Adventures in Property Management

Evictions Are Never Fun...Especially When Tenants Are Unknown!

Paul Roth - Thursday, April 25, 2019
Property Management Blog

The truth is often stranger than fiction. One of our managers has a particularly difficult set of places he manages. He has a gold mine of stories to share that have taught him and all of us many valuable and rewarding things. Among those things we've learned: expect the unexpected! This is first in a series of stories we will share that sometimes just leave us shaking our heads in disbelief, amazement, and reaffirms why we have legal counsel on retainer!

I had a "nice guy" tenant help another tenant get into an apartment. He was the one that made the money so they could get qualified. He had no intentions of ever living in the apartment but we didn't know that. The other tenant ended up subleasing the apartment to two additional couples so they were illegally occupying the property. The tenant who did the illegal sublet ended up getting arrested for trafficking drugs across state lines and was unable to pay rent. We had to navigate a tricky eviction process due the fact we didn't know who the illegal tenants were in the place. They ended up vacating the property but left a huge mess that we had to clean up. All of this was happening as we were trying to sell the property. We were able to get the property cleaned up to nicer than it was before and got it sold to a buyer who ended up occupying the unit that was left vacant.