A bad-faith eviction during the COVID lockdown of 2020 was risky, especially when the tenants knew how to play hardball.

When one greedy landlord gave a business seven days to clear out their space, he never expected them to clear out all their belongings and make the place pretty much uninhabitable!

Read on for the full story.

Landlord advertises all of our company’s equipment for sale to our competitors. Best follow our eviction to the letter.

I work for a leisure company — think soft play, indoor soccer, laser tag (can’t be specific).

Prior to lockdown, managers and the big bosses were negotiating the renewal of the lease on one of our parks.

Things were going mostly smoothly; however, the landlords were difficult to contact.

But then, everything changed.

Then 2020’s crap hit the fan.

All of our sites were closed, and everything was thrown into a mess.

Negotiations began to slip down the priority list.

Then came the worst of it.

Nobody thought the landlord would push an eviction for an expired lease during this period — especially with it still getting rent, despite the site’s closure and the closure of every business and restaurant in the immediate area.

We were wrong.

A few days ago, we received a letter saying we had 7 days to leave the premises and take everything with us.

We were reminded that anything left in the building after 7 days would become the landlord’s property!

(That line is very important.)

But this business had invested quite a lot in this particular space.

Now, a lot of construction goes into installing our equipment into a new building, which makes emptying one even harder.

Add a lockdown, with no staff and most businesses shut, and it meant that saving much of our assets would prove to be extremely difficult.

To lose a profitable site and all of its assets is definitely a blow to our company.

But here is where it gets worse:

The landlord had been acting rather shady.

A few days into our 7-day eviction, we found out that the landlord had been advertising our park to our competitors.

But he wasn’t offering just the building — he was offering all of our stuff pre-installed. “Ready to go, just needs re-branding.”

The landlord had evicted us from the property in an attempt to increase rent and make a solid profit from our equipment installed, because he thought we wouldn’t be able to empty the park.

We were furious.

So they were determined to make sure he wouldn’t get a scrap of their belongings.

And here is where the malicious compliance came in.

We were told we had 7 days to move everything we owned out of the property. So that’s what we did.

The community around them even stepped up to help.

Local businesses from all around offered up free space to store our things.

A few people came back out of lockdown, and they all spent the rest of the week removing, selling, or destroying everything that was related to us.

We didn’t even leave light fittings.

In every other site vacation we’ve seen, we always end up leaving thousands of dollars worth of disco lights in the ceilings because they’re too hard to get.

We leave most of the construction in, as well as things like the bars and kitchens that all stay intact (recognizable as what they once were).

They painstakingly removed every small detail.

But not this building.

We ripped up the flooring we installed, tore down the walls that were not part of the original structure (wooden walls to divide up the space), ripped apart our manager’s offices, and removed all artwork and lockers.

And the landlord suffered greatly for it.

The landlord now has every new deal he has been making dead in the water, and a large renovation bill to install new flooring, etc.

(Or a company willing to do it themselves like we were).

Lockdown has been extended another 4 weeks, so he has at least another 4 weeks without rent (we were paying) and won’t have any potential buyers.

Some good even came out of the MC too!

Silver lining: The assets we got out of the site (fridges, TVs, equipment, food, tables) have all been sold, and the lack of rent and additional income has helped the business and paid staff wages.

Now this is a lesson on what happens when greed meets grit!

What did Reddit make of this satisfying malicious compliance?

This landlord behaved like a supervillain, and in the end, he got bit in the behind for it!

Many other businesses aren’t so fortunate to pull off this sort of MC.

This crooked landlord may have been sitting on an even bigger legal landmine than they realized.

This user has an idea how they could have gave the landlord an even bigger headache!

This landlord ended up stuck with four bare walls and a rent check that never comes.

The landlord tried to play dirty, but they cleaned house — literally.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.