It’s a simple transaction. You pay rent, you get a roof over your head. But some tenants get the wrong idea. From missed payments to completely wrecked homes, these landlords the absolutely crazy reasons they’ve had to kick somebody out of a rental unit.
The Crazy Old Lady And The Mystery Of The Black Blob
“I worked as a handyman for this property firm in my town and basically every day there were little odd tasks to take care of. Sometimes it was changing the light bulbs in apartments (they were high ceilings since the building was built in the late 1920s) to more beefy things like replacing a water heater with a tankless system.
But one thing takes the cake and I will never be able to forget it. We got a call to do an inspection for this strange black blob that appeared in one of our tenant’s ceilings and my coworker cuts an inspection hole and realizes it was black mold. Uh oh. Well, I had a vacation planned to go with my family to Santa Cruz and when I came back, my buddy told me a hoarder upstairs had caused the problem.
She had one of those old-fashioned single-door fridges with a freezer compartment which had turned into a giant block of ice that pushed open the freezer door and then caused the fridge door not to shut properly.
So this fridge is chugging trying to keep up with making ice at the back while in front it’s melting hitting the warm summer air. It dripped down onto the lino and then ran into the studio where it mingled with all manners of garbage before just soaking down. This lady had gotten in trouble once already for hoarding and the landlord just allowed her to stay in another renovated apartment. But this place we had to gut out. Luckily, the two of us didn’t have to remove everything, we left that to a hazmat crew.
Her toilet was completely stopped up and full of spiders, we figured something was amiss when she was continually taking out cat litter even though her cat died a year ago. She was using a cat box as a bathroom. If she wasn’t doing that, she wore adult diapers and when she soiled one, she’d take it off and toss it into the corner by the radiator. There was so much garbage everywhere, but it was only two years of accumulation. It was about 18 inches deep and you could clear a space out and stand in it and I’d be looking at my buddy’s belly button. So garbage out, but meant we had to rip out the floorboards, carpeting, walls, and old cabinets (how she managed to never get bitten by the hundreds of black widows, I’ll never know). The worst was having to clean the ceiling.
We had noticed there were an awful lot of fruit flies around my friend’s apartment in the building even when he didn’t have fruit. The woman’s ceiling was black with fruit fly egg casings and scrubbing didn’t get rid of it. You’d have to stand on a ladder, look up, spray bleach, and try to scrub. It wouldn’t come out so we just painted over everything. It took about 12 coats just to get it plain white again.
After we finished, it was rented out to a nice woman who kept a clean home, but the original tenant who reported the mold left and the landlord stuck the hoarder lady in the apartment. I could understand he was trying to avoid a disability lawsuit, but this was her third strike already. It cost about 8000 to rehab the apartment. On top of that, we had to put together new furniture for her as well. After that, I handed in my notice and went back to school full-time.”
The Stench Smelled Around The Neighborhood
“My parents rented out our old 1,500sq-ft house to a nice-looking couple. They had one child and seemed very clean. A few months went by, and we started getting calls from the neighbors stating that there was a really terrible odor coming from the house and that they believed the tenants may have another family living there. My parents make plans to go check on it the next day.
Well, they postponed it until the next week until they received another call – the tenants had left during the night. My parents are quite busy and ask me to go assess damages. I go over there, get out of my car, and the smell hits me from the street, a full 20 feet from the door. I said to myself ‘screw this’, left and grabbed a respirator, and came back. I didn’t want to walk through the house and inhale whatever the heck was making the smell.
Came back, opened the door, and nearly passed out. Furniture was covered with feces, holes in walls, and carpet was stained in damned near every spot that you could see. I say ‘every spot that you could see’ because you couldn’t really see much of the floor. There was way too much trash.
As I’m walking through the living room, I’m wondering how this small family and even another family managed to accumulate this much trash and cause this much damage. It’s not until I get to the basement and the bedrooms that I see why. There were 23 mattresses in the house. No box springs, no frames, just dirty stained mattresses on the floor. 23 or more people living in this small house…
There were other things, but the number of disgusting mattresses and the feces-stained furniture was what stood out to me the most.
Forget renting. These people were animals.”
Just When You Think You Know Your Tenants
“My brother had a family as a tenant in one of his houses. It was a recently renovated old Victorian house in a great area right on a river. Massive yard. The perfect place to raise a family.
The family seemed super cool. And my brother is such a good fellow he really likes to help people out. And this family seemed like interesting and trustworthy people. He even gave them a bit of a deal on rent.
The mother took in kids from abused homes. I guess she would foster troubled youths. She got a bit of cash from the government for her troubles. But she was passionate about helping these kids. Most of them were in their early to mid-teens. I remember there was a trans girl and a couple hard done street kids mixed in with her own kids, one of which was a newborn. Despite a few of them being from broken homes they were friendly. All in all, there were maybe a total of 6 or 7 in the household. Helped with yard upkeep and loved their newly adopted family.
They lived there for over a year. And my brother would regularly give them things. He got a new bbq one year and just gave them his older one which was only a year old. He would sometimes get music or movie tickets through work and he’d give them to his tenants. Just being a helpful guy and checks in on his tenants every handful of months.
My brother came on hard times and due to whatever problems he found himself in he was forced to sell one of his two properties. He gave them the legally required three months’ notice plus an extra month just because he felt so bad and even went out of his way to share the names of some other landlords he trusted.
The family says they understand. No harm no foul. Then after moving out, my brother went into the property to find the upstairs bathroom flooded and seeping to the lower floor. Trash was scattered everywhere. Holes in the wall. Graffiti scribbled across the walls in giant sharpies saying ‘screw you whiteboy’ and things of that nature. Kitchen cabinets were pulled from the wall and smashed. It was like a bomb went off. It was the complete and utter destruction of his recently renovated property. But the worst was yet to come.
For the past few months that this family lived there, the mother of this group of destruction decided to throw her newborns’ excrement-filled diapers in the basement. Feces-filled diaper bombs were piled high and spread and smeared at the bottom of the stairway and along the walls. No courtesy bag. No tight burrito spirals. Just loosey goosey butt to stairwell poopie diapers. It was like a doodie doomsday down there.
All in all, I think it all cost him around $70,000 and another four months to get the property ready for sale. He had taken loans from his parents and grandma and generally just hated himself for a while. He spoke to a lawyer from what I recall but was told for some reason insurance or landlord law related that he’d spend another arm and a leg going after someone who doesn’t have much money to begin with. Needless to say, she didn’t get her damage deposit back.”
The House Was Absolutely Gutted
“My brother rented out one of his three houses. It was a three-story house with a small single unattached garage. Well, we heard through the grapevine that the police kicked in their door to arrest them over the weekend, but they weren’t home. After contacting the sheriff’s department, he learned that said tenants had skipped the state fleeing prosecution. My brother served an eviction notice to the residence and posted it on the door for thirty days. He gets a call one week later from the tenants. They were asking him to put their stuff in storage. He went over to the house to check it out, discovered they’d gutted the house.
They called back and said they’d send him a money gram to pay for the storage. He asked about the twenty thousand dollars worth of damage. They argued back and forth and the tenants said screw it. Keep the junk. Never heard from them again. He talked to the city and they told him that he needed to wait one more month before he could set their stuff out on the curb.
He and I go over there to clean it out. When I say they gutted it. I mean they literally gutted it. They’d knocked out interior walls on each floor except the top. They’d pulled all the copper wiring out of the walls to sell I guess. They had extension cords running up the stairs from the several outlets they’d wired into the breaker box. The ceiling fans were gone. I assume they sold them. The bathroom sink was gone. Their copper water lines were gone. Their furniture was O’Sullivan brand particle board furniture and was all bubbled from spilling drinks on them. The mattress was all stained, no frames, and no sheets. They just had a blanket thrown over them.
The only thing we found that was halfway interesting was an old television in the third-floor bedroom. When I picked it up to carry it out to the dumpster, it was super light and shouldn’t have been. I tapped the screen and discovered they’d slipped a curved piece of plastic in where the screen was supposed to be and removed the guts. After removing the back, we found their pharmacy and about a hundred dollars in singles. I pocketed the money and discarded the drugs.
They even pulled down the kitchen cabinets that’d been newly installed before renting to them and according to one of the guys across the street who came to pick through the trash we set out, they’d sold the kitchen cabinets three months after moving in. Everyone on the block was told that they’d bought the house and were slowly remodeling.
My brother was so ticked off, he just put the house up for sale and sold it as is because he couldn’t afford to fix all the damage they’d done.”
Well, That Escalated QUICKLY
“I was a landlord but my last two sets of tenants made me throw in towel and sell the place. I did all the right things. Background checks etc and this group seemed to be on the up and up. They always paid by the way. The trouble started when the neighbors started calling me about loud parties, breaking and entering and people coming and going at all hours. When I stopped by to do some repairs etc. there was trash everywhere and lines of white powder on tables. Pitbull poop all over the place even though pets were a no-no in the lease. There were burns on the hardwood floor that was too big to be from cigarettes. Turns out that shooting up heroin requires cooking it on a spoon and the hot spoon will burn the floor. They leave and it took me two months of cleaning (50 ‘contractor trash bags ‘ and repairs. They did not get their security deposit back.
The funny part was when I was renting the downstairs unit two months before those idiots moved out I arranged to meet the prospective tenants at noon. When I got there the new guys were standing out front as they had arrived 10 minutes early. We chatted for about a minute and then I brought them in. Five minutes later we come back out. They had a lease and I had a couple of checks from them. I jump into my white corvette (ex-wives) in my shorts and loud Hawaiin shirt (I looked like a tool) I round the corner on a narrow one-way street and there is a van blocking the intersection. I wait about 30 seconds and honk the horn.
The back of the van opens up and two guys jump out with Glocks in hand. The first thing that goes through my mind is I am going to get shot for honking the horn. My hand is reaching for the gear shift to put it into reverse when I realize they have badges hanging around their necks. While I am being questioned one of the cops is on the radio and it’s obvious from the conversation my two new tenants have been stopped, frisked, and questioned going the opposite direction. A well-coordinated strike. It turned out that the cops were watching my property for a week and the tenants upstairs are not just users but dealers.
To all the tenants who left me high and dry and didn’t pay rent: screw you. It adds up to about 1$2,000 over 12 years. To all the tenants who did pay: Thank you and I wish you well.
Overall it was 85% a good experience and 15% stressful and me paying for stupidity and laziness.”
It’s A House, Not A Workshop!
“I helped my father evict a tenant from the second house he owned and was renting out.
The house had a small secure garage attached to it. But rather than use this to repair his motorbikes, the tenant had three of them inside the house. Two in the living room, in bits, and one in the spare room upstairs, also in bits.
Oil everywhere. He’d spilled at least one gallon of oil downstairs which had soaked into the carpet and floor underneath. He’d taken the carpet up and thrown it in the garden. Upstairs there were numerous small spills, the carpet was wrecked again.
Dirty handprints were all over the doors and walls, especially on the stairwell, kitchen cupboards, and so on.
We found out as the neighbors were complaining about the smell of petrol – he had a leaking fuel tank in the kitchen, on the draining board. It was very slow so thankfully he hadn’t blown the house up, but the kitchen stank, along with the outside drain.
My father had a clause in the rental agreement that specifically prohibited any kind of workshop-type activity in the house (no woodwork, pottery, engine repairs, etc). So it was fairly easy to evict him, took two months. He didn’t even ask for his deposit back and left two of the bikes behind – two rusty old Hondas that were beyond repair. My father sold them for a few quid to help pay for the repairs to the house.”
