The day of the inevitable has come.  I have a very long term tenant that I inherited when I bought this particular building and she is finally moving out.  This Section 8 tenant has been great in one regard - the rent came on the 4th every month without question.  This ends the greatness.

This tenant has completely trashed the place.  Her apartment has probably never been cleaned during her tenancy, which I’m guessing has been about eight years.  For the several years we’ve owned the building, she’s had a permanent laundry pile in the bath tub.  Guess what that means?

Take a look at her bathroom.  How is it possible that it looks like this?  I honestly cannot think of a sane scenario that makes sense.  Oh I know why, it’s because I’m limiting my thoughts to “sane” scenarios.  I need to think outside of the box and maybe it will come to me LOL.  An incident from a couple of months ago provides some clue.

The fire department has been there because her smoke alarm goes off sometimes when she cooks since there is so much food baked onto the burners and inside the oven.  The city inspectors have been there and gave her a talking-to about the health and safety hazard she’s created.  We’ve talked with her social worker about getting her to clean or hiring a service to come in and do it for her.  Nothing has worked. 

At one point we converted the building to a smoke free environment and since she’s the only remaining smoker, she’s been required to smoke outside.  This happens most of the time, but needless to say the inside of the place is coated with a yellow haze never to be removed. 

With her exodus comes a major remodeling job.  We’ll need to replace drywall, appliances, bathroom sink/vanity/toilet, and all the flooring.  Lucky for us it’s a studio apartment and the costs will not be as high as they could be.

We knew this day would come eventually.  She’s a month to month tenant so we only had 30 days notice of her moving out.  As soon as we found out, my manager contacted her social worker to make it very clear that we expect the place to be cleaned as good as it possibly can be cleaned.  Her measely security deposit isn’t going to make a dent in the repairs we’ll need to make.

We also contacted the Bureau of Consumer Protection to see what recourse we may have for lost rent due to us needing to take time to remodel.  They said that we cannot pursue lost rent due to forced vacancy during the remodel.  They advised that our only course of action would have been to issue her a comply or quit notice as soon as we saw that the condition of the unit was deteriorating. 

It was bad when we bought the building so the only thing we would have gained from that is she would have been gone years sooner.  In retrospect I’m glad she stayed so we didn’t have to spend the money until now.  Plus we collected rent on that unit 100% of the months for all of the years we’ve owned it.  Not all bad.

As it turns out, the tenant is moving out the week before Christmas so at least we should have 7-10 days for turnover.  We are feverishly coordinating all the help that will be needed to get the work done during this tight timeframe.  We already have a referral from one of our other tenants so it’s looking like we may have it rented for Jan. 1.  Great!  No vacancy!  In the middle of winter it can be iffy to get the place re-rented immediately.  Pressure’s on to get the work done because I could not expect anyone to move in to a place anywhere near this condition.