Nothing Personal

This week’s goals are pretty much the same as last week’s: renovate Stan’s old apartment at property Beta and get it ready to rent out before Friday, and file the amended tax return for 2010. Stan’s brother, Kris, has left the apartment so I’m going there after work today to see what needs to be done. I’ll buy materials today then play hookie tomorrow and get as much work done with Carver as possible. I handed in all the paperwork for my tax guy Ross to file the tax return so I’ll speak to him tomorrow to find out what’s taking so long to file.

Eleven days. Yeah. I’m so anxious to throw out the idiot upstairs tenant of property Alpha, Nicky, that I’m counting down the days. As I look over her tenancy, I realize I made two mistakes. The first is renting the apartment out to her in the first place. I knew she couldn’t afford the apartment but I rented to her anyway because it would be only her and her kid living there. The second mistake is making things personal with her. When she was texting me and I didn’t respond, it showed that I was mad at her. She reciprocated the anger and now we don’t talk at all. This sucks because I have no communication with her and I don’t know what she’s gonna do at the end of the month. It was a stupid mistake on my end. No matter how bad a tenant is, it’s the landlord’s job to be the professional, not the tenant. Deep down, tenants know this. Once the landlord gets unprofessional, it gives them carte blanche to act the fool. What bothers me most is that I’ve had worse tenants but was able to remain professional, so why did I pick a fight with Nicky?

Maybe it was because I was so mad that she subletted to her welfare friends. I hate welfare abusers with an extreme passion and I hate that they found a way to sneak into my life again. I guess I also had hope that, even though I rented to the wrong person, I could still make it work. Nicky was finding ways to pay every month and I was giving her advice about banks and money and stuff. She was like a project to turn a bad tenant good and it was working until this welfare crap came up. The lesson, I suppose, is to keep it business. The last time I made it personal with a tenant was when I had a guy living in the downstairs of property Chi named Cliff. 

He would usually be a couple days late with rent but he usually paid without a problem. One month he was maybe ten days late. I sent him a letter saying that he had to pay rent or get evicted, then he replied with a letter of his own asking to be paid for all the work he's been doing around the house. I called him up and started yelling and cursing at him, and things went downhill from there. I should have sent him a letter explaining why he's not getting paid extra for that work (we had signed a maintenance contract along with the lease) along with a three-day notice. Instead I made it personal and then code enforcement got involved and everything went to hell. Cliff was a long-term tenant of mine and even though the chances were that he was gonna get evicted anyway, I could have handled it better so that it didn't have to get so ugly.

No matter how much crap a tenant gives me, I’ve got to keep my cool. Landlords that make things personal are usually the ones that end up with holes in the walls, lawsuits, and all kinds of drama. Sha likes to make things personal with tenants and I’m supposed to be doing the opposite of how he practices business. The lesson is learned, and I should've only had to learn it once.