He Vetted His Tenants Carefully and They Seemed Perfect — Within a Month They’d Stopped Paying Rent and Left $24K in Damage and Stolen A/C Parts
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Background checks are supposed to catch the red flags before they become your problem, but that’s not what happened in this story.
A landlord ran the standard screening process on a couple who looked completely fine on paper, no warning signs, no reason for hesitation.
What followed was a nightmare tenancy that started with unpaid rent after month one and escalated into stolen air conditioning parts, sledgehammered bathroom fixtures, and paint dumped across carpets and tile.
By the time the couple was finally evicted, they’d managed to strip an entire central A/C system down to the vents and leave behind a bill that would make any landlord’s stomach turn.
Keep reading for the full story.
Stole our a/c heat pump
We had to evict a couple. They checked out fine when we vetted them. They weren’t.
Their true craziness was exposed not long after they moved in.
They were crazy fake religious people who fought constantly. They never paid their rent after the 1st month.
They smoked like crazy in a no smoking house and snuck in a pit bull dog. That dog tore up all the doors by scratching through them.
But when they finally vacated, they left a trail of destruction in their wake.
When they finally moved out they literally stole all the parts of the central A/C in the attic, including the air vent tubes, and half the parts of the exterior A/C heat pump unit.
They also spilled paint all over the carpets and tile floors, smashed up bathroom fixtures with a sledgehammer.
This cost the landlord a boatload of money.
$6,000 to replace the A/C. $6,000 to replace the upstairs carpet. Plumbing fixtures probably another $6,000.
Altogether, including all repairs and non-payment of rent, this couple cost us more than $24k.
They had possession of this unit for 7 months total.
They plead their case about landlords getting a bad rep.
THIS IS WHY landlords SEEM heartless. Other awful people who we thought we could trust broke our heart to pieces with a sledgehammer in the bathrooms.
It will take us at least 6 more months to get this repaired, so more money lost.
These tenants sound like absolute nightmares.
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Selling is often the much simpler option.
Tenants are capable of some truly crazy things.
A background check is only as good as the person filling out the application, and this couple apparently mastered the art of looking harmless on paper.
Everything about their tenancy escalated from bad to bizarre, unpaid rent within the first month, a hidden pit bull destroying every door, chain smoking in a house that explicitly banned it, and a move-out that somehow involved dismantling and stealing actual A/C components.
Landlords get painted as heartless (and many are), but stories like this are exactly why those safeguards exist in the first place, even when they still don’t catch everything.
This was more of a home invasion than a legitimate tenancy.
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