I'm Pathetic

[kathryn d]

That is what I was told yesterday by an ex-tenant

Two years ago our departing tenants left owing about $800. We lodged to keep the bond plus stated we will be going for the arrears.

Last year when we returned from Australia, we found the tenants, served them personally. They didn't appear at the hearing. We win. We offer the tenants a chance to pay the arrears in payments..as we always do. they accept, but never follow thru.

This year, we lodged the appropriate paperwork with the Sheriff. We know their bank details, but they have changed jobs, so our options are limited.

Sheriff has good news. There was money in their bank account, and so he puts a hold on their account.

Tenant calls me last week in a panic, wanting to work out a payment plan.She apologises when I mention we offered her this last year. Anyways, I told her it is in the hands of the Sheriff, and to contact him.

Tenant talks to her bank (we use the same bank) and the Sheriff. The Sheriff says we need to tell him if we want to do this. The bank says it can be done, but she can also stop all payments anytime she wants. They don't recommend we do it.

I call the tenant back, and say we won't even consider it without their employment details. They tell us who they work for, and I verify it. She calls me, and tell her we decided not to, and let the Sheriff do their job.

Yesterday, former tenant calls me and asks why I keep calling her job. I said I only called the once to verify where she works. She asks why, if we weren't going to do a payment plan with them. "For the Sherrif, of course"

She then says that I'm pathetic...I hang up.
It is days like this, when I really love being a landlord.

Today we went to talk to the Sheriff, to make sure he had the employment details for garnishment. He said letting him deal with it is always best, otherwise we need ot start all over, if they stop paying us.


We've had a few days like this so far....karma is a ******

 

[mikezen]

wow that's quite a fiasco over 800 bucks

 

[kathryn d]

Last July we had new tenants move in. They always pay on time at first. By Xmas they stopped rent. They finally left at end of January owing $1500.

When we returned to Canada, we start the process to collect our money. The problem is, we don't know where they live. To comply with the rules, we do everything we can.I call where he works to make sure he is still working there...he is.

Send registered mail to their former address and next of kin. We personally go to the man's place of employment. We wait for 30 minutes, and then his manager comes out and says he won't allow us to serve him, because he wouldn't like to be served at work.Off we go.
We wait until he gets off work, but he doesn't show, because he is working overtime, we find out later.
We send him the papers via his employer. (registered mail) They return it unopened.

The wife calls us and asks us to stop calling and going to her husbands work.
I tell her let us give you these papers, and we are done. She agrees to meet with us the next morning, and we serve her. She says to call her husband on Saturday and he will meet us. On Saturday they don't answer their phone, or call us.

We ask the Director of Residential Tenancies for help..substituted service. She agrees we have tried everything we can. She writes a Supreme Court Order to the man's employer, requiring them to pass along the papers to the employee.
We then send this via registered mail. It is signed for, and them refused and returned to us unopened.

We take this mail back to the employer, and speak to the head boss, and ask if they want to be in trouble with the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia.He is dumbfounded by this remark. Rob explains we sent the company mail, but with our return address (so they knew it was us, again ), but this time it was addressed to the company, and not the tenant c/o of the company. Rob explains all that has happened, and the head boss asks if he can open the mail. Of course, it is addressed to them. He reads it and understands what has been going on.
As Rob leaves the head boss, the receptionist (who keeps returning mail) comes back from lunch break arrives, she is beckoned into the office.Oh to be a fly on the wall.

I get another call from the wife, wanting to meet with us, so we can finally serve her husband. She is worried her husband will get fired if we keep trying to serve him at work. No, I tell her. We are past that. We are deemed to have served them now, by substituted service. Her husband will really hate getting garnished..then I hang up.

This was Rob's day for karma...he was singing and whistling for the next 2 days.

 

[kathryn d]

wow that's quite a fiasco over 800 bucks

Maybe , but when you own 40 properties, if you allow them all to do this, it adds up.

 

[AlmostBob]

wow that's quite a fiasco over 800 bucks

not sure whether this is some **expletive deleted referencing limited intelligence** who condones theft
or
someone who thinks that there would be less embarrassment in not having the sheriff seize your bank accounts and garnishee your pay

we tell the tenant up front what the result of not paying every dollar will be, and completely follow up
if they leave owing $1, they will have a minimum of $501 to pay once added in costs and sheriff fees

only 800
fuggedabowdit

writing 2 letters, a phone call some mail, $400/hour for me
$500/hour for the sheriff serviing the garnishment order
everybody happy

except the former tenant,

a dumb manager, and an even dumber receptionist​

because we make every tenant pay every cent, we are retired with 40 properties living on rent,​

8 months holiday each year

go to the ceo of the company;, I can, therefore I do, its FUN
the directors of a LLC are very concerned about the actions of idiot staff, to reproduce a phrase, "Nobody wants the supreme court pissed at them" and the provincial government is the biggest client of this llc
It is pleasant to have the person who is rude to you 'spoken to', may make the idiot rethink what they do.

 

[pinkboy]

Very timely.

Just recently I have been called 'a grub', 'shoddy employer', 'dodgy operator' and various other expletive names under the sun - all by a disgruntled employee over 80c an hour that didn't actually exist in the first place.

Recently had 34 man crew for a shutdown for a couple weeks in May. Unfortunately had to put an ad on Seek to get the amount of bodies, and my wife and I always shudder at the types of blokes who apply - but we need the bodies on site. There is always a couple who stir the pot regarding what pay rate they are on, so this year (a little wiser from last year), I made up pay rates that were neat dollar figures ($30/$32/$37/$40 all plus penalties of course) reflective of their ability/trade.

When I employed the guy, I told him the pay rate was just under $32/hr, as I didn't know the exact cents (by mistake and in hindsight I said around 80c). But when I went to do the pays on site, I did the right thing, by just rounding it up to this new neat dollar figure!

Next thing I know, the guy, along with his buddy just upped and left without notice after the second day of the shutdown. Lucky I had a backup plan for blokes (cross hire off another company we work closely with, but comes at premium cost). Anyway, with no notice of leaving, when I went to do the pays, I didn't include their last 2hrs travel, and only paid them for the hours (I presume worked), at the arbitrary rate of $32.

My argument to them after receiving all the dirty phone calls and emails etc was they chose to leave their employment between the end of their worked shift and before they travelled home. Why would I pay someone the hours it took them to abandon their job- it just doesn't make sense to me?

So, for the sake of $64, and approx. $24.80 (the imaginary 80c over the couple days worked), this guy gets Fair Work involved, emails the mine we worked at his same filthy emails, and because I was slow responding to his emails (I always sleep on emails of this nature, otherwise the expletives and the truthful name calling and what I really think always comes out), his Accountant started to hassle me. Accountant? . The mine passed the emails down the line to my site contact, we spoke about it, laughed it off, wrote emails back up the line and was given the nod that as an employer, I had taken steps to my duty of care.

My final email to his basically said I was lawyering up, and was ready for anything he had coming for me...............been silent ever since!

So if 33 blokes were happy to work for me for the pay rates, and 1 guy is disgruntled - I must be a seriously poor operator right?

The biggest argument out of all this......You don't get paid anything if you just sit at home in your caravan, while all the other blokes enjoy their fruits of their labour!


pinkboy....I don't lose sleep over this $h!t, I have better things to worry about than a somewhat pathetic employee!

 

[nhg]

I wish it was a shorter process.

Have one tenant about to get booted, already approved by tribunal.

And another just started playing up, going to tribunal soon.

Total so far $8k+ in arrears.

Fortunately I can service the loans quite comfortably, for now...

How long does it normally take for insurance to pay up?

 

[Risky Business]

I'm with you KD and AB.

It's a business for you. And the hard part is going through the process the first time. Mine was all drama and stress. 3 years later, the money is coming in from the default. If this happens again, I pity the defaulting tenant. It will be shock and awe.

If you don't deal with the problem, you're passing it onto the next landlord. It's only $800 you're recouping but I'm sure you can think of ways to spend it.

Of note, here in QLD I applied for alternate service via email and a family/friend's? residence which were last known to me. The court was all good with it.

Wish you the best.

 

[cimbom]

Nhg, we recently lodged a claim with Terri Scheer for $1,000 in rental arrears. Took about 1.5 weeks after submitting paperwork to get money in our account

 

[kathryn d]

Pinkboy,
Happy it worked out for you.


Being a hands on landlord, sometimes you need to grab all the fun you can get. For us, it is finally getting some satisfaction thru the courts, if that is the only way.

This year has been a bit easier for us than last. We brought in our carpenter to take of things when we knew we didn't have the time.

In a couple of days we have another hearing for $9000. We haven't been able to serve the tenants personally, and if they don't show up at the hearing, we can't prove they have been served. We will request substituted service again. It delays us, but it doesn't stop us.

We started paper work for 3 sets of tenants who's lease expire this month. They are already in arrears. One tenant is messy, but the other two look after the property great, and want to stay. If they would only pay their rent!
We just can't keep them, and actually have accpeted a new tenant for the property today.
The other tenant we will wait until they vacate. His attitude is confrontational, and it will only drive applicants away..so decided to wait.

Sunday night we had to issue a 5 day eviction.He moved in 1 May.Tenant was walking thru the hallway (multi unit) in his underwear, lit cig, and drunk. When he is sober, he's a nice(still odd) guy. There are no hard feelings between him and us, and he understands we can't keep him. He took a swing at another tenant, and missed, but the other tenant decked him. Police were called and were already there when we arrived. Seems they were there last week too....wish they would tell us !

All in all, we can't really complain too much. Just haven't had a day off since arriving home. At least we aren't bored.

 

[kathryn d]

I'm with you KD and AB.

It's a business for you. And the hard part is going through the process the first time. Mine was all drama and stress. 3 years later, the money is coming in from the default. If this happens again, I pity the defaulting tenant. It will be shock and awe.

If you don't deal with the problem, you're passing it onto the next landlord. It's only $800 you're recouping but I'm sure you can think of ways to spend it.

Of note, here in QLD I applied for alternate service via email and a family/friend's? residence which were last known to me. The court was all good with it.

Wish you the best.

Thanks RB


At least Australia has landlords insurance.We don't have that option.

 

[cu@thetop]

As a lawyer- when people say (usually about other people's money) " oh it's only $800/$x" I usually pipe up and say- "well if it so little why don't you pay it out of your own pocket?".
I'm impressed with your debt recovery methods. Well done.

 

[Ed Barton]

She then says that I'm pathetic...I hang up.
It is days like this, when I really love being a landlord.

Unless your statement is satire then, yes, you are pathetic.

 

[VYBerlinaV8]

Good work guys.

I've only ever had one troublesome tenant and I took fairly decisive action to have the situation resolved, which involved, ah, 'leverage'.

Pay the rent and you're my client, I will move mountains to take care of you. Screw with me, and I have all the resources I need to get what I am owed.

 

[weg]

Husband did some work for a company the year before last, on the recommendation of a guy he knew and trusted, and who joined this company as a project manager (he pumped thousand of his own dollars into this company too, before being screwed himself).

As it turned out the company wouldn't pay the last $2,800 of the progress payments so we ran it by 2 debt collectors who confirmed they were aware of a few cases each of the company not paying the last installment.

Many being owed didn't bother following through and few ended up recouping their losses because of the tactics employed by the company, ie. counter suing for false claims, etc. Nice!

Husband ended up going through a friend that was a lawyer and working on the guy who worked for the company and 2 aborted court hearings and counter suings, and many months later got $2000 of the money owed.

Company ended up going into recievership and making front page of the paper due to a 'fiasco' the company was associated with resulting in many individuals being out of pocket 10's of 1000's of dollars.

Some people/companies are serial thieves and deserve to be chased up, even if only to save others from suffering the same fate.

 

[kathryn d]

Unless your statement is satire then, yes, you are pathetic.

Sorry, no satire here. It made my day. I still smile when I think about it.


VB,
We really are great landlords.When a tenant has a clogged drain, and we can't fix it, the plumber is there asap. When they lock themselves out of the apt...we run over and let them in.

As soon as they tell us something is wrong, we act quickly to fix it.
Most of our tenants are great...we just can't pay our bills if we can't collect our rent.

Everytime we keep a tenant out of pity, hoping they will start paying consistently, it has backfired on us. This year, we decided to not renew these type of tenants.

 

[VYBerlinaV8]

Everytime we keep a tenant out of pity, hoping they will start paying consistently, it has backfired on us. This year, we decided to not renew these type of tenants.

Agreed. I don't persist with these types, because every time you give them an inch, they end up taking several miles.

 

[kathryn d]

Weg,
I agree. Sometimes when they are made accountable, they are less likely to continue 'theiving'.

Last July we had 2 tenants. We ended up evicting them after 3 months. They have been evicted 4 times since then. Pretty soon they will run out of landlords in that town.At least they didn't owe us money.

 

[MsAli]

I wish it was a shorter process.

Have one tenant about to get booted, already approved by tribunal.

And another just started playing up, going to tribunal soon.

Total so far $8k+ in arrears.

Fortunately I can service the loans quite comfortably, for now...

How long does it normally take for insurance to pay up?

Mate, think you need a better PM

 

[kathryn d]

Agreed. I don't persist with these types, because every time you give them an inch, they end up taking several miles.

Today, as we were showing a property, the tenant said in front of the applicant...I don't want to move. I know we are behind in rent, but my wife's mother died.
Well, the trouble was, they have bounced 2 cheques. They tell us they will have the money in one week, then when that day comes they give you a post dated cheque for the next week....it never ends with them.
When we cash (hopefully) their cheque on Friday..we will give them their tribunal papers.If we did this first, we have no hope of collecting this last month's rent.


We accepted a bond for the place tonight. Hopefully the new tenants will be better.