Perils of Landlording: Dance of the Deadbeats

I recently moved out two tenants who absconded on paying their rent.  Fortunately,  I didn't have to evict them.  Rather, I used the art of persuasion with one, and the other was "constructively" evicted by their own ineptness.

The first tenant seemed to be in a great situation when he applied in August.  He had work, he had no credit (rather than bad credit), and was just starting out in life.  Unfortunately, he did not have a good educational background and ended up being cut back at work by his employer.  Apparently, his job required a high school diploma and he only had a GED.

He was forthright about the situation.  I asked him to pay the last month's rent and I negotiated a lease break fee with him.  He agreed.

Unfortunately, his follow through was very poor.  Each week a payment was promised and each week a promise was broken.  After a month of non-payment I was fed up.  He was living there about one day a week or so.  I finally posted a 3-day notice to pay or quit and threatened further eviction action if he did not remove his things.  He finally came and retrieved them.

Tenant number two was more sly.  They also experienced work problems immediately upon moving in.  They were also a roomate situation and one roommate moved out quickly after the lease started.  That left the remaining two unable to pay all the bills.  Payments were slow, and then non-existent.  Promises to pay were made and broken.

Finally, a couple days before the next month's rent was due, they called and said they didn't like the place anymore and were moving.  I was fine with that since they hadn't paid and appeared unwilling to pay.

After they moved out I called the utility company to transfer service back into my name.  They indicated that the gas had been shut off and the power was scheduled to be turned off for non payment.  Interestingly, the day my tenant called to tell me they didn't want to live there anymore was the day the hot water was turned off.  It appears cold water is an excellent motivator to move.

Where I went wrong on both of these tenants was with the deposit.  Both of these tenants were higher risk due to their credit histories.  Given such, their deposits were higher to compesate.  Yet, I agreed to "work" with them on paying the necessary deposit in installments.  That didn't work out.  I received one deposit payment and then nothing afterwards.

So, the moral of the story is if a tenant doesn't have up front the required deposit to compensate for the risk of renting to them, move on to the next applicant.