Finding a Perfect Tenant

Posted: Sep 20, 2018
By: NatEvict
Comments: 0

Finding a Perfect Tenant

We are all looking for that neat and responsible tenant who will respect the property, keep it clean and pay bills in time. And it’s not always easy to judge reliability from a brief meeting and a pile of paperwork. At NationalEvictions.com, we’ve put together a few pointers that will help you find that perfect tenant and highlight the possibilities for a compromise if the search is taking too long.

Start with your property

The condition of your property will ultimately affect what kind of tenants it will attract. You can’t do anything about the location, but keeping the property clean, updated and well-maintained is in your hands. Outdated appliances, dirty walls and untidy bathroom may scare away your potential tenants, especially if the price is high.

Rethink the layout and possibly knock down a few walls to make a bigger bathroom or add a walk-in closet. Provide the top amenities your tenants want, and you’ll have plenty of candidates to choose from. If you don’t want to mess with the renovations, just keep the property clean: a fresh coat of paint, a scented candle and clean sunny windows can make a big difference. Remember, first impressions matter!

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Screen your tenants

As Property Managers Ourselves, we advice you not to let an unscreened tenant move into your rental, no matter how desperate you might be to close the deal. Even if the person was recommended by your friend, take the time to conduct at least minimal screening. Here are some things you might want to check:

Attitude and behavior. Take mental notes when you first meet a potential tenant. Did they make an effort to dress nicely? Are they kind and polite? What kind of car do they drive and is it clean? Of course, you can’t judge people by these characteristics alone, but they should help you paint a bigger picture.

References from previous landlords. Do verify the reference by calling the former landlord, as it’s easy to forge a reference letter or have a relative write it. It’s also a good idea to ask how much the tenant was paying in rent at his former place.

Employment status. Your tenant should be employed, preferably for some time. You can request recent pay stubs and even talk to the employer to get more insights.

Credit history. Request a credit report on your potential tenant. Look for any open collections, late payments, bankruptcy and overall credit score. The report itself might cost you, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Criminal and eviction records. Find out if your tenant has had problems with the law in the past or is currently a part of an investigation or a litigation. You probably might want to reject someone who’s been arrested for public disturbance multiple times.

Social life. With social networks playing an important role in many people’s lives, almost everyone has a digital footprint. Search an applicant’s name in the search engines and look over their social profiles and other publicly available information. This will give you a better idea about their personality and lifestyle. Google them, Check other Social Media for the names on the application. Do Your Homework as a Manager!

Besides conducting a thorough background check, also let your potential tenant tell their story. Find out why they are moving, what they do for fun, and see if everything they say matches the reports you’ve obtained.

Learn to compromise

It’s unlikely that you find a tenant that has everything you are looking for. Being picky is good, but don’t bluntly reject applicants based on certain things you uncover during the background check. Remember, every month your property stays unoccupied, you are not just failing to make profit, but possibly losing money as well.

Instead of focusing on separate accounts of “irresponsible behavior” on the part of your potential tenants, look at the bigger picture:

Everyone makes mistakes, and a criminal charge or an unpaid debt from back in the days doesn’t define a person. Focus on the past five years instead of considering someone’s entire history.
When screening couples, look at the combined income if low individual income is the only issue and everything else checks out.
Appreciate the honesty when someone tells you upfront about their bad credit or other issues. This means they understand the consequences of the bad decisions they made in the past and want to mend things.

A bad tenant can be a disaster to your rental property business. If you have multiple properties and consistently struggle to sort through dozens of undesirable applicants to find that perfect one, let us know and we’ll take that burden off of your shoulders.

Learn more about Tenants, Landlords and Property Management and Evictions on our website: https://NationalEvictions.com

Tags: Eviction Information, Landlord Information, Tenant Screening

In the Phoenix area, rapid evictions leave delinquent renters with almost no options

Posted: Sep 15, 2018
By: NatEvict
Comments: 0

In the Phoenix area, rapid evictions leave delinquent renters with almost no options

Tenants can find information for Defending Evictions on NationalEvictions.com

So much was at stake, but there was nowhere to sit. The courtroom’s wooden pews couldn’t hold them all. So the people called into Country Meadows Justice Court sat in the jury box and pressed themselves against the white walls. A group waited in the hallway outside. They clutched bright green eviction papers and practiced what they would tell the judge.

They were going to lose. They just didn’t know it yet.

Behind the bench, Judge Louis Goodman scanned his daily docket. It listed 128 eviction hearings. Then he flicked on a digital clock and motioned to the lawyers’ table, where attorney Kevin Holliday sat behind a tall stack of folders.

“Are you ready to go, sir?” Goodman asked.

“I can certainly start,” Holliday said. He stood and carried his folders to the bench. Loose papers shifted inside. Holliday had loaded them in advance, filling in the details of judgments he would almost surely win: Hundreds of dollars owed, five days to move out.

Goodman took the first file and read the name aloud. He looked up. Holliday twisted around. A crammed courtroom stared back, but nobody moved. Six seconds passed. Silence. Goodman called the name again. He waited 3 more seconds.

“Defendant is not present. Judgment will be entered,” he said, reaching for Holliday’s pre-filled form. He scanned it. Signed it. Handed to the clerk.

The day’s first tenant had been evicted. The hearing lasted 10 seconds.

Goodman called a couple’s names. They weren’t there. Their case took 13 seconds. The next lasted 7 seconds. Six. Six again. Eight seconds. Each one would empty another home.

“All right, we’ve got more,” Goodman said 20 minutes later, after he had blitzed through 29 cases. All but one ended in eviction. “Wow. Busy day.”

The eviction cycle had reached its peak. It was the third Wednesday in June, one of the busiest times of the year in a Justice Court system that often works more like an eviction mill.

Last year, Maricopa County’s Justice Courts issued 42,460 eviction judgments, one for every 14 rental households in this massive county that’s sinking ever-deeper into an affordable-housing crisis.

Once a person is sucked into the system, there’s almost no way to escape. A lawyer can help, but only a minuscule minority of tenants have one. The rest are overpowered by expert attorneys and overwhelmed in courtrooms where more time is spent on a single traffic ticket than a dozen life-altering evictions.

“There is nothing that goes on in the eviction system that is of any help to tenants,” said Ellen Sue Katz, executive director of the William E. Morris Institute for Justice, which advocates on behalf of low-income Arizonans.

Most cases are decided instantly, because the tenants don’t show up to defend themselves. Those who do are led by lawyers into courtroom hallways, where they’re nudged toward signing a settlement and agreeing to move out.

The few people who actually stand before a Justice of the Peace get just a few seconds to unwind why they missed rent. They make often-futile efforts to shake off an eviction, to push their case to trial, to buy a couple more days at home.

“I was switching jobs, so I was just pulling money out of my 401(k),” a young man with gelled hair told Goodman. He was evicted.

“This is my first time ever being here,” a woman in yoga pants explained. She was evicted.

“There’s no way you can do a suspension for a few hours?” another woman asked.

There wasn’t. She was evicted.

Tags: Arizona Eviction Articles, Eviction Information

Legal Eviction of Roommates

Posted: Aug 21, 2018
By: NatEvict
Comments: 0

Legal Eviction of Roommates

A living situation with roommates may become stressful if a roommate falls behind on rent or causes other problems in the home. The legal options for eviction of a roommate depend on whether the roommate is a legal occupant of the rental property, an unauthorized occupant, or a subletting party. The landlord, original tenant or either party might be able to pursue eviction by following the real-estate laws

Find Landlord and Tenant Help pages, Articles, and more on NationalEvictions.com

Sad Tenant moving apt after eviction sitting on the floor of the living room at home. NationalEvictions.com

Definition of Legal Occupant

A written lease agreement creates a legal obligation between each tenant and the landlord. A leases often require the names of all adults who will live in a rental home, along with the names of children or other adults who might spend time living in the residence. Whether a roommate is a legal occupant of a residence depends on whether the lease names the roommate as a lessee. If the roommate is lessee, the landlord can start eviction proceedings directly against the legal occupant.

Landlord’s Right to Evict

When a landlord wants to evict multiple roommates from a residence, States requires court proceedings for eviction, also known as “summary ejectment” under state law. North Carolina allows eviction based on one of three reasons: breach of the lease, nonpayment of rent or holdover of the premises after the end date specified by the lease. If the lessees fall behind on their rent payments, the landlord can initiate proceedings to evict all roommates, even if only one roommate is responsible for the past-due rent. Furthermore, if the lease specifically prohibits additional occupants or subletting parties, the landlord has the right to ask a North Carolina court for a summary ejectment based on a breach of the lease after a lessee allows a roommate to move in.

Legal Significance of Unauthorized Roommate or Subletting Party

A lease might state whether additional roommates may live in a rental home without signature of a new lease or advance permission from the landlord. A roommate who doesn’t appear on the lease usually doesn’t have a legal obligation to the rental home’s landlord; accordingly, the landlord can’t pursue late rent or directly take other legal action in North Carolina toward the unauthorized roommate. The roommate might have a sublease arrangement with the original lessee, however, and have a legal obligation toward a lessee who does appear on the lease agreement.

Tenant’s Right to Evict

If an original tenant allowed a roommate to move in without updating the lease with the landlord, the original tenant still might be able to pursue legal eviction of an unauthorized occupant. The original tenant and the new roommate might have an oral or written sublease agreement. If the roommate doesn’t pay rent or causes problems in the residence, the original tenant may be able to start legal proceedings for eviction based on the terms of the sublease. Legal eviction initiated by the landlord might result in a court order requiring all individuals to vacate the property and return possession of the premises to the landlord. Accordingly, the original lessee may need to take action independently if he wants to remain on the property himself. To evict a roommate, the original lessee must follow the notice, service and filing procedures required by North Carolina’s landlord-tenant laws.

Tags: Eviction Information, North Carolina Eviction Articles, Tenant Information

Young Lawyer Fights Against Unjust Evictions In Durham

Posted: Aug 21, 2018
By: NatEvict
Comments: 0

Young Lawyer Fights Against Unjust Evictions In Durham

By LAURA PELLICER & FRANK STASIO

Find North Carolina Eviction Help for Landlords and Tenants on NationalEvictions.com

Jesse Hamilton McCoy II was raised by a single mother in low-income neighborhoods in Vance and Durham Counties. Growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s, he witnessed the drug epidemic firsthand and remembers not being able to trust some adults in the community because of their addiction.

It was one of those situations where you could see the look of shame on everybody’s face, and it was so misplaced.

He always thought becoming a doctor would be his ticket to a different life, but a run-in with police in middle school set him on a new course. An officer accused him of throwing rocks, despite McCoy’s hands being full of groceries he was bringing home for his mom. Police whisked him into their car, flipped on the sirens and drove him around before dropping him off in front of a crowd of neighbors. The incident left McCoy feeling vulnerable and voiceless and inspired him to make a career of fighting against injustice.

Today McCoy is a housing lawyer, the James Scott Farrin Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law and supervising attorney for the Duke Law Civil Justice Clinic. He focuses on running a new eviction diversion program that aims to reduce the number of people forced out of their homes in Durham County. The program mediates between landlords and tenants, litigates on behalf of renters who are being mistreated and helps tenants understand their legal rights.

Host Frank Stasio speaks with McCoy about his upbringing, his path to fighting for housing justice, and what the Durham eviction crisis looks like on the ground.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

On living in Henderson, North Carolina during the 1980s:

When we were living in Vance County, I always tell people I was blessed to see sort of the best of times and the worst of times … It was definitely a low-income area, but I remember when we first got there there were a lot of seniors, a lot of very nice people, folks would watch other people’s kids. And then one of the biggest changes was we had three factories, and two of those factories ended up closing, I believe, within a two week gap from each other. So people went from being pretty happily employed and communal to desperation kinda setting in. And this was in the ’80s at the same time where crack was being distributed within the community, and I got to see the rapid decline of an otherwise vibrant neighborhood.

On writing romantic comedies to impress his classmates:

I started writing in middle school for the reason that all teenage boys write: I wanted girls to like me … I did a lot of, like, romantic-comedy books, because there was this whole Eric Jerome Dickey phase. I [had] just met Eric Jerome Dickey. I thought he was the greatest guy in the world. He autographed my book, and I said: I want to be like him when I grow up. And so I wrote novels that basically showed different personalities that I always [encountered] in school, and I would just mix them together. And people would get a kick out of basically sending my book around to everybody in the class – there was only one copy of it, and they would try to identify who was their character.

On police mistreating him when he was in middle school:

I was coming back with a friend from getting groceries – we used to go to the grocery store on Saturdays for our moms to get whatever they needed us to get from their list … A police car pulls up, cuts on the siren, stops us, police gets out of the car [and] asks us why we were throwing rocks in the road. Now keep in mind our hands were full of groceries, we weren’t throwing rocks .. Quickly it escalated to the point where we were being stuffed in the back of a car, and we thought we were going to be arrested, but weren’t arrested. He just rode around with the sirens going off until there was a nice crowd of people in the neighborhood and then opened the door and let us out with a stern warning about: Don’t do this anymore. Don’t throw rocks. It was one of those situations where you could see the look of shame on everybody’s face, and it was so misplaced. We felt like we wanted to take a stand against what this officer did to us, but you don’t really have any mechanism to do that … It was one of those things where it felt like we were supposed to accept that this was the way it was going to be … I said to myself: I want to be in a position when I grow up where I can actually represent this community … So that was really when I shifted my career decision from being a doctor to wanting to be an attorney.

On the effects of being evicted and the need for the Durham eviction diversion program:

There are a number of collateral consequences. It will affect the school district that your kids go to if you’re no longer able to stay in that community. It can actually increase the rate of homelessness. It can affect your ability to get employment if you don’t have a stable address. So with all these things in the aggregate, what we said is: We needed to see what parts can we fix through the litigation process … We view our role as a problem solver to help people who want to come to the table and work out resolutions [to] do so, but we also view our role as that of, if a landlord is actively doing things that are in violation of the statute and does not wish to participate, we do have that option of being able to pursue litigation against those landlords…

Tags: Eviction Information, North Carolina Eviction Articles, Tenant Information

Rental Evictions Rising

Posted: Aug 21, 2018
By: NatEvict
Comments: 0

Rental Evictions Rising; Affordable Housing Not Meeting Demand

Charlotte voters will be asked in November to more than triple the city’s Housing Trust Fund, to $50 million. It’s part of a plan to increase affordable housing. City officials say there’s a 34,000-unit shortfall.

And eviction notices are going up again, after several years of decline following the recession of a decade ago. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, landlords filed more than 30,000 eviction notices in Mecklenburg County, according to the North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts. That’s an increase of about 1,000 from the previous year.

Find North Carolina Eviction Help for Landlords and Tenants on NationalEvictions.com

In 2010, rental housing in Charlotte averaged about $800 a month, according to the U.S. Census. Today, the average is around $1,100, a nearly 40 percent increase. Ashley Clark of UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute says there are consequences.

“Renting costs have increased and wages haven’t kept pace, and that creates challenges for people looking for housing,” Clark said.

Ashley Clark co-authored a UNC Charlotte Urban Institute report that tracked the rise of rental evictions in Mecklenburg County.

CREDIT GWENDOLYN GLENN

And challenges in holding on to housing. Clark co-authored a report on evictions in Mecklenburg County, released in March. Although the median household income in the county increased by 14 percent since 2010, when adjusted for inflation, the report says the increase is only about 2 percent.

The Urban Institute’s analysis of 2016 court records found about 25 evictions take place every day in the county, mostly for nonpayment. The average amount owed was $850.

“We found that areas with higher percentages of low-income families, African-American families, had higher rates of evictions in those communities,” Clark said.

Those communities are in the northeast, east, west and southwest parts of the county.

Rents are lower in many of those communities, but the median household income for residents there is between $26,000 and $42,000, according to the Urban Institute report. It’s nearly $63,000 for the county.

“They’re one crisis, one paycheck away from eviction,” said Courtney Morton, a Mecklenburg housing and homeless research coordinator. “Which underscores for us the need for more affordable housing.”

A few months ago, Jean Compas did not meet the tenth of the month deadline to pay his rent, the day before landlords typically file eviction notices.

“On the eleventh day I offered to pay that month and they wouldn’t take it unless I paid for the following month, including court fees, which brought me to this problem here,” Compas said.

Compas and his landlord’s attorney came to an agreement. Compas won’t be evicted if he pays all of the back rent, more than $2200, by the end of the month.

“My kids, I’m raising and I don’t want to have, there’s a lot of stuff to move. I’ll make it but it’s a struggle,” Compas said.

Nearly 45 percent of residents in the city and county are renters—about the same as Seattle, Indianapolis and Raleigh. Charlotte’s population has increased by 17 percent since 2010. To accommodate that growth, developers are building or plan to build 27,000 apartments, according to RealData. Twenty thousand have been built in the past five years, with rents on the new units averaging $1,400. At the same time, lots of older, more affordable rental complexes and homes are being razed to make way for new construction as neighborhoods become gentrified.

Ashley Clark says more low- and middle-income people are left with the choices of moving farther away from their jobs in the city or into less safe neighborhoods. But some are opting for the more expensive units that they can barely afford.

“We know that between 2010 and 2014, 46 percent of renters here were spending more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing, so by HUD’s definition that would be cost burdened and points to that there is a mismatch between affordable housing stock and what people are earning,” Clark said.

From the landlord’s point of view, Tim Szymanski, executive director of the Greater Charlotte Apartment Association, says many are willing to work with tenants before seeking evictions.

“Evictions are last resort,” Szymanski said. “Housing providers hate to do it but eventually you need to control your asset that you borrowed money on with the humanitarian side. Some are more humanitarian than others. Some are quite, and some are not particularly that way.”

The Urban Institute found that 92 percent of eviction filings are made by corporations. Szymanski says 10 years ago corporations were a small part of his organization’s membership. Now 70 percent of the group’s members who own rental properties are out-of-state corporations.

“When you don’t have locally based companies with roots in the community there may not be as much a sensitivity of working with delinquent people behind on their rent,” Szymanski said. “(There) may be some more leniency with local companies that have an understanding and roots in the community. But those companies can’t do that forever, that’s detrimental to their business.”

City officials hope an increase in the Housing Trust Fund, which finances affordable housing, will result in more rentals that low- and middle-income people can afford. But no one expects the $50 million city officials are asking for to solve the problem.

Tags: Eviction Information, North Carolina Eviction Articles