29th June 2008

Whiney Potential Tenant

posted in Care and Feeding of Tenants |

For a while there I was totally freaking out due to the fact that it looked like I was going to have two maybe three properties vacant and one time. With that big sucking sound coming from the economy as a whole, this would not be a good thing at all.Whaaa, whaaa, whaaaaaaa!

As it turned out one, of the vacant rentals was snapped up pretty quickly, the existing tenants in another one renewed their lease (yay!) and that left the one which needed to be totally cleaned out after the most recent eviction.

The aforementioned rental is now ready, thanks to a needy neighbor and the $600 I paid him to do the work. Soon after this was done, an acquaintance called to ask if I had any houses for rent because her daughter was looking for a place. I let her know the address of the vacant rental and told her to have the daughter call me for details.

So the daughter calls up and proceeds to whine to me on the phone that she needed to be out of her apartment by the end of the month, the rent on my place was too high; would I work with her and could she pay the $900 security deposit over four months. Here was my thought process: “Um……too bad, no and no.”

After that conversation, I decided that I could not rent to her for the following reasons:

  • First, if I rent to this girl and anything bad happens…..like I have to evict her, then I most likely will have to take grief from her Mom thereby turning a potential friend into an enemy.
  • Second, if she doesn’t have the money to move in (about $1700) what’s going to happen when she has to repair her car or go get medical care or whatever? I stand to lose because she can’t pay the rent.
  • I called her to let her know that I had accepted an application from some other people who put down a deposit and submitted an application with fees. She called me back and proceeded to whine about the fact that she called me before they did, etc, etc.

WHAT-ever lady! It’s not who calls first but who slaps money down first…..oh, AND ALSO WHO DOESN’T WHINE to me on the phone before they’re even a tenant.

N-E-X-T!!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Care and Feeding of Tenants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 3 responses to “Whiney Potential Tenant”

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  1. 1 On June 29th, 2008, Clifford said:

    The number of whiney stories that has entered my ears is beyond numbers.

    My rule of thumb is to never rent to a friend of a friend. I don’t want to lose a friend due to a “friend in laws” actions. Plus I think renting to total strangers naturally establishes a landlord-tenant relationship instead of a friend-friend relationship. This can get mucky.

  2. 2 On June 29th, 2008, TheLandlord said:

    Tell me about it Cliff. As a footnote to this whole situation, I saw the Mom in the grocery store the other day and totally got the stink-eye from her.

    Maybe if she didn’t treat her 20 year-old daughter like she was 7 she wouldn’t be whining to people who just don’t care?

  3. 3 On July 1st, 2008, George C. Torres said:

    I was there with about three units coming vacant all in one month. Luckily I got one rented with another rent pending. The third apartment will take some time.
    Here are some lessons learned:
    1. Never tell a neighboring tenant that one of your tenants moved out in the middle of the night without you knowing about it. News like this spreads like a virus and unhappy (read: fiscally challenged) tenants may want to do the same if they see how easy it is to “escape” to cheaper digs at the end of the month without giving you the courtesy of a lease-madated thirty-day notice.
    2. If a tenant has the electricity cut off and their meter box locked by the electric company because of failure to pay the electric bill, pay close attention to that loser. Especially if you have vacancies nearby with electric meters intact. Chances are, that the tenant will most likely bolt out if the cutoff was near the end of the month. Also, loser electricityless tenants will rip out a nearby meter and tear open their (your) locked meter box to install the stolen meter so that they can have lights to work with during their night time clandestine move out operation. Then end result is a dirty, vacant, and trashed out apartment when you arrive the next day to verify if the tenant paid the electric bill; torn up meter boxes; a pissed off electric company technician who checks up on his locked boxes the following day and declares your meter loop as “tampered with and out of code”; having to hire a licensed electrician to pull permits and rebuild the meter loops (unless your licensed, it usually is illegal to do this work yourself); paying a city electrical inspector to inspect the work and give the OK to the electric company to turn on power to your trashed out apartment so that you can get it cleaned up.
    3. In low income rental areas, always maintain a take no prisoners attitude with tenants. Get the full deposits from those types. Especially if they have punks for kids. Those kids will trash out your apartment, invite their gangster wannabe thug friends over, and go look for a pretty wall to spray paint their BS.
    It’s getting to the point that I’m seriously thinking about the language in the criteria for my rental application policy: Something to the effect of being able to have access to the citizenship grades or principal’s phone number of the 7th grade and above kids of applicants. Loser kids are most likely the result of loser parents — translation: Loser renters.

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