At long last you find a tenant and all goes well at first, but then the rent is late, and there are promises that the rent is coming. And then the rent still doesn’t come and a second monthly rental payment is not made. You make a number of phone calls and there are promises to pay soon, but this doesn’t happen. You send letters, and even stop by the apartment to confront the tenant. Still no luck in getting your rent, despite your threats of beginning eviction proceedings. Eviction, as you are probably aware, is the legal process whereby you enlist the help of the court to remove the tenant from your property due to the nonpayment of rent or other serious violations of the terms of the lease.
You have no choice but to take this last resort. Unfortunately to dislodge an unwanted tenant is a hard process; it may take months and is a great legal and financial hassle. You can be certain that there will be extensive damage done to the apartment, and more time and money will be lost in preparing the apartment for rerenting. It will also be difficult to get a deadbeat tenant to pay for any damages or legal costs, even if the signed lease stipulates that he or she must do so.
Was there something you could have done beforehand to save yourself from this scenario? Indeed there is. With our Eviction Report you can find out if the rental applicant has a history of evictions or other serious problems with prior landlords. These problems include such things as the failure to pay rent on time; the bouncing of checks; long durations of nonpayment; violation of rules; habitual damage to the apartment or premises; noise complaints arising from loud and frequent parties or the playing of music at excessive volumes; sanitation complaints; failure to vacate the apartment at the expiration of a lease; keeping prohibited pets; subletting without the landlord’s permission, or permitting others, other than member’s of the tenant’s immediate family, to reside in the apartment for a long period of time. You may also come to learn that the applicant or his or her guests were involved with altercations with other tenants, or that the police were called on numerous occasions owing to complaints relating to domestic violence.
In cases where a tenant has broken the lease or refused to pay rent it’s not always safe to assume that the tenant is the one at fault. Situations arise whereby a negligent landlord finds a tenant to be quarrelsome, perhaps owing to the tenant’s exercising of legal rights (for example, in complaints to housing authorities if repairs are not being made in a timely fashion, or if there is not adequate heat, or if the apartment building or grounds are not properly maintained). In other situations a landlord may himself be guilty of harassing the tenants, perhaps by entering the apartment at unreasonable hours. Often such a tenant simply decides to abandon the property and seek a rental unit elsewhere with a more reasonable landlord. It is for this reason that the eviction records you obtain should be carefully examined and corroborated with other sources, such as the applicant’s former neighbors, in order to ascertain whether the previous landlord was entirely ethical in his dealings with the tenant.
