Video Summary
How do you get rid of an unwanted tenant? Well, you turn to the Landlord-Tenant Act, and the easiest way is if they haven’t paid the rent, you provide them with a three-day notice as to the amount of unpaid rent, and the notice gives them three days to pay the rent or vacate.
If they pay you the rent within the three days, you must accept it. If they do not pay it within the three days, well, then you can then file an eviction action to have them removed, and do not have to accept the rent after the three days expires. The three days are counted, if you served a three-day notice on a Monday, the three days are not up until Friday. They’ve got three full days in which to pay the rent.
You say, “Well, I just don’t want them in there.” Well, if they are a month-to-month tenant, meaning they don’t have a lease, then you can give them a 15-day notice prior to when the rent is due, and terminating their month-to-month tenancy, and then if they don’t move out you can file an action to evict them.
Let me caution you about self-help. You can’t go over there and do repairs and remove the front door. You can’t turn off the power, and if you do any of these shenanigans, well, then they can sue you as the landlord and get three times the amount of rent as damages. So you don’t want to do that!
You can also give a tenant a seven-day notice if they’re violating some term of the lease or doing some kind of conduct as far as damaging the property or not complying with the certain ordinances, and that gives them seven days to come in compliance, and if they don’t, you can then file an eviction action. This is a little more difficult ‘cause you have to prove first that they were not in compliance with the lease provision, usually, and then have to show also that they never corrected it, which is a problem if you have to go to court to evict them. So the easiest way, if they don’t pay the rent, is to give them a three-day notice.
And everybody wants to know, well, about how much do evictions cost? And usually I would say you need to budget between $1,000.00 and $1,200.00 in order to see about getting a tenant out, and that’s in the event that there’s not a whole lot of hearings that you have to go to, and it’s not the eviction from hell.
So if you have some tenant problems, and you need a lawyer to help you with an eviction action, well, give me a call at 727-847-2288.