Hi all,
As the title suggests, my tenants are in arrears and I'm taking them to the Tribunal (QCAT in QLD). I was wondering if anyone had some advice for me since this is the first time it has happened.
I found out the tenant was in arrears when I received my fortnightly statement and called them up when I saw the lack of credit. Their response was "yep they're in arrears, do you want us to send a remedy of breach?" So basically it took 2 weeks for me to find that out. Are they required to notify me ASAP and not just wait for me to call them? This was also the 2nd time this has happened with this particular tenant and it was their last chance.
I had to do some maintenance on some trees on the property anyway so I gave them 24 hours notice to go there myself. Without even walking around the house I could see finger painting on the walls, extremely dirty carpet, unkempt lawns and gardens etc. The PM did do an inspection 1 month prior and provided photos showing it was all clean.
So basically I got the PM to lodge a remedy of breach request (7 days), then a notice to vacant (7 more days) and they didn't move out - effectively squatting. At this point they have not paid rent for 1 month, wiping the bond money. Anything else is a loss, and there is no repercussion from the tenant to actually clean the property before they vacate.
The next step was to lodge an urgent application with QCAT for a 'warrant of possession', which it took 1 week to actually get a hearing date nominated, and the hearing date was nominated for 2 weeks after that (it's actually set for Feb 13th). Then i'm told it takes 2 more weeks for the police to come and act on the warrant to boot the tenants out.
So effectively, in QLD it takes approximately 7 weeks to evict a tenant from the date you start the process. Since I missed the first 2 weeks it will be 9 weeks total. On top of this, I am anticipating the house to be in an un-rentable state, where I will have to potentially have to re-paint, re-carpet, and do a lot of gardening maintenance. I have landlord insurance which only covers wilful extreme damages and it sounds like I will have to replace this at my own cost.
The tenant is a young single mother with 3 kids living off Centrelink. It sounds like she knows that she can squat until the police come kick her out. It also turns out the PM never sought my approval for such a tenant, or provided me with a copy of the lease agreement at the time. No offense intended but I would have said no to such an application because of alarm bells in my head about someone not working.
So I guess my questions are:
As the title suggests, my tenants are in arrears and I'm taking them to the Tribunal (QCAT in QLD). I was wondering if anyone had some advice for me since this is the first time it has happened.
I found out the tenant was in arrears when I received my fortnightly statement and called them up when I saw the lack of credit. Their response was "yep they're in arrears, do you want us to send a remedy of breach?" So basically it took 2 weeks for me to find that out. Are they required to notify me ASAP and not just wait for me to call them? This was also the 2nd time this has happened with this particular tenant and it was their last chance.
I had to do some maintenance on some trees on the property anyway so I gave them 24 hours notice to go there myself. Without even walking around the house I could see finger painting on the walls, extremely dirty carpet, unkempt lawns and gardens etc. The PM did do an inspection 1 month prior and provided photos showing it was all clean.
So basically I got the PM to lodge a remedy of breach request (7 days), then a notice to vacant (7 more days) and they didn't move out - effectively squatting. At this point they have not paid rent for 1 month, wiping the bond money. Anything else is a loss, and there is no repercussion from the tenant to actually clean the property before they vacate.
The next step was to lodge an urgent application with QCAT for a 'warrant of possession', which it took 1 week to actually get a hearing date nominated, and the hearing date was nominated for 2 weeks after that (it's actually set for Feb 13th). Then i'm told it takes 2 more weeks for the police to come and act on the warrant to boot the tenants out.
So effectively, in QLD it takes approximately 7 weeks to evict a tenant from the date you start the process. Since I missed the first 2 weeks it will be 9 weeks total. On top of this, I am anticipating the house to be in an un-rentable state, where I will have to potentially have to re-paint, re-carpet, and do a lot of gardening maintenance. I have landlord insurance which only covers wilful extreme damages and it sounds like I will have to replace this at my own cost.
The tenant is a young single mother with 3 kids living off Centrelink. It sounds like she knows that she can squat until the police come kick her out. It also turns out the PM never sought my approval for such a tenant, or provided me with a copy of the lease agreement at the time. No offense intended but I would have said no to such an application because of alarm bells in my head about someone not working.
So I guess my questions are:
- Do I have any recourse with the PM that they didn't get my approval of the tenant or give me a copy of the lease?
- What would happen if I just shut off the water supply and locked the meter box or something like that?? I'm joking of course, but I wonder...
- How do I get compensation from the tenant? Do I need to lodge another QCAT request or will this warrant of possession hearing also give me some sort of compensation arrangement of the rent in arrears and any property damage?
- Do I need to front up to QCAT with a bunch of copies of documents or a written summary of events? Or will this just be an automatic thing? No one seems to be able to tell me...
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