Landlords, What Are Your Wildest Tenant Stories?

Dave:
Real estate is a people business, but people being people, they’re going to do some crazy things in your properties. Hey everyone, it’s Dave and I’m back here with Henry Washington Henry. Today we’re going to talk about tenants. So my first story is, I don’t even know why I’m telling this story. Basically just going to give everyone who thinks that house hacking is a bad idea. You have to share a wall with your tenant. I’m going to make all their worst dreams because their worst nightmares come true. I think, I don’t know. So I was house hacking. This is like five years into my investing career. It was this little one bedroom, 600 square foot. It was a nice apartment though in a cut up old house, there was a main unit and then a basement unit. I was just sleeping one morning and woke up in my apartment and just heard some noise.

Dave:
It sounded like someone was in my apartment, and I’m pretty casual about these things. So I was just like, yeah, whatever. I was tired. I just rolled over and I was like, okay, this is whatever. That probably isn’t someone in my apartment. I go back to sleep and a minute or two later I hear the toilet flushing and I’m like, what? Okay, that’s pretty weird. This is not that big an apartment. There’s only one bathroom. And I’m like, oh, it must be Jane, who’s my girlfriend at the time. But we weren’t my current wife, but we weren’t living together at the time. And I kind of all of a sudden snapped too. And I was like, Jane didn’t stay over here last night. And so I’m like, someone is in my apartment and I just looking around my apartment, I’m in my boxers and I found, so I like camping.

Dave:
So I pulled out my camping knife and I’m stocking around my apartment, and I walk out into the living room and there’s just this woman fully clothed, asleep, face down on my couch. And I’m like, what is this person doing? And so I went over to her and I just started shaking her and I was like, hello? And she was like, leave me alone. And I was like, no, you’re in my house. Well, you have to get up. And she was like, no man. It’s cool. It’s cool. I was like, no, it is not cool. You can’t be sleeping in my apartment right now.

Henry:
It’s very not cool.

Dave:
It’s very not cool. So it was going on for a minute or two and finally she’s like, no, no, man, it’s cool. CJ said I could sleep over. And I was like, oh my God. CJ is my tenant who lives in the basement and I’m looking around my apartment and I see she had just left cigarettes and a lighter on my floor and I don’t smoke cigarettes. And so I was like, oh, she must have gone outside to smoke or something, gone outside and come back in the wrong door. She was still hammered. You could smell it on her breath. And so I guess in retrospect, I learned that the latch on my door kind of was off, and if you pushed it really hard, it would open. I fixed this later, but didn’t know that at the time. But the funny thing is she wouldn’t leave.

Dave:
I had to call the police to come. I was like, I’m not going to touch her. I’m not going to physically remove from the house. So I was like, I’m calling the police. She’s like, yeah, whatever. She was still so drunk. I was just like, call the police. So the cops came and physically removed her and they’re like, do you want to press charges? And I said, no, obviously. And I went and talked to my tenants and let’s just say that wasn’t the only problem I had with those tenants, but luckily no one was harmed. No one else was there. But that was probably the worst house hacking landlord experience I had.

Henry:
You did more than I would have buddy. I’m not playing that game. I’m so sorry. I’m in Arkansas. I walk out into my living room and there’s a lady laying on the couch. I’m just going to go lock myself in my room and call the police. I’m going to let them deal with it. I don’t know. Her wasn’t, I didn’t touch her. I didn’t talk to her. True. I don’t know nothing. That’s true about nothing. You take care of

Dave:
This. In retrospect, that is true. I probably should have done that. I was just so surprised. It was just so weird. And thankfully nothing happened. But I think that was the worst living in the same building as my tenants story, even though it wasn’t my tenants, they clearly we’re doing something weird. If that was the result,

Henry:
I don’t know. I think everybody, at some point, if you’ve ever partaken of Alma Hall at some point, has had a story where either you or somebody walked into the wrong house apartment building. No, I’ve never, never. I wouldn’t

Dave:
Dream. Yeah. But it was just funny. It was the next morning at nine. It was like 9:00 AM Anyway, so that was my don’t not house hack because of that. It was also my fault because I didn’t realize that my lock was broken, but it was and nah,

Henry:
You got a drunk person, test him.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s true. Putting all of your weight against it and just slamming against it.

Henry:
Well, you need to thank her. She might’ve stopped an actual burglar.

Dave:
That’s a really good point. Maybe she prevented something and this was just a good test for me. Alright, so that’s my first story of me not securing my own property and luckily getting out of that situation without any serious trouble. Henry, what’s your first tenant story you want to share?

Henry:
Well, my first tenant story is the case of the stolen identity. So we had a tenant who applied to live in our unit.

Dave:
This is like a Scoopy do episode. I like

Henry:
It. Yes. Yes. They applied to live in this unit and I would normally keep names out to protect the innocent, but this person who applied name was Samantha Suarez. And Samantha Suarez passed a background check. She was very friendly, she seemed very respectable, and so we said have at it. She moved in and within,

Dave:
Wait, can I ask a question?

Henry:
Sure.

Dave:
Did you meet her in person? Was this on the phone? Was it digitally?

Henry:
Nope. Met her in person.

Dave:
Okay. Now I’m even more intrigued.

Henry:
Seemed like a decent person passed a background check, was a paralegal. She moved in and then within a couple of months she started having issues with payments. But when we would send her the three or five day notice just to let her know, Hey, your rent’s due, she would have very reasonable excuses and she would even say, Hey, I can get you paid by this much. And she would make a little payment plan and timeline and then she would pay by the timeline. But what would happen is she’d pay, it would go through and then the a CH process would then drag out and then it would get rejected. But that process takes several days.

Henry:
And so then we’d have to reach back out and say, Hey, your payment failed. And she’d be like, oh yeah, sorry. I’ll try again. And then it would happen again. And then by the time we come around to it, the next month is due. Right? And so we said, Hey, I understand things are an issue, but we really got to get you caught up and since you were having trouble with the A CH, why don’t you just pay us in person? And so we met her in person and she paid us cash, but it wasn’t as much as she needed to pay, but she gave us some cash and so things were getting a little weird, but she was essentially, once they make a payment, whether it’s full or partial payment, you as a landlord are saying, Hey, I’m allowing you to stay. And so we couldn’t just evict her because she’s made a partial payment and she did seem to have reasonable excuses and she did look like she was trying to make efforts to pay, so I wasn’t going to put her out if she’s trying to make efforts to pay as long as she gets caught up.

Henry:
Well, things were still getting a little fishy and I wasn’t liking it. And then I was out shopping. My wife and I were out shopping for a dress for her for an event, and I got a phone call. It was a lady saying that she was Samantha Suarez. What?

Dave:
And

Henry:
I was like, my tenant. And she was like, no, I’m Samantha Suarez. Someone has stolen my identity. And we were like, what? She was like, I think it’s the person living in your house. And so they wanted us to call the police, and I’m like, well, you need to call the police.

Dave:
I don’t know who the police is. How’d she even get your

Henry:
Number? I don’t know. I think she found it online. I don’t know. She had some line on this lady living there and found my phone number, called me to tell me that the lady living in my house wasn’t Samantha Suarez, and she was Samantha Suarez. And I was like, okay. I was like, well, you need to call the police. I don’t know what’s going on. And the police are going to have to be the ones that are sorting it out.

Dave:
Yeah. It’s not like you’re a detective and can figure

Henry:
This out, but who is a detective? My wife. And so my wife was like, I’m going to get to the bottom of this thing. And so she started doing reverse image searches and started seeing different names and then would confront the lady about the names and the pictures and she would say, oh, that’s my sister. And that opened up this whole can of worms, and we started to reconsider everything we knew about this lady.

Henry:
Oh my God. Then we started to look at the letters she had given us about her employment and the letters and all these things turned out to be completely fraudulent. And so we sent it all to the police and they opened up an investigation. And as my wife was searching, she then found a mugshot of this lady who was our tenant, but it wasn’t her name, it wasn’t the Samantha Suarez name. And so we finally were able to get an eviction processed, and as we were filing the eviction, what took so long is she was fighting the eviction on her own. She was a paralegal and had some legal background. And our attorney even said, I’m really impressed by what she’s doing to fight this case.

Dave:
Wait, so she made up the name part but was actually a paralegal?

Henry:
Yes.

Dave:
So she was still half the identity? Yeah. Right, right. Just the name. Okay, interesting. I guess that’s probably a good tactic.

Henry:
She was holding it off long enough to keep her in there for a little bit, but eventually she lost the case and we were able to get in there with the sheriff, and when we got in there, we show up. The AC unit has been taken apart. All the copper is out of it. We found medical marijuana cards in there with different names on them.

Dave:
I mean, isn’t that a felony?

Henry:
Yeah. I mean, of course this lady’s committed lots of felonies apparently. Wow.

Dave:
Did she get arrested?

Henry:
I don’t know. She was gone.

Dave:
Is it just because the eviction court and the criminal court are different?

Henry:
They completely,

Dave:
It doesn’t get passed along.

Henry:
Exactly. They weren’t there to arrest her. They were there just to evict her, but she was long gone.

Dave:
And I guess you don’t have standing right? That actual Samantha Suarez would need to press charges, right? For the

Henry:
No correct.

Dave:
Felony part of it. Correct. You were just doing eviction.

Henry:
Correct. But we found out who she really is and we gave all that information to the authorities. And so Samantha Suarez, if you are listening, we do know who stole your identity, so hopefully that can help you in some way.

Dave:
Oh, poor real. Samantha Suarez. That’s a terrible story, but good for your wife for figuring that out.

Henry:
Yeah, she was not playing games.

Dave:
That must be so strange to have that confrontation.

Henry:
Yeah, it was super weird.

Dave:
All right. That is a crazy story. I’ve never had that. And honestly, I guess if someone really stole all the information, that’s kind of hard to guard against. If someone really had your social security number and knew this stuff about you, maybe that could happen. That’s kind of scary, but glad that it all got it resolved.

Henry:
Yeah, the identity she applied with was a solid identity. It was a great credit and background check. I don’t know what else I could have done there.

Dave:
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Henry:
Alright, it’s time for a break. We’ll be back with a few more of these crazy landlording stories on the other side. Thanks for sticking with us. Here’s more of me and Dave talking tenants.

Dave:
Alright, well I have a very crazy story for you. This is not just a crazy tenant landlord real estate investing story. I feel like this is just a crazy coincidental story. So I told you a little bit already about I was house hacking this apartment and that below me was this big beautiful four or five bedroom apartment. And for the whole time I was house hacking. And years after, there’s this group of women similar age to me at the time who lived there and we were all really friendly. We didn’t hang out all the time, but if we were having a beer in the backyard, they’d come sit down kind of thing. And they wound up actually living there for I think three or four years minimum. And towards the end they were getting taking advantage, I think of me a little bit. They were moving their friends in and out of different bedrooms without letting me know.

Dave:
And I kind of let it slide all pretty cool. They always paid rent, they took care of the apartment. I was kind of like, whatever. So then eventually they moved out of the apartment and they just didn’t clean it and I was pretty annoyed by it. I thought we were all pretty cool and I just sent them a text and I was like, Hey, I’m going to hire professional cleaners to clean it. It’s expensive. It’s like a 3000 square foot unit. So it cost like 800 bucks. And I charged it to them. I took it out of their deposit and they got super mad even though I documented all of it. There was milk in the fridge, it was gross. There was just food everywhere. They just didn’t clean it up. And so they threatened to take me to small claims court to reclaim that $800 and it just kind of turned nasty.

Dave:
This is really the only time I’ve ever had this in my landlord career where it sort of turned nasty and I was kind of bummed about it. We all got along well and I have a pretty good track record I think, of having good relationships with my tenants. And so it always didn’t sit right with me. Fast forward a few years, I moved to Amsterdam and I’m just chatting with a friend of a friend and he’s like, I was telling him I own these properties in Denver. He was like, I know that apartment. And turns out he was friends with a couple of these women and we were just laughed about. And I told them the story. Fast forward again to just this past summer, my wife and I had a summer party and we invited the guy who was a friend of a friend, we’ve become friends. And in he comes to my party this summer and brings the woman that I had had this spat with and who was threatening to sue me. And she just walked into my apartment in

Henry:
Amsterdam.

Dave:
In Amsterdam this year. This is 10 years later, this is 10 years later. And I’m looking at her and she’s like, because I think my friend Joe told her that we were going here. And she was like walked up to me and I just started laughing because who cares at this point? And I was like, oh my God, what are you doing here? And she was like, oh my God, I wanted to tell you. I’m so sorry for what happened. I don’t know what got over. You were always so cool to us and all this stuff. And I was like, oh, don’t worry about it. It’s all so great. She wound up staying at her party for four hours. We were drinking together until the wee hours of the morning. We had this great closure moment 10 years after the original event. So I don’t know why. I just love that story. It was so great.

Henry:
Well, first of all, what are the chances? Did you party in Amsterdam?

Dave:
Right?

Henry:
But you got your tenant closure. That’s sweet.

Dave:
Yes, it was very

Henry:
Sweet. That’s sweet. So now you can still say, I’m a great landlord and I’ve never had an issue.

Dave:
I think so. I did have some problems with inherited tenants, but not ones that I actually properly screened. But it was actually pretty funny. So my buddy, the guy who connected us the first time, he was like, dude, we used to throw some parties at that house. And I was like, yeah, I know. I lived upstairs. I could hear them. And he was like, yeah, man. The cops used to always get called. I was like, no, they didn’t. He was like, yeah, they never showed up. But I heard the cops were called. And really what was going on is I was pretty cool with it. I was 26 at this time, so I was going out, but at two or three in the morning when I was ready to go to sleep, I would just call my tenant and be like, the cops just called. They said, they’re on their way. Can you just shut down the music and the party and I’ll tell the cops not to come. And they’d be like, yeah, okay. But I was just totally waking it up every time because I wanted to go to sleep.

Henry:
Professional house hacking tip right there, folks.

Dave:
Yeah, there you go. Just bluff that the cops are on their way and you can stop parties

Henry:
That way. You stop the party and you get to say face. Look at you,

Dave:
Look at you. Exactly. Everyone

Henry:
Wins. Creative solutions. Yeah.

Dave:
Well I guess both of mine so far are kind of funny, but obviously not all tenant stories are funny. So do you have any stories, Henry, that you’ve learned something important from

Henry:
Yeah, absolutely. I do. Lemme tell you about this tenant situation we had where didn’t end up going very well, but we definitely learned a lesson. So we had a tenant apply to live and it was a two bedroom, one bath apartment. It was over by the university. And so typically we have students that live there, but this guy was a single male and he had one child financially he seemed to check out in terms of his employment and his background check. And so we rented the place to him and as we fast forward, we started to hear that there was a woman there all the time and there was no woman on the application. And so we always get an application and a background check from anyone over the age of 18 who will be living in the property. And so when we found out that this woman was spending a lot of time there, we were like, Hey, we know you got a girlfriend. We need her to apply. So she took a while to apply.

Dave:
How long is a while?

Henry:
Oh man, we probably sent her the application and it took her about a month and a half before she actually filled it out.

Dave:
All right, so you let it slide for a little while.

Henry:
Yeah, we were lacking in a lot of areas

Dave:
Here.

Henry:
So she finally filled it out and it was not great, but not enough for us to say, Hey, you guys need to move out. But that was kind of the first red flag that she was living there. And then we started to get complaints about noise from children and we were like, well, we thought there was only one kid, but apparently she had several kids and he had more than one kid. And so this is a two bedroom apartment, so there was at least four kids living there and the two adults.

Dave:
Oh my God.

Henry:
And so that should have been enough for us to go ahead and put them out. But there’s kids living there and they need the space and the complaints weren’t that bad, so we really just kind of lolly gagged about that. And then we started to get complaints about smells and both bad smells and marijuana smells. And so we were like, Hey, well we can’t have you smoking inside. And so we talked to ’em about the smoking inside multiple times, but this carried on for maybe, I don’t know, four or five months of the smell. Somebody would complain, we’d tell them to stop it, things would stop and then a month or so later it would start again.

Dave:
Who was complaining other people? Was it a multifamily?

Henry:
Yeah, it’s in apartment building. And so the unit above was complaining because of the smoke smell would get into the HVAC and all that stuff. Again, none of this seemed like enough for us to just say, Hey, you got to go. But then they stopped paying and when they stopped paying, we started to chat with them about that and then they just wouldn’t make payments. And so we started the eviction process and the eviction process drug out really long because what would happen is they kept telling us, Hey, we have a new place to live. We’re just waiting on X, Y, Z to get out or X, Y, Z to get approved. And then they would send us text message screenshots from the other property manager that showed that, Hey, your unit’s not ready yet. We need a couple more days and then you can move in. And so these look like legit screenshots, but one of them finally, they sent me and I saw the name on the screenshot and I was like, Hey, I know that property manager, she manages for another landlord that I know. And so I had this internal debate, do I reach out and tell them, Hey, these people haven’t been great,

Henry:
Or do I just let it ride and let them get out of my property?

Dave:
Well, that’s one of the biggest conundrums and sort of misalignment of incentives in this industry, right? Because if you have a bad tenant and they’re like, I’m going to leave, and then that other property manager calls you for reference, you’re kind of like, well, I want him out of here. But you also want to be honest. It’s definitely a dilemma.

Henry:
Yeah. Well, I like to operate from a place of integrity. And so I called him and I was like, Hey bud, you guys are interviewing. I just want to talk to you about what’s going on with him in my place. And they said, oh yeah, we talked to him, but we told him no immediately. And I was like, what do you mean? They’re showing me screenshots of you guys saying you have a unit ready for ’em? They were like, no, we rejected them immediately. And I was like, what? And so that’s when I was like, okay, they’re forging these screenshots. They really, they’re just trying to just get places to stay. And so finally we had to go full bore with the eviction process, and so it got down to the point where the sheriff had to come and get them out. And so the day the sheriff showed up, they happened to already be out.

Henry:
And so the sheriff gets to the door and my sister-in-law’s with him, we were managing the property on north this time. My sister-in-law’s with him. The sheriff gets to the door and he tells my sister-in-law. He’s like, you know what? I’m going to need you to wait outside. I smell something that smells like a dead body. He was like, I’ve been doing this a long time. I know what a dead body smells like. And so he didn’t let her go in. And so he goes in, clears the place. There’s nobody in there, there’s no dead body, but what there is is just piles of human poop. What? In the corner of the living room, they were just using the bathroom in the living room and it wasn’t recent. There was just lots, lots of human poop in the corner of the living room. There were kids living

Dave:
There. No

Henry:
Four kids living there.

Dave:
Where’d they go? Oh, that’s

Henry:
Terrible. I don’t know where they went.

Dave:
That’s disgusting and terrible.

Henry:
My sister-in-law walked in immediately starts vomiting, so she goes outside and starts vomiting. So we had to get ServPro in there and do a full, what do you call it, make sure that it’s all sanitary and done properly. So we had

Dave:
To get that thing completely sterilized entire place, completely

Henry:
Sterilized, had to redo the floors, had to paint the whole house. It was a lot. And part of the story that makes me the most angry is that they were kids living there in those conditions, man, because it wasn’t like they just were doing that to spite me.

Dave:
I just feel so terrible for those kids.

Henry:
That stuff had been there for a while. And so

Dave:
That is both traumatic and really sad.

Henry:
And it’s tough, right? Because part of the reason that we ran into them is we felt bad for the single dad who couldn’t really find a place to live. And then we let him live there and then we drug the process out because there was kids there and we didn’t want to put everybody out. And at the end of the day, we have a business to run and we learn we have to be more diligent in our background checks. We can’t just believe a screenshot that’s sent to us. We need to actually call the number on there or call the name on there and see if things are legit, right? We need to be more diligent about making sure and following up to see who’s actually living there. Because we had two adults living there and one of ’em wasn’t on the application, and they obviously did that on purpose because when we saw her application, they applied with her in the beginning, we probably wouldn’t have rented to them, and so they were trying to circumvent the system. The red flag that came up for her is she had an eviction on her

Dave:
Record,

Henry:
And so should we have evicted them? We found out she had an eviction before probably. But knowing they had small kids there and they were paying at that time, it was hard for me to just say, you know what? You should leave with your kids. It was tough. So we have to be more diligent. We can’t trust everything we have to trust but verify. You just have to have a solid landlording background and screening process that you follow every single time the same way, regardless of what the story is of that tenant.

Dave:
That’s the real thing about, we always talk about this, but prevention is so much better than dealing with it once. People are always living there. It gets really sticky and really challenging with those kinds of situations. Well literally sticky in this situation. But yeah,

Henry:
Literally sticky and stinky in this situation.

Dave:
Yes, that’s right. We have to take a break, but stick around because coming up, Henry has one of the more uplifting tenant stories I’ve ever heard.

Henry:
Welcome back folks. I’m here with Dave on the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast.

Dave:
I’ll actually tell you a story in case you probably haven’t listened to the first time. I was a guest on this podcast when it was my first year working at BiggerPockets. I told this story, but I’ll retell it. So my first property I bought was this four unit and I was a year out of college. I did not grow up handy. I wasn’t fixing stuff. And this property, I was 80 years old at the time and needed some work, and I just decided I could teach myself. I was self-managing and I wanted to save some money because all the money that was spending on contractors could have gone towards my rent. I was still renting at the time this before I was house hacking. And basically when the inspection happened, there was this railing and staircase that needed to be built in the backyard that goes out to the parking lot.

Dave:
And I decided I would build it myself because I’m an idiot and didn’t realize that building staircase is incredibly difficult. You’re so hard and no business doing it. I started, I’m sure for someone who’s experienced, they could do it pretty easily, but for someone who hadn’t done that much with power tools in his life, I probably bit off more than I could chew. So I went to the pawn shop and bought some tools because actually pawn shops have pretty good tools. They have the best tools. And so I went to the pawn shop, bought some tools, watched some YouTube videos, got the supplies at Home Depot and sat out there just trying to build this staircase and just failing just so miserably over and over again. And so I’m there for four hours the first day, second day I come back and spent six hours just failing again.

Dave:
I think I did this for three or four days in a row. And then the final day I show up and I pull into the parking lot and there’s just this beautiful immaculately built staircase out there, and I’m like, what the heck just happened? And I’m sitting out there amazed. You just saw a leprechaun or something. I was so just taken back by this situation and I’m just staring at it. And my tenant, who I just placed, they were brand new, walked out of the back door and comes up to me and she goes, my dad was over visiting yesterday and he was watching you and he just felt so bad for you that he just built this staircase for you.

Dave:
I was like, oh my God, you’re amazing. Let me reimburse you for this. And I paid him back for the materials that he incurred, but he was just like, you’re a young guy trying your best, trying to hustle and be an entrepreneur. I thought I’d help you out. It was so nice. It was such a wonderful thing for that person to do, but also so embarrassing. I could not look at my tenant for the rest of their tenancy. It was two sisters and they lived there for two or three years. I had no authority with that. My credibility was absolutely nothing. But luckily they were cool and we all got along

Henry:
Pretty well. Oh man. He felt terrible for you.

Dave:
Yeah, which was very kind.

Henry:
He saw what a wreck it was and was just blown away that he was like, this is just a normal 20 something year old man trying his best.

Dave:
Yeah, exactly. Yes. What a nice guy. I don’t even know. 23. Luckily I learned to be a little bit handier, but not that much more, to be honest. I could do some things, but not carpentry.

Henry:
I guarantee you. You did way better than I would’ve ever been able to do.

Dave:
It was just so pathetic. I did not have the right tools. It was just such a, that’s a cool story, really good learning experience, but also aside that people are really cool most of the time.

Henry:
Yeah, man, that’s a cool story.

Dave:
Do you have any uplifting ones,

Henry:
Man? Absolutely. So in this case, we had a tenant who is a convicted felon. He spent 12 years in federal prison for a nonviolent drug charge. Before he applied to live in our place, he had spent over $700 in application fees. So every time he, he’d try to find an apartment, he’d have to do an application fee just for them to tell him they’re not going to rent to a felon. Even when they would tell him he’s a felon beforehand.

Dave:
I hate that. I hate when landlords use applications as a revenue stream. It’s not a revenue stream.

Henry:
No, it’s terrible. And so the way we found out about him was through my wife’s counselor. My wife’s counselor was his prison therapist at one point. And so we reached out to him and when we first talked to him, he just sounded so down and out because he had spent so much money and no one would rent to him, and he was concerned that he wasn’t going to have a good place to live. And in his eyes, he had served his debt to society, which he had, and he just wanted a place to have a good start so he could go to work. But he spending all of his money on these application fees and he is running out of money. He just felt defeated. And so we did tell him that he needed to apply because we did need to see his credit and his background check, and he applied and his story completely checked out. Everything he told us that we would see, we saw it wasn’t any clearly he was being upfront. And when my wife told him that we would rent to him, he started crying. He was

Henry:
So thrilled that someone was going to take a shot on him, and he promised us like swore up and down. He was like, I’m not going to let you down. And it’s been three years now. He’s been our tenant and he called us recently last week to tell us he was getting married. Oh, wow. And he’s just been great, and he always pays on time. There’s never any issue. He doesn’t complain about anything. And then it’s in a duplex and the tenant next door is a little old lady who is very old, and we inherited her and we just didn’t want to put her out because she was a little old lady on disability. And so we’ve kept her in there and he goes and he mows her side of the yard and his side of the yard and make sure that she doesn’t have to do any of those things. He’s just been an amazing tenant who needed somebody to take a chance on him.

Dave:
That’s so great. I mean, did you have doubts when you were agreed to rent to him?

Henry:
I mean, yeah, things like that could be scary. You never know, but he seemed genuine. It was the fact that he seemed so down and out, it was hard to fake that I feel like somebody was looking to take advantage of a situation, wouldn’t be down or bummed about that situation. He was just genuinely saddened that people weren’t having any faith in him, and so we gave him that shot.

Dave:
That’s awesome. Well, good for you. I think that’s super important because people like that don’t have that many options, and it sounds like you read him as a human being. Well, there’s some things that come up on a tenant report, but just meeting and talking to someone will tell you something totally different.

Henry:
Absolutely.

Dave:
Well, thanks for sharing that story, Henry. That is a very nice story to end on. I appreciate you telling us this. Is that your experience that most of the time tenants are pretty cool?

Henry:
Yeah, I mean, we’ve got a lot of tenants and most of them we don’t have any issues with. It’s a select few that we end up having issues with, and it’s either people we’ve inherited or people where we just read the situation wrong. But a lot of the times, man, when situations go bad, life just life starts life in the people, right?

Dave:
Yeah.

Henry:
Even though you can pick a good tenant who ends up in a tough life situation and then things can go south, man, it’s hard to always just remember that yes, you are running a business, but these are people and people have people problems, and sometimes you just got to put yourself in their shoes and that it’s not always most important to make the best business decision. We try to make the best people decision, and sometimes that costs us money, and we’re okay with

Dave:
That. Well, I would say sometimes you don’t make the best financial decision, but that can be a good business decision. You know what I mean? It depends on the kind of business you want to run, and I totally agree that you don’t necessarily need to make the most profitable decision, but sometimes good business is just being reasonable with your tenants. They need to get out of the lease, let ’em out of the lease. You need to do cash for keep. Sometimes that’s just what you got to do. I don’t know. For me, it lets me sleep at night. I don’t stress about it as much. If I could just be a reasonable human being and maybe that makes you lose some money in the short run, but I actually think over the long run, that kind of stuff comes back to you positively. And so that you’re going to find tenants who are going to stay longer, who are going to take care of your place if you just put that good intent out into the world and into your business.

Henry:
Couldn’t agree with you more.

Dave:
All right, well, thanks for sharing the story. Let us know if you like these types of tenant stories. If so, we’ll rack our brain and come back with some more fun, horrible, uplifting stories for all of you here on the BiggerPockets podcast. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next time.