It was late in the month of May when I was trying to find a tenant for a vacant two-bedroom house. I was not getting many applications, and only one applicant came remotely close to being qualified. Then I received a call from a man named Matt. We set up an appointment for him to see the house, and he and his wife Angela were waiting there for me when I arrived. As we chatted and I got to know them, they appeared to be what I would describe as the ideal tenant family, at least from a landlord’s perspective. After showing them the property, I gave them an application. I hoped to hear from them soon, and they called later that day and said they definitely wanted to rent that house. Matt was a self-employed small businessman who worked from home, and his wife was a full-time homemaker. They had an adolescent son and a baby daughter. I didn’t bother calling their former landlord because I didn‘t think it was necessary. However, I did run their names through the county court’s web site to see if any evictions had been filed against them. Nothing showed up so I agreed to rent to them.

My standard lease agreement is for a term of six months with a provision that it be continued as a month-to-month rental if agreeable to both landlord and tenant. On the day I was to accept the first-month’s rent of $975 and a security deposit in an equal amount, Matt asked if I could reduce the security deposit. Being confident I had nothing to lose, I reduced it to $700. Little did I know what a mistake that was.

The lease agreement was to begin June 1^st, but the place was ready a few days early, so I gave Matt the keys and allowed him to move right in. I told him I would call to have the utilities taken out of my name, but I’d wait a few days so he would have plenty of time to put them in his name, and there would be no interruption of services. On the first Friday after June 1^st, Matt called late in the day and said the electricity had been turned off. I asked if he had called to put it in his name, and he said “no”. I don’t know why he was calling me since this was not my responsibility. Perhaps I should have recognized it as a harbinger of things to come. I suggested he call the electric company and beg them to send someone out to turn the power back on. Miracles happen, and they did come out that night and turn the power back on. I usually overlook incidents like this because everyone makes mistakes. For Matt, this was just the first in a long series of goof-ups.

When July 1^st came around, I did not hear from Matt. The rent was due on the first of every month and it always concerns me when a tenant does not pay the rent in a timely manner in subsequent months. I waited a few days before calling him. When I did, he said he had experienced some unexpected automobile repairs and would have the money on the 12^th along with the late-payment penalty. He did pay on the 12th, and I hoped that would be the end of the matter. I did not hear from him on August 1^st as expected, so I called him a couple days later. This time he said the engine blew in his car and he was renting a car until he could find a replacement. He said he’d have the money on the last day of the grace period, which was the 5^th of the month. About 8 PM on the 5^th, he came over with half the rent in cash, and half in a check which he asked me to hold until August 12^th. On the 12^th, he called and asked me to hold the check for a few more days. A few days later, he called and said he would come over that night and give me cash in exchange for the check. He did not show, so the next morning I drove to his house to find out why he had not come over as promised. To my surprise, he pulled the cash out of his pocket and handed it to me. He said he had witnessed an automobile accident the night before and had to make a statement for the police, causing him to get home very late. Anything is possible, but I was getting concerned about Matt and his ability to pay the rent.

During this time, Matt called me frequently with so-called problems with the house. He complained about spiders and insects around the house, so I provided him with some bug spray. One window screen had been knocked loose at one corner, so I fixed that. Most of his complaints were petty, some were caused by his own negligence, and most would be considered the tenant’s responsibility. I’m not one to rock the boat, so I took care of most of the things he complained about. One day he said the shelves in some of the cupboards were not clean when they moved in and he suggested I come over and paint them. I know they had been cleaned before he moved in and I was concerned that he was going to make me take care of every little issue that came up, even if it was not my responsibility. I decided to buy some shelf paper and reline the shelves, a simple job. When I got there, I discovered why he wanted me to paint them. The cupboards and cabinets in the kitchen had originally been wood-finished, but a previous owner had painted the fronts of them white. Matt said the white clashed with the natural wood finish inside, and his wife would like me to paint the interiors white to match the doors. I told him I was opposed to painting the interiors because I might refinish the cupboard doors some day, putting them back to original condition. I did reline the shelves and thought that would be the end of it. More on this later.

September 1^st rolled around and Matt did not have any rent money. When I called him, he said he had just bought a late model mini van and the down payment took all the money he had. He promised to pay in just a few days, and he did write me a check the following week, but postdated it for a week after that. On the day I was to cash it, he called and asked me not to cash it for a few days. Another postponement put the date to September 3^rd. On that day, I went to his bank to cash it, but the funds were insufficient. Again, I drove to his house to have a few civil words with him. His wife was there and she told me Matt had been trying to call me to say he had the rent money in cash. Matt showed up a few minutes later. He only had $500, but he promised to have the balance very soon. “Very soon” turned out to be October 29^th when he paid me $700. I told him it was getting near the end of the lease and I was not going to renew it or allow it to roll over into a month-to-month rental unless he was able to pay up in full. He promised me he would have all the unpaid rent by November 12^th. I was skeptical, but I had enough other issues to occupy my time, and I didn’t want to start an eviction. I average one eviction per year, and I had already evicted a tenant in July. My goal is to have zero evictions per year, so I was doing everything in my power to avoid another one.

I was starting to wonder where I had gone wrong with Matt and his family. In the beginning, I thought they would be really great tenants, but that proved not to be the case. I decided to check the county court’s web site once again and see if I had overlooked something when I ran their names a few months earlier. I learned a very painful lesson that day: the county does not list cases until 60 days after filing. I discovered that when he was applying to rent my house, he was being evicted from another residence. It had not been listed earlier because of the 60-day rule. Learning about this previous eviction really put things into perspective.

On November 12, I chose not to call Matt because I was confident he would not have the rent as promised. My plan was to let the lease expire, and if he didn’t leave voluntarily, I would evict him. That evening, he called me and said he was surprised that I hadn’t called. I told him I didn’t think it was worth the effort because he had never paid the rent on time yet, and I didn’t think he was going to start now. I didn’t tell him that I had learned about his previous eviction, and I assumed he didn’t know I was aware of it. He told me he didn’t have the rent, but he had a plan to get caught up, so I agreed to listen. His plan was to sign a note promising to have all of the unpaid rent by December 3^rd, three days after the expiration of the lease. He said his mother was going to come into some money on that date and she was willing to bring his rent current. He even put her on the phone, basically to beg for me to let him stay. I told her what I had just told him, that I was not going to renew the lease and he would have to be out by November 30^th. I also told her that I had discovered his previous eviction. She was fully aware of it. That was the end of our conversation.

November 30^th fell on a Sunday that year. Usually in an eviction case, the landlord files a complaint with the court and has the tenant served with it the same day. Tenants have five days to file an answer with the court, which they rarely do. If no answer has been filed, the landlord can have a default judgment entered against the tenant and apply for a writ of possession. If the fifth day for filing an answer falls on a weekend or holiday, the tenant has until the following day to answer. Due to the fact that the lease expired on a Sunday, the soonest I could request a default would be the following Tuesday, even if I filed on Monday or Tuesday. Realizing I could wait until Wednesday December 3^rd to file an eviction complaint and serve Matt with it without delaying the eviction process, I decided to call him a few days before the lease expired and ask if his mother was still willing to help him out with the rent by December 3rd, and he indicated that she was. I should have known that nothing good was going to come of this, but I have a tendency to give people more slack than they deserve. On the 3^rd, Matt called me in the morning and said he’d be over with the money by early afternoon. When I questioned why it was taking so long, he assured me he did have the money, but was running behind for some unspecified reason, and couldn’t make it as soon as he had hoped. That afternoon, he called again and said he’d be over by 5 PM. I was losing my patience. The next time I heard from him it was 7:30 PM. He told me his elderly parents had gone to the doctor in a town about 60 miles away and had missed the bus coming home, so he had to drive there and take them to their residence in a nearby city. At this point, I wasn’t believing a word he said. At 11:30 PM, he called again and said he had changed his mind and he would be moving out by Sunday. The following day, I filed an eviction against him and had him served with the complaint the same day. He was very disappointed, but with his history of making commitments and not keeping them, I couldn’t take his word that he would move out as promised. Because Matt had been late in everything he did and never kept a commitment he made, I began thinking of him as “the late tenant”.

The following Sunday, the day Matt promised to be moved out, he called and left a message on my answering machine that he couldn’t find a place to move to, so he was just going to stay. I was disappointed, but not surprised, and happy that I had not waited to file the eviction. Since I had filed on a Thursday, the soonest I could request a default was the following Wednesday. All went according to plan and I obtained a writ of possession which I took to the sheriff’s office. The deputy handling this case served him with a 5-day notice two days later, and the lockout was scheduled for the following Thursday. Evictions move swiftly in this county, and the lockout was set for exactly two weeks from the date I filed the case. It went well, the house was returned to me without incident, and I installed new doorlocks. Most of the tenant’s possessions had been removed from the house and put into storage, but there was still one bed and a decrepit piano inside, plus a lot of stuff piled up in the driveway. I turned two lights on inside the house and the front porch light for security purposes. I noticed the furnace was running and it was quite warm inside, but I didn’t take time to turn it off.

Prior to this eviction, we were planning a mini vacation to Arizona with our grandkids, and I had informed Matt that we would be leaving Friday afternoon, December 19^th, and returning Monday, December 22^nd. Our grandkids had school on that Friday before starting their two-week Christmas vacation. Since we couldn’t leave until they got out of school, Matt had several hours that morning to remove the rest of his possessions. The law prohibited him from stepping foot on the property without my permission, but I was more than willing to cooperate because I would be required to protect any possessions he left for 15 days after the lockout, even if it was junk. He called me about 9AM to say he was renting a truck and would call back in half an hour when it was ready. He had not called by 1:30 PM, so we picked up our grandkids from school and headed to Arizona.

We returned from Arizona about 1 PM on Monday, December 22. There were two messages waiting for me on our answering machine, both from Matt. The first one was placed Friday afternoon. Matt stated that he had left the charger for his cell phone in the house and he’d like me to let him in to get it. The other had been placed about an hour prior to our return, and he wanted to meet me later that day to pick up the rest of his belongings. I called him back and we agreed to meet at 5 PM. I got there a little early and noticed all the lights were turned off. I checked the breaker box and the main breaker was turned off. It wasn’t dark yet so I left it as I found it. Mark showed up a short while later with a friend, and they removed the piano, placing it in the driveway. The bed and a few other items were put in the garage. It was now getting dark and I asked Mark why the lights were off. He said he turned the breaker off because the electricity was still in his name and he wasn’t going to pay for electricity I used. He didn’t say when he turned the breaker off, but obviously he had been to the house sometime after the lockout. I told him I had turned the lights on for security reasons, and the amount of electricity used would be miniscule compared to what he owed me in unpaid rent. At this point, Mark lost his cool and said I had no business talking about the rent he didn’t pay because, in his words, “You own several houses”, as if that had anything to do with it. He soon calmed down, and before leaving, he said it was OK if I left the lights on. Thank you very much!

The next morning, I returned to the house to see what would be needed to put it back into rentable condition. It was very cold that morning and it struck me that the furnace was not running. I discovered the pilot light was out, but when I tried to light it, it would not light. Then I noticed the main gas valve behind the pilot had been turned off. It became painfully obvious that Mark had illegally entered the house while we were in Arizona, probably to retrieve his cell phone charger. He probably noticed the furnace running, so to insure that it wouldn’t cycle back on, he turned the gas valve off. I would have given my right arm to know in advance when he was going to enter the house and have the police show up while he was inside. In fact, I would have given up my vacation just to be there when it happened. But that is water under the bridge, and life goes on.

As I was inspecting the house, I removed several items he left in cupboards and drawers. As I was removing them, I noticed he had painted the interior of the kitchen cupboards white to match the doors. Keep in mind I had told him I wanted them to stay natural in the event that I might restore the cupboard to their original wood finish. Now, that would be virtually impossible.

After a while, a neighbor came over to see how things were going. He informed me that Matt had told him he wasn’t coming back for anything, particularly the piano which was at the end of the driveway near the street. This didn’t surprise me, but I still had a legal responsibility to safeguard a tenant’s belongings for 15 days. Since Matt had placed some of his possessions outside, it was obvious he did not consider them valuable. I took some photos to show there was nothing or any value, particularly the piano which was in desperate need of refinishing. I also wanted to prove that if Matt had considered any of these things useful, he would not have left them outside. What was valuable to him had already been put into storage. So, I moved everything to one side of the property, and put the junkiest items in the trash cans. Every day, I set things by the street with “free” signs on them, and one by one they disappeared. By the time I was done cleaning up the interior of the house, most of it was gone. I didn’t mind hauling a small load to the dump if that became necessary, but moving an old piano was not my idea of fun. I took some photos of it just to prove that it was no valuable work of art. Then I placed an ad in Craigslist offering it free to anyone willing to pick it up. I explained in the ad that it had been abandoned by a former tenant. I included the address of the property where the piano was located, but did not provide a phone number. The next day after placing the ad, the piano was gone.

I learned some valuable lessons from my experiences dealing with the late tenant. I will never trust my first impressions again, and I will dig deeper, looking for those hard-to-find clues that tell me about a tenant’s past. There have been times when I have been impressed with people that turned out to be outstanding tenants. The lesson I learned by renting to Matt and Angela is that I can not trust my first impressions, and I will never take anything for granted again.