Skycraper Dreams

Being a good guy doesn’t pay your bills; at least not in this case.  As you know I decided to give a tenant a break so that she could get caught up on her rent and not have to move.  As it turns out, all that seems to mean to the tenant is “My landlord isn’t harassing me anymore so I’m not going to pay him, I’ll pay my other debts instead.”  Instead of actually making headway on the more than one month’s worth of rent she owed, she actually fell even further behind.

Because I’m soft, I’m not out about $1,200 with an empty apartment to rent, I’m now sitting on about $1,200 worth of debt, an apartment I can’t rent until my lackluster tenant vacates (November 1), and potentially another two month’s of unpaid rent.  Stupid.

I have made an appointment with the local tenancy board for October 26 to pursue by debt and enforce eviction, but because the system is so shitty I’ve got to wait 6 weeks to even get in front of them and present my case.  I’ll win, then I have to wait another 10 days for the appeal period.  Then, if the tenant is still in the building I can give her 5 days to vacate.  This equals two months of unpaid rent, unless by some miracle she decides to pay me.

I doubt this will happen since she has no incentive left to pay.  She knows she’s moving, she knows I can’t forcibly remove her until November, and she knows collecting her debt will be difficult at best.  I fucked myself.

Oh, and on top of this one of my new tenants screwed up her second month of budgeting and still owes me a full month’s rent for September.  Supposedly I’ll get that payment on Sept 20.  Then she has a mere two weeks to come up with October’s rent; highly unlikely in my opinion.  We’ll see how this works out.

Lastly, another tenant (new again) owes me a further $95 for late rent.  I feel they’ll get caught up as they work hard and seem to take paying rent seriously.  I need to get everyone back on track because I can’t afford to keep floating mortgage payments while waiting for tenants to pay up.

I guess its hard ball from now on.

UPDATE:

I’ve collected the outstanding rent from all other tenants, with the exception of the one who’s leaving October 31.  I served that tenant with a notice to appear at a tenancy hearing scheduled for October 27, 2009.  She says she’s going to pay me ‘what she can’ but frankly I have little hope of seeing any money.  If she doesn’t pay anything by the end of the month I’ll give her a 15 day Notice to Quit and see if that encourages her.  Realistically, I can’t enforce it until the hearing, but it may get some money out of her.

I must tread carefully so she doesn’t cause problems with me trying to rent the place to a new tenant.  Or more likely so she doesn’t go crazy and make my life difficult full time.  I’ll be glad to have her gone.

Steve Rent Rent, tenant