"RBM" wrote in message
...

"Robert Green" wrote in message
...
We've been thinking of renting our current home rather than selling in
this
down market while we rent in some of the places we're thinking of
retiring
to. Unfortunately, movies like "Pacific Heights" where a bad tenant who
knows all the tricks of staying in a place without paying rent, haunt
us.

Yesterday I saw a 'People's Court' episode where a deadbeat had managed
to
stay, rent-free, in a Section 8 rental for three years by using a
loophole
that says a tenant can't be evicted from Section 8 housing if there are
code
violations. Every time he was about to get evicted, he just broke
something
to forestall the eviction process, eventually plugging all the sinks
with
rags and flooding the place.

How can you drive a bad tenant out from a rental in such situations?
How
do
you prevent them from completely trashing the place on their way out? I
know that tenants should be checked out thoroughly beforehand, but even
so,
people can have no record of evil behavior but still turn evil. While
I'd
probably NOT rent to any Section 8 tenants, I could easily see someone
losing their job or some other such tragedy and so decide they wanted to
live in my house rent-free for as long as they could get away with it.

I'll entertain all solutions, even extra-legal ones (as long as I can
implement them without getting caught!).

--
Bobby G.


For the reasons you fear, I had decided a few years ago against buying
some
rental property. From my experience, with other people's rental
properties,
you have two ends of the spectrum. You have low end sec 8 low lifes
trashing
your property, or you have high end legally savvy dirt bags living in the
place rent free while you spend piles of money on lawyers trying to evict
them. I think that in a lot of the more "liberal" states, the laws are
designed to protect the offender and few to protect the evil, greedy
landlord, so my best advice would be to find tenants via friends in the
real
estate business who are willing to "illegally" screen them for you.

You raise a good point. On the daily court shows, there seems to be exactly
the two ends of the spectrum you describe. There's also a third class - the
honest beef about what wear and tear is worth. I've yet to see a landlord
and tenant agree on that. The worst ones are those that know they can do a
hell of a lot of damage that they can never be held accountable for. I want
to try hard to eliminate them from the candidate pool and failing that, have
some sort of way to feed 100,000 bees into the heating system by remote
control and force them out! From what I see, it's pretty painful to have to
pay the mortgage for a bunch of deadbeats who are destroying the property
while they game the system. Leads a lot of landlords to engage in illegal
self-help. There has to be some sort of legal "self-help" that works.

What if the place becomes condemned and the local government then is in the
role of forcing them out? It just seems so bizarre that so many people seem
to be able to get away with freeloading. Apparently a foreclosure notice of
any kind seems to be a "rent no longer required" notice to some tenants,
even if it was placed there in error.

--
Bobby G.