Broker gone wild!

I've been a landlord for about 8 years and I have had almost all great experiences with tenants. I did have one friend of a friend who lived in the second bedroom of a two bedroom condo I was living in who said she was saving up for a wedding and asked if I could overlook one month's rent towards the end of her lease and it ended up being more like 3 months that she skipped out on, but that was about the worst that's happened to me and I feel fortunate - only because I've seen what happened to my parents.

My parents were school teachers before they retired and they had a couple of houses down the Cape that they rented out to year round tenants. They aren't super-rich - but they worked very hard. What they got was the biggest collection of vagrants and bums I've ever heard of.

A few stories: there was an occassionally out of work builder who asked to defray some of his rent in exchange for making occassional repairs to the property. Not only did he never make any repairs - the sink in the kitchen sprung an obvious leak that he let go for months and months on end until finally it rotted out the kitchen floor. There was a hole the size of a person's head in the kitchen floor that you could look through straight into the basement - and he never told my parents about it until they took the property back over. My parents had to have the entire kitchen replaced and had to put in a new septic system.

There were the two girls who ran a commercial catering business - who failed to inform my parents that they were running it out of the small kitchen of the house. They absolutely destroyed the stove and most of the plumbing. They also had about 15 cats that apparently had never heard of a litter box. They destroyed the carpets (that's a smell you'll never get out), ripped up all the curtains, and just basically left a trail of destruction like you've never seen. My parents tried to keep their security deposit, only they didn't know the ins and outs of how you need to keep the security deposit in an interest-bearing, segregated account and provide statements to the lessees - and they didn't have pictures of the house before it got destroyed so they couldn't prove what damages had occurred even though it was pretty obvious. The judge awarded the girls TRIPLE damages - and apologized to my parents, and said that he believed them, but that was the law.

Finally, there was the nice Columbian couple who paid their rent every month in cash. My parents never heard one complaint from them until one day they opened the paper and read about a drug bust at their address where 20 illegals were seized along with tons of drugs. My parents were afraid to go back to the house - and when they did, there were still two cars in the yard that sat there for weeks until my parents had to pay to have them towed away.

So as much as I sympathize with tenants who have bad landlords (I've rented too - and it's not all wine and roses all the time) -- let me just say that the downside for a landlord is MUCH MUCH worse than the downside for a tenant. I have no idea why my parents kept doing it. The moral of the story is apparently - do not rent out property down the cape during the winter. Yikes.

Squatting tenants drive landlords to financial and sometings mental ruin!
“May take MONTHS to evict a tenant”???? How about WILL take!
In the mean time a landlord’s income flow has been interrupted threatening the financial foundation of the property owner. This was just the situation for one such elderly property owner of a single family home located on a hillside lot on Tremont Str in Malden. The property was initially purchased as a Flip, but then rented out to the owner’s business partner/handyman’s daughter. It was never to be a long term gig as the mortgage was not fixed. As luck would have it, the tenant overstayed long enough for a rate change to kick in. Almost overnight the mortgage payments far exceeded the income. To further complicate matters, rent was often late for months on end. Thus the property was put up for sale. But the Tenant took the position that their “rights” superseded those of the property owner, refused to give access to prospective buyers. The bleeding of money drove the owner to fall behind on his note with the bank, and eventually had the property taken by foreclosure.
The tenants’ point of view was to protect their residency for as long as possible with no interruption. Did the tenant care if the landlord defaulted? Not one iota. Quite honestly, the rights given to tenants far exceed those of the property owner. It is just too difficult to remove squatters or those that take advantage of the system.