Many landlords are just homeowners with an extra room or apartment that they use to help pay their mortgage.

What would you do if your parents were in that situation, but the tenant refused to pay, which meant your parents were falling behind on their mortgage?

That is what happened to the family in this story, so the son went through the courts and found a great loophole.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

A future lawyer’s petty revenge on a tenant

In the late 70s my parents bought too much house for too much money.

The place had a basement tenant.

“The rent from the basement will cover the mortgage,” my parents said.

But the tenant wasn’t paying rent, and after a few months, my parents missed a mortgage payment.

They need to evict him ASAP.

The tenant was not even in the place most days. He had another place close to work. He just used my mother’s place as a weekend party crash pad.

I tried talking to him, but he had a really bad attitude.

My father tried to evict the man but was defeated by the paperwork.

By the time my mother asked for my help, they were desperate. They had a mortgage to pay and they needed the guy gone before the bank came knocking.

Sadly, this type of thing often moves very slowly.

The courthouse had a law library and nice people at the desk. With their help I served and filed some forms.

The tenant didn’t care.

He laughed and said I should tell it to the judge.

When the court date finally came the tenant was there, looking smug, as if the law weren’t on my side. I soon learned why.

I watched case after case get adjourned. “First time up,” the judge would say and that would be that. The case would be delayed for another month or three.

But the tenant’s smugness worked against him. The judge did not like him, not one bit, and gave him the heave ho, ordering him evicted effective immediately.

Why is he still so happy?

I wanted to celebrate, but the tenant was smiling as he walked out of court.

That caused me concern.

An old paralegal helped me out. “A judgment’s just a piece of paper,” he told me, “You’ll still need the Sheriff to get him out.”

I’d been clutching my court order like a trophy, but the paralegal’s words deflated me.

“Can the Sheriff come right away?”

The paralegal laughed, telling me about writs and deposits, about Sheriff’s fees and delays.

“Is there any way around that?” I needed help. I was only seventeen, and my legal loophole antennae had not yet grown.

The legal system is horrible sometimes.

“There’s no exceptions,” the paralegal told me, adding that unless the man abandoned the place, I would need the sheriff.

“Thanks for the loophole,” I said.

The paralegal looked at me like I was nuts.

Three days later the tenant knocked on our door, in a rage because his key to his apartment did not work.

“We found the place abandoned,” I told him, which was technically almost true, sort of. It had been unoccupied for a few days, and when I entered purely to do a wellness check, the place had a decidedly unoccupied feeling.

I felt obliged to call it into the police just to report it, make a record of it. Abandoned residential unit. Landlord moving contents to storage.

Hey, at least it seems to be working.

“Abandoned?” the tenant said, “and where’s my stuff?”

The nice lady at the courthouse library had not been very impressed with my eviction loophole. But she helped me draft a release. “You’re going to need one,” the lady said, after admonishing me for coloring outside the lines, and making me promise not to pull a stunt like that again.

“Sign here,” I said to the tenant, trading the release for the storage company’s address.

The tenant called me from the storage place an hour later telling me what a jerk I was, that I’d stuck him with a big storage fee.

“If you don’t pay that storage fee, they’re gonna say you’re abandoned the unit. You don’t wanna do that. You lose all your rights if you abandon a place.”

I hung up the phone.

Well played, people who refuse to pay for their rent and refuse to leave are the worst. Hopefully this guy will learn his lesson, but I doubt it.

Let’s see what the people in the comments on Reddit say about it.

Great job!

A very satisfying story.

This would be the way to go.

There are lots of flaws in the system.

Bad tenants are very costly.

Few things are worse than a bad tenant.

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