He Noticed People Were Being Evicted Unfairly By A Shady Landlord, So He Let Residents Know Their Rights And Got The Landlord Arrested

Matthew Gilligan

4 weeks ago

Source: Shutterstock/Reddit

This is the kind of story that warms the heart!

It comes to us from a Reddit user who sounds like a pretty smart cookie to me…and he used those smarts to help out some folks who needed it!

Take a look at what went down.

Bad landlord scams his tenants, goes to jail.

“Many years ago, when I worked for a rent-to-own company in a small town, there was a little apartment complex which we made frequent deliveries to, and just as frequently had to repo from.

It had been a motel when it was built, and the owner turned it into apartments by just making doorways in the walls between rooms, putting a kitchen and living room in one and a bedroom in the other.

It was a sketchy environment.

The place was very run-down and apparently pretty inexpensive, and based on a few things customers said, it seemed that the majority of the tenants moved in there for short times.

I figured it was because they were waiting for prefab houses to be financed and delivered, since the vast majority of housing in that town was mobile homes.

Turns out I was wrong, but more on that later.

Between deliveries and pickups, we were visiting this place multiple times per month, but the landlord wouldn’t let us park the truck in the parking lot to do it.

It was a motel parking lot, so there was way more space than the tenants needed, and plenty of room for our truck.

The minute we pulled into the lot, the landlord would come running out of the office and yell at us to get the truck off his property.

That’s annoying…

We were still allowed to deliver and such, we just had to carry the couches and old-style rear-projection big-screen TVs across the gravel lot from a truck parked on the street. It was more than a little annoying.

Then the day came that I was visiting some customers, a young couple, to have them sign an extension because they couldn’t make their payment.

I saw an eviction notice on their door.

I knocked, they answered, and then they, too, saw the notice.

They explained that they needed the extension because they were behind on rent, but the eviction was unexpected because they were only two days late.

The notice gave them one week to move out.

They signed the extension and I left, a little suspicious because that didn’t seem right to me.

A few days later, I got a call from the couple saying they needed to return the stuff they’d rented because they were being evicted and had to move to a motel.

I told them to wait there, I’d be over in an hour.

He knew some of the rules about this stuff.

My wife had worked in the rental office of our previous apartment complex, so I knew some tenant laws.

When I’d checked after getting the extension signed, I found that evictions couldn’t be served with only a week notice, they had to give 30 days for the tenants to pay or move out.

If they moved out, the landlord could take any unpaid rent out of their security deposit.

This was a small town with lots of mobile homes, so I’m guessing the law was to prevent people being evicted from rented land on which they had a mobile home they owned, but it applied to apartments, too.

Normally, I’d have considered this none of my business, but everyone in our store didn’t like that landlord and wanted to get back at him.

So I printed out the applicable rental law pages from the town’s website and drove over to the apartment complex.

There, I knocked on the door of every one of our customers living there, which was about half of the 20 or so apartments, and gave them a copy of the law.

While doing this, I learned that the landlord had been evicting people like that for being even a day late, then keeping their deposits, citing the very law I was giving to my customers, just not the part about 30 days leeway.

This landlord was a creep.

He charged rent in advance (you paid for the next month at the end of each month), so people were losing their deposits over being one day late.

On top of that, the landlord wouldn’t accept late payments, even if they were before his scheduled eviction time, because he made more money by evicting people and moving someone new in, since he kept all their deposits.

I told the couple that had started all this that if I were them, I wouldn’t move out, and I’d contact a lawyer or at least the city housing department and file a complaint.

They were worried because the landlord had said he’d have the sheriff’s department evict them if they didn’t move out in time (there were no local police–small town), but I said that even if the landlord called them, I doubted they’d actually evict them if they cited the law.

That was about all I could do, and I hoped it’d be enough.

Things changed course in a hurry!

It was.

The couple came in a few weeks later to pay for their rental furniture and to thank me for all my help, telling me the landlord had just been arrested.

They’d filed a complaint, and when the landlord called the sheriff to evict them, it had kicked off an investigation.

I never learned what exactly the charges were, or what happened to the landlord, but the complex ended up under new ownership, and the new manager had no problem with us parking on their property for deliveries.

Also, the number of our repos and deliveries there suddenly dropped, because people were no longer being evicted constantly.

Between that experience and other stories I’ve read online, I never cease to be baffled and annoyed that people don’t know their rights as tenants.

Check your laws, don’t take a landlord’s word for anything, and stand up for yourself!”

Reddit users shared their thoughts.

This person was impressed.