . .
Lessons learned:
1) People are weird.
2) Just because the rent is being paid, doesn't mean everything is OK.
3) Communication is important. Tenant wanted to do the right thing (honour his lease) but should have communicated with me about his situation and the "roommate" (there's no way Mr. Genius would have made it through our screening as a new tenant). Would have been better for both of us to have worked out an amicable termination of his lease than deal with the situation that emerged. I think he knows that now.
