Tenant Eviction
When my dad passed on, I was given his house 2+ hours away. At the same time, my wife and I had a newborn and were working full time. I let my lifelong friend move in for monthly rent and he actually helped fix up the house and keep it in good condition. His girlfriend started staying the night once in a while at the house, and then more often. If I had known what she would do, I’d have kicked her out on the spot.
He and his girlfriend had a falling out. He left and stopped paying rent as we discussed. I sent family over to check on the house and apparently someone’s living there. I check on house that weekend. It’s my friend’s now ex-girlfriend living there. She asks for one week to move all her stuff out that I didn’t even know was there.
I had my new family in the car with me and was not prepared for having to remove someone and all their stuff so I said ok. I was to come back the following weekend when my schedule allowed and she would be gone. Well this final week let her have a full 30 days living at my house, and she had proof, so she was now a resident and needed a full offical eviction to get her out of my house.
When you’re involved in an eviction, there’s all sorts of help and organizations and websites for the person living at the house to get answers. For the “landlord” evicting the tenant, I found almost nil. SO, I had to pay a ton of money and had to drive to the county courthouse 2+ hours away like 6-8 times over the next two months to get her out of my dad’s house.
During this time, I set up cameras on the neighbor’s property with their permission, attempting record damage to the house, parties, theft of my property still at the residence. I didn’t get jack squat. And I was not allowed to enter the house. She did about $40k damage to the home, took a lot of my dad’s belongings that were hidden in the attic, and cost me an insane amount of time.
Well, really, I did this to myself by letting my “friend” move in. It took almost two full years of going across the state every weekend to work on the house. I guess I can pay more money to go after her for the damages to the house, but she was living off stolen means and state aid during this whole process and would never be able to pay me back.
One final kicker, the house was heated via fuel oil in Michigan and we have cold winters. This woman ran out of fuel oil in late December and she didn’t have $150 needed to get a fuel oil delivery that you have to pay because you have to order a minimum amount to get them to drive out to your house and put fuel oil in your tank. Instead, she used electric heaters and had several of them running all winter to compensate.
Because she was on state aid or something, the company couldn’t shut off her power in the middle of winter, so she racked up an average of $1,700 a month in electric bills over the winter. When I went to put the power back in my name, I was told that I have to pay her $6,300 balance before the power could be restored. This was because I didn’t set up some landlord program with the power company in the first place. This took another three months or so, and a couple hundred to a lawyer, to get straightened out.
The house is fixed up and sold now—for less than half the profit we originally anticipated. I lost so much money.