During the COVID pandemic, lots of people lost their jobs and had to find various ways to make ends meet.

What would you do if you had a rental property, but the tenant refused to pay their rent, even though they didn’t lose their job, because it was illegal to evict them at the time?

That is what the landlord in this story experienced, so he removed all the locks on the doors until the tenant paid their rent again.

Check it out.

AITA for removing the lock from the door of my rental property?

I (39M) lost my job due to COVID.

Luckily my wife still got hers and I have inherited my parents’ house 3 years ago and converted it into a rental property, so we have enough income to provide for bills, food and school supplies for the children (10M and 6F).

Good thing they have some income.

Moreover, I occasionally do gardening for the neighbors in order to earn something.

The tenant living in my house is an ex coworker of mine.

He did not lose his job since he joined the company many years before me.

In addition, his wife also has a decent job so they have a solid income every month.

Wow, that is a jerk move.

Now the problem is that my coworker just stopped paying the rent some months ago.

In my country (not US btw) it is not legal to evict someone atm and he wants to take advantage of the situation.

Clearly this is a problem since not only we lost a crucial income, but we also have to cover bills for the rental property out of our pocket and this is making us struggle.

I am furious, so I asked my brother (who is a lawyer) what could I do to force the tenant to pay.

At least the law gives him some rights.

He told me that, since he has not been paying for more than 6 months, the house is legally mine (even though I still can’t evict, law is law).

Therefore I can do whatever I want, so I just removed the locks from every door (the main one and the one on the back) in order to scare my ex coworker (criminality is not exactly low here).

It took a week before the tenant started paying again in order for me to add the locks again.

I guess he should have paid his rent then.

However, he has been blaming me a lot since I put the life of his family (he has a 5yo son) at risk.

AITA?

It sounds like he put his family at risk himself by failing to pay rent.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say.

Yup, the tenant was horrible.

Here is someone who thinks the tenant was taking advantage of the pandemic.

This commenter says that the tenant’s idea backfired.

This person says the tenant was taking advantage of the situation.

The tenant was endangering the landlord’s life too.

This tenant was taking advantage of the situation.

The landlord had to make a move.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.