Reasons Why I Hate My Tenant

My tenant is finally out of my life after having served an eviction notice on her incompetent dumb arse. I’m definitely ready to close this chapter in my life… right after I’ve documented a list of reasons why I want to skull fuck her with a blunt, rusty axe.

Before you commence onto my ungodly rant, I want to clarify a few things (in case you’re jumping in at the tail-end of the love affair with my ex-tenant)…

This blog post is written on the back of a gruelling, lengthy and painful eviction battle between me and my former tenant, so my level of frustration was off the charts. I’m pretty sure I suffered from a few stress induced strokes and several months of impotence during this whole ordeal.

Regardless of how recklessly and abruptly my emotions may come across during my moment of despair and dwindling faith in mankind, I am a professional landlord. I follow all the rules and regulations, I provide my tenants with a good service, and nice and clean properties, and I’m always eager to resolve any maintenance issues immediately.

The reality is, there are some tenants that exist purely to abuse the system, and it doesn’t matter how professional and reasonable any landlord is. I believe my tenant was one of those people; she’s abused the system and literally sucked the living shit out of it for every thing it’s worth.

I’m sure many other landlords that have gone through similar trials and tribulations will be able to relate to my emotions (but probably not with my choice in words). Now, onto the list:

1: Late rent payments

I don’t think I received one rent payment on time.

Every time rent was due she fed me with an excuse in an attempt to justify the delays. Little did she care to realise is that I didn’t give a flying fuck about her stupid excuses after the forth consecutive delay. She signed a contract (without a gun pointing at her head) to make payment on a set date per month, so that’s exactly what I expected.

I can live with one or two late payments, but consistently late payments got tiresome, as did her excuses. In fact, it’s the excuses that make everything much more painful.

2: Failing to make payments, period.

She completely failed to make payments 2 months in a row. That left me out of pocket by about £1.5k. Ouch!

At this point I started the eviction process. BOOM! Have that.

3: Housing Benefit abuse

My tenant was receiving cheques from the social benefit to contribute towards her living expenses. However, as mentioned in my previous point, she failed to pay the last 2 months rent, which left me in the shitter.

The million dollar question: where did her allowance go? A few people have their own theories, but I have a few unsavoury theories of my own. Of course, my theories are all drug and alcohol related.

4: Liar

She’s a compulsive liar. She lied about pretty much everything, a lot of it was actually so absurd that it was comical.

On a few occasions she literally told me she was “on her way to bank” to transfer the rent into my account. Seriously, she would make out like she was actively walking to the bank while she was texting me.

She must have got lost and/or fallen down a very deep hole… every damn time. Obviously I didn’t receive a single penny. She literally did that on 3 or 4 occasions.

I guess what she was really saying was…

I’ve got your fucking money punk, and now i’m going to get high as a motherfucker with it!

5: Attitude

She always gave me stinking attitude when I chased her down for late payments, even though I showed literally no aggression or haste (unlike the display I’m putting on right now). She was acting like I was an arsehole for enquiring why rent wasn’t paid on time.

Why do some tenants in arrears do that? They act like they’re the victim and we’re monsters for exercising the terms and conditions of the contract they willingly agreed to.

I just assumed she was constantly high and oblivious to reality. I’m no expert in the field of drug abuse, but I’m confident she was showing all the classic signs of an abuser.

6: Avoiding the situation

Eventually, ignoring my phone calls and text messages was her method of choice to solve the situation. Not the best method, may I add, but I expected nothing less.

Once again, I just assumed she was always passed out in a gutter somewhere after a wild night, so unable to engage in any conversation.

7: Unable to take responsibility

Even a 2yr child has the ability to know that shitting on the carpet is wrong. If a child knows wrong from wrong, I wonder why my 28yr old tenant struggled to comprehend that she was in the wrong.

Every time I spoke to her she put blame onto something or someone else. For example, “I haven’t been able to make payment because my mum is ill” or “I haven’t been able to make payment because the council have messed up my payments”

The constant flow of excuses was driving me bonkers.

8: Incapable of apologising

Needless to say, I didn’t get one apology throughout the entire affair. Not even when she was late with rent the first time. Surely that’s just common decency, right?

I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve dished out inauthentic apologies purely out of courtesy. So even a hollow, bullshit, flimsy, spluttering, drunken “sorry” would have been something!

9: Complete lack of decency

The funny thing is, if she had only just communicated with me like an adult from the beginning, maybe the situation could have been handled in a more amicable manner.

Despite being a greedy landlord, I can empathise with financial turmoil, so I’m always willing to help how I can, and I’m always willing to work with my tenants as long as they’re reasonable and fair. Unfortunately, from the moment my tenant started experiencing financial difficulties, she buried her head in the sand (i.e. didn’t talk to me about it), misdirected her anger, constantly lied and was unable to take responsibility, so this was always going to end in one bitter way.

Final thoughts…

I don’t think I need anymore reasons to justify why I think she was a stupid, crack-whore, shit-for-brains!

The relief

Oh, the relief.

One thing I’ve learned through years of being a landlord is that there isn’t a better feeling than shaking off a tenant that’s causing horrific discomfort. Too many landlords hang-on [for too long] thinking the situation will improve or just go away, but they rarely do. I’m guilty of clinging, for sure.

But the reality is, once you become unshackled and liberated from a bullshit tenant’s grip, the feeling is euphoric. So my advice is, if your tenant is causing you discomfort (i.e. because they’ve either broken the rules and/or being completely unreasonable), don’t prolong, don’t give them the benefit of doubt if they have already abused your trust, simply shake them off ASAP.

You will feel better for it, and those sleepless nights will become a puny distant memory.

On a side note, if you need any legal advice on how you should go about the process, you can get free legal advice for landlords from here.

Have you had a bad tenant? If so, express yourself… no judgement here. Consider it therapy.