The Money Kings are keepin' it real, baby!!!

For your consideration: Real Estate Profits And Losses.
Scenario 22: Your Tenant Is In JAIL! You're In Hell.

What??!!

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse with your real estate empire/debacle/mess/nightmare/cash pot/addiction/flop/money pit/ business, or whatever you’re calling it these days, you wander over to one of your units where the tenant is 7 days late on his/her rent. You’re about to lay the smack down!

You roll up to the unit, get out of your car, and walk up the stairs. Right when you’re about to knock on YOUR door, the following interchange occurs:

You: [Hand raised to knock on door.]
Some Dude You Don’t Know: “Hey man. You da landlady? You lookin’ fo Fast Eddie?”
You: “Who’s Fast Eddie? I’m looking for John.”
Same Dude You Don’t Know: “Awww. I get it. Huh. Huh. You want John. Yeah, well, uh. He got picked up last night?”
You: “Picked up? What does that mean?”
Same Dude You Don’t Know: “Po-Pos, man. Day got ‘em. Don’t know when he coming back . . . Hey! You got a smoke?”

After knocking on your door a few more times. and politely telling the dude you don’t know that you have no cigarettes, you enter your unit.

What you find is a dark, cold living space possibly crawling with ants or flies. You find stale bread. You find moldy fruit. You find that your tenant has been hauled off to jail!

What sucks about this situation is that it’s similar to what we described earlier in the week with naked women costing you money: As soon as your tenant goes to jail, it’s like Uncle Sam personally takes more money out of your pocket each second. YOUR tenant sitting in jail means nothing but a mess for you.

AND there’s nothing you can really do about it . . .

The reason The Money Kings say that there’s nothing you can really do about this situation has more to do with what we’ve seen done in the past in this type of scenario vs. what we know is legal.

The Money Kings have seen:

• Landlords contact the tenant’s family to find out how long the tenant will be in jail (all of this information may be completely inaccurate), and if the tenant is going to be in jail indefinitely, then the family will come to remove the tenant’s items from the unit and tell the landlord to re-rent the unit.
• Landlords accepting payment from family/friends of the tenant in order to “hold” the unit till the tenant gets out of jail (these could be partial or full payment).
• Landlords mail tenants in jail telling them that they realize that they’ve fallen on hard times, but if they’d just sign the enclosed lease termination contract then the landlord will store the tenants items until his/her release while renting the unit to someone else.

ALL of the aforementioned means the following to the landlord:

• Confusion.
• Lost time.
• Misinformation from dudes unknown, ignorant family, miscellaneous idiots looking to gain access to the unit.
• Useless phone calls to local authorities and prisons trying to find the tenant and track where he/she will be transferred and/or held and for how long.
• Probably at least 2 months without income from the tenant as they move through the penal system—depending on the crime, of course! (the tenant doesn’t pay rent and still gets free lodging from THE SYSTEM even though the whole unit is empty)

In the end, how can you legally solve this problem?

Eviction!


That’s right! If your tenant goes to jail, and completely disappears, the only thing you can do to legally re-rent your property and gain valuable income is the same damn thing that you have to do if the delinquent tenant never went to jail at all!

1. Mail the tenant pay or quit notices (in jail), and be able to prove to a court that your tenant received the notices (good luck).
2. Follow the eviction process to the extent the law allows, and pray that you win.
3. Contract with the county sheriff (whenever he/she gets off vacation/has the time/feels like helping you), and then have the tenant’s belongings put out on the street (after all the food has been rotting for weeks).

The Money Kings can’t emphasize enough just how fast you must move when you find out that your tenant has gone to jail. You need to be moving toward eviction YESTERDAY!

This is all great news, isn’t it?


Good luck out there.

Keywords: real estate, investing, income, tenants, jail, prison, eviction, landlord