Landlord Blues: Renting out the house from hell

Tenant: Individual room let to single, unemployed man, Peter. 
Duration of tenancy: 18 months. 
Monthly rent: £180.

We thought that the next inmate, who was going to move into Gethin’s room, looked more promising. He’d seen my 50p advert in the newsagents’ window (not my £50 one in the local newspaper). Although thought he sounded dodgy at first when he said he’d split up from his partner in mid-Wales (unverifiable) and was now living with his sister (the worst tenants do this after being thrown out by their landlords for non-payment of rent) and had just lost his job but was in any case, self-employed usually as a carpenter (the word ‘self-employed’ had become anathema). He also used the dreaded word ‘desperate’ which usually made us run a mile. 
I met up with him at his sister’s house the next day though and he seemed a nervous, shy but pleasant type. I could actually see him shaking, which I presumed to be the result of his relationship breakdown, so I felt a bit sorry for a man in his 40s going through that. His mum and sister were present and the mum showed me her wage slips as she was going to be his guarantor and his sister had already submitted his benefit claim on-line. 
‘Crikey’, I said to him, ‘you’ve got a good team working for you’. Having a guarantor made him a pretty safe bet.  The only thing that was nearly a deal-breaker was when he asked if there was a TV aerial in the room. I ‘phoned Adrian and he said that this was something Peter would have to sort out himself, but I over-ruled him as it was worth sorting one out to secure the tenancy. 
‘I can’t live without my soaps,’ Peter had declared, in a defiant tone. I recalled how Gerald had once suggested we install TV aerials in all the rooms.  Adrian had given his usual answer: 
‘It’s not a Travelodge.’ 
The TV aerial negotiation settled, Peter moved in the next day and we had a second ‘paying’ tenant there. Hooray! Although I did worry about him as he looked so fragile and I thought he might be lonely up there with just Jason for company and, being unemployed, he would constantly be at home. I needn’t have worried as the two had a lot in common.
It turned out that Peter’s shaking hands were more likely caused by alcohol withdrawal. And it became clear that we now had two alcoholics in the house; one of whom, Jason, regularly broke doors and windows and then, when sober, politely offered to pay to sort out the breakages.  The other one, Peter, sometimes made attempts on his life and would then be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, but the rent always came in, so it was better than having a teetotal, mentally stable non-payer. There was, of course, a fair amount of drama and, fortunately, we only saw the tip of the iceberg, not being present to see all the rows and drunken episodes. 
We'd get a glimpse from time to time, for example, I received a call from Peter one day, as he and Jason had fallen out and he was now ‘in hiding’ at his cousin’s having been threatened with violence. He had mentioned to Jason – probably in a drunken moment, that he'd been in trouble with the law after an incident involving 15-year old girls lifting up their blouses, being photographed by himself and other men, one of the girls crashing one of the men’s cars and our tenant ending up on the Sex Offenders Register (he said the girls had been willing participants but when they’d crashed the car reported the men to get out of being prosecuted over the car).  Jason’s girlfriend was now refusing to come to the house if there was a sex offender there and Jason allegedly threatened to beat Peter up or have his mates beat him up if he didn’t immediately vacate the house. Peter stayed out of the way for a couple of days and then the men kissed and made up.

The next thing on Adrian’s agenda during this time, was to contact the other tenant, Jason regarding the noise-nuisance, but his ‘phone was switched off, so he ‘phoned Jason’s sister, Melanie, instead. She was one of the many female relatives who seem to be sorting out a whole generation of men. A meeting was arranged between Adrian, Jason and the sister.

We weren't especially concerned about him making the house difficult for the current housemates; that is, Jason wasn't driving out two good tenants (Gerald and Gethin), with his loud music – since we were evicting them anyway for non-payment of rent. In fact, bad behaviour by Jason might hasten them on their way. We did worry, though, that if we managed to get decent tenants to replace these two jokers, they might be driven out by Jason's lack of consideration, so the issue had to be tackled. At least Jason was an amiable type and his rent was always paid (by the State). The outcome of the meeting was that Jason was put on a final warning.

The month before we'd got rid of Gethin and Gerald, Adrian had texted Adam – our only ‘good’ tenant – because we hadn’t received the rent, and he had texted back to apologise and say that he had lost his job three weeks earlier, but had put in a claim for LHA.

‘He’s a great guy’, Adrian said, ‘devoted to his kid.’

‘Well, we’ve had that before’, I replied. We’d had fathers who seemed devoted to their child; that is they still wanted to be fathers after splitting up from the mothers, but it didn’t always mean they paid the rent. In my book, that made them rubbish people, as we were paying the mortgage and bills and they didn’t give a damn about us. The good thing was that Adam did seem okay and was trying to find another job. But it meant that, all of a sudden, we had three out of four tenants not paying the rent! The mortgage had gone down at the time to under £200 a month (from a high of £600), but the council tax, water and electricity came to over £300 because of their decadent use of it. With one person paying £217, we were running the house at a loss, therefore, when we should have been making a profit for a change.

Anyway, Gethin, the selfish good-for-nothing, wouldn’t even get us the Deposit repayment code and they wouldn't pay us without it. Obstacles were put up everywhere. Why couldn’t we tell the Deposit Protection Service the facts and then they could ring and check with him and pay us the money? Instead, the rule was that if the tenant does a runner and won’t contact the deposit scheme to release the deposit that we have to get a solicitor to vouch for us… they say a lawyer will do this for a fee of £5.

In fact, we'd already asked our conveyancer (through whom we'd bought all our houses several years earlier) to sign these forms loads of time (for free – because she doesn’t ‘do’ £5). Since we weren't buying any more houses and she hadn't made a penny out of us for some time she had started to pull faces when we asked for yet another favour, so we felt we couldn’t ask again. We didn't know any other lawyers and when I popped into a lawyer's office on the high street, the admin assistant unsurprisingly said that the lawyer would not sign anything for £5. People often say 'talk to your lawyer' or we'd had tenants say 'we want to speak to your lawyer and not you.' Where does this idea come from that everyone has a lawyer? Who does unless they're always in trouble with the law?

Also (while I'm going off on one), how does a lawyer signing that they can vouch for us prove we are owed the money? It’s completely illogical. I felt like demanding that the DPS give us a list of the lawyers who work for this pittance and we’d beat a path to their door.

We in fact had to wait several years before we got the couple of hundred pounds back. Adrian renewed his friendship with an old school pal, via Facebook, and it turned out he was a high-flying lawyer. Adrian could now take his old pal for lunch and he would sign the necessary paperwork when tenants had done runners, to enable us to finally get the deposits.

Anyway, back to Adrian's idea of visiting Gethin in his workplace: I advised against.

'Mmm. Considering he's a body-builder, he might punch your lights out,' I suggested.

So we waited until he'd moved out. Adrian then went to the house and found a letter from ‘Orange’ showing he owed over a thousand pounds and threatening him with legal action; it’s a way of life for some. And in response to the bleeding hearts who would side with the Gethins of this life, how can one justify using a mobile ‘phone excessively instead of paying to keep a roof over your head?

Later on and in response to several texts from Adrian, Gethin texted to say he'd changed his job and was no longer working at the garage, so there was no point going to see him there and also could we do him a favour and not ring him at his (old) workplace?

'I don't want my employers knowing my business,' he said, meaning that he didn't want them to know he was a defaulting tenant who didn't pay his way in life. But he wasn't so scared of their disapproval that he would actually put his hand in his pocket. With these debtors it had to reach the ‘terrified’ point on the scale for them to actually hand any money over (and since we don't employ heavies, we couldn't instil terror in anyone). It was also a lie about him having changed jobs, as Adrian saw him lounging about outside the garage one day when he drove past.

Gethin Morris, who was one of the quieter tenants, had started to play up by now. It could happen very gradually, the transition from good to bad tenant. There would be a few late payments, a few missing payments, and then the person would go incommunicado, refusing to answer the ‘phone. This was now happening with Gethin, until one day Adrian received a text saying he was ‘going to see his Dad’ at lunchtime that day. What that was supposed to mean? Was he just telling us that he had social plans or did it mean he was going to borrow money off his Dad?

And why would he need to? He was earning £800 a month and his rent, including all his bills, was £217, so where was the problem? During months when he didn’t pay us, it meant he had £800 disposable income, just to spend on himself.

Naturally, he made no specific promise to pay anything in the texts he then sent us; instead, he went on about another tenant, Jason, keeping him awake at night with his music.

'Well you should have mentioned it before,' Adrian countered.

'It's made me late for work five times,' Gethin replied.

'Well, he's still got a bloody roof over his head,' Adrian fumed to me. ' Not to mention heat and light.'

But of course this was the ‘counter-attack’, implying that he shouldn’t have to pay the rent because one of the other tenants was annoying, but he hadn’t liked to say. Indeed, he said to Adrian that he didn’t want him to raise the matter with Jason as it would make things awkward.

This type of response was part of a pattern; if the rent hadn’t materialised, tenants would often tell us something negative about the house. As Adrian said, we were still paying the mortgage, council tax, water and electricity, without receiving a penny from him. And if Gethin found the behaviour of Jason so intolerable, was he saying he wanted to leave? ‘No’, Gethin replied, 'I like the house and want to stay.' (But still no mention of paying us any money for the privilege.)

'I'll be in the area, just near your workplace tomorrow,' Adrian texted to him one day. 'So I'll call in at lunchtime to see you.'

Gethin immediately texted back: 'No, I'd rather you didn't. I'd be uncomfortable with others at the garage, knowing my business.'

We should respect his wishes and feelings.

In fact, by law, we probably had to, although we had previously called into the pub where a tenant worked as a manager and eventually he coughed up what he owed us and got out of our house, purely because he was embarrassed by us calling in at his place of work.

We would never have got him to pay up, had we not had the leverage of being able to go into his public place of work. If he’d worked in an office in a closed building where you needed authorisation to enter, we'd have been impotent. He refused to speak to me, however, and insisted he would only speak to Adrian, man-to-man. He was scared of me; all five foot three of me. Some men just can’t have a woman tell them anything.

When he did eventually get out, he still owed us over £500, so Adrian sent the following text:

Adrian (8.31, 28 March):

Gerald. You haven’t written with payment plan nor repayment code so I have no option. You haven’t paid a penny since 21 February despite previous promises to pay weekly. You will liable for all costs and this could have been avoided. If you pay 50 today and every Monday until debt is cleared we will delay action.

Gerald (8.35, 28 March):

I can’t afford that amount weekly so i need balance then i will seek legal advice which I will get free due to low income.

Adrian (8.35, 28 March):

Balance given in letter dated 9 March, advising you to seek legal advice. 541.18 is due at moment.

Gerald (8.59, 28 March):

The amount i was paying you off debt was a lot less than fifty pounds per week i will offer you twenty pounds per week on tuesday’s that is max i can afford if not suitable then you have to do what you have to do, that’s my last word on subject; can’t give you what i have not got. But i still require a balance if this is acceptable i will organise for you to have one eighty bond as well. I think that’s a reasonable offer considering my financial situation. After bond it will be eighteen weeks at twent pounds. Yes or no.

Adrian (9.06, 28 March):

I accept, starting tomorrow. I will write to confirm.

So, Adrian spent a considerable amount of time some days, sending texts, reading daft replies and then sending further texts. It was interfering with him enjoying walking the dog, tapping away on his mobile as he tramped over fields. And then there were the hours spent preparing court papers and court appearances which more-or-less swallowed up whole days, because we couldn’t think of much else on a day when we had a court hearing.

When Gerald texted with the above repayment plan, I was gullible as usual, thinking he was likely to stick to the plan, because he wouldn’t want his financial affairs in the spotlight. I felt that, as a fellow business person, he might be more likely to pay his debts as he would be able to relate to the experience of being owed money and not receiving it. I was wrong and in the end, we got the £180 deposit, which he lost nothing by signing over to us, as he never could have got his own hands on it and he paid one instalment of £20.

We could have blackmailed him, by threatening to report him to the Inland Revenue, as it was clear he was living completely out of the system, paying no tax. We also considered getting a court judgement against him, followed by bailiff, but it was all so much negativity, that we just couldn’t handle it. In addition, we had a problem brewing with another tenant at the house.

When we finally got him out and advertised his room, we received a call from a woman and I put her off, more or less saying that, as a woman, you’d have to be a maniac to live with the kind of tenants we had there.

Adrian also surmised that Gerald was now doing badly on his stall, but that he couldn’t pack it in and sign on, because of his being out of the system. Maybe it would then all blow up in his face. I once met a landlady who said she rented out 13 houses and dealt only in cash. She couldn’t go on holiday, as she would have liked to have done, because a big part of her time was spent calling around the houses collecting the cash. From this I deduced she wasn’t paying tax. This meant she was open to being blackmailed by any one of those tenants, who could threaten to report her to the Inland Revenue; or the tax authorities might stumble on her anyway as a person whose name came up 13 times on the Land Registry. I also wondered where she kept all the cash. It wouldn’t be hard to work out she was letting the houses out and she could easily be sent to prison. Some might think they’re smart not paying tax, but it’s a worrying way to live.
And it wasn’t our fault if Gerald also chose to live his whole adult life not paying taxes, even when times had been good. He'd told Adrian there had been times in the past when he'd taken over a thousand pounds a day. 
So, he was committing a criminal offence and if he chose to stay at our house, not paying us anything, we would be justified in using any means of redress we had, including contacting the Inland Revenue if he didn’t pay what he owed us. We didn’t in the end; sometimes we felt life was just too short to get all worked up and try and prise money out of people. It felt like we were belittling ourselves.
As usual when people are in the wrong, Gerald was now becoming increasingly stroppy. The first time I’d met him was at the market stall; because I hadn’t been to the house since he’d moved in, Adrian introduced me and he said, in a really sarcastic way: 
‘Oh, yes, I know who she is.’  
I’d only ever spoken to him on the ‘phone and had always been polite, so I was caught off-guard. Mind, he didn’t have much going for him, as a scruffy, 50-something, grubby-looking bloke with a beer gut and rotten teeth. Maybe that was enough to turn a person sour. 
Quite often, the main problem when we were trying to get someone out, was that they had nowhere to go. It could be because they didn’t have the deposit, or because other places were more expensive than ours. It looked like he had nowhere to go and the fact that he knew he was on his way out meant, predictably, that he stopped paying altogether, whilst also refusing to get out. 
On the 23rd of March, Gerald actually answered some of Adrian’s texts, in his usual sour tone, after Adrian asked him to get the deposit, which was lodged with the DPS, released to us:
Gerald (9.26am, 23rd March):
Gonna do it 2day nd ill sort tha owt told u tha nd I will

He wrote like an illiterate northerner. 

Adrian (9.41am, 24 March):
Gerald. How did u get on getting the repayment code off dps?

Gerald (9.44am):
Send me details again and i’ll try and get through today, if home in time. Paper work every where and i want you to sign that house left in good order from my part.

Adrian (9.46am):
And I want u to write your offer to clear arrears by end Friday.

Adrian once more gave him the details of the DPS telephone number and the deposit ID, even though he’d had this several times already from the DPS and from us. He owed us over £500, showed no inclination to pay any of it, wouldn’t even sort out the £180 refund of the deposit, which cost him nothing to do, apart from one ‘phone call and which would reduce his debt, and he thought he could make demands on us.
Adrian (19.33, 27 March):
Gerald. As u haven’t taken away yr items and given me the keys u r liable to double rent from tomorrow. I will write to u at Hill View to confirm yr tenancy will continue until keys returned. 

Gerald (19.37):
Don’t try and be funny you told me i had till monday morning to sort and Monday morn it will be sort.

We didn’t get this text until the next morning as we’d switched our ‘phones off to get a bit of a break.
Gerald (8.06, 28 March):
My items have been removed your keys on computer table in bedroom. All i can say is ‘bon voyage’.

Adrian (8.09, 28 March):
OK. Where shall I send the court papers? Unless I hear otherwise I will use your work address.

Gerald (8.22, 28 March):
Work address be fine if you wanna go that route, but don’t forget i haven’t refused to pay therefore you wasting court time.

He believed that because he’d never ‘refused’ to pay, we couldn’t take him to court or if we did, we'd get nowhere; according to this, if he kept promising to pay ‘at some stage’ ad infinitum that would be sufficient to avoid a legal judgement against him. If only it were that easy. 

We knew Gerald was likely do a runner sooner or later and that once more we would be hundreds or thousands out of pocket. We were wracking our brains for ideas on how we could somehow get him to pay; for example, we looked into getting a charge on the house he reckoned he still owned with his ex. Adrian paid £4 for an on-line search at the Land Registry to check who owned this property and found it had belonged to two men for the last nine years, without even Gerald's ex-wife’s name being on it, never mind his. That meant we wouldn’t be able to put a charge on his property, because he didn’t own one. We also wouldn’t be able to get an attachment of earnings because he didn’t have an employer. 
I found the psychology of people's rationalisations when they were in the wrong intriguing; they would flip the blame onto others or try to set a different agenda. For example, one day, Gerald said to Adrian, ‘You don’t care’. Well, why would we have cared about him? He didn’t care about us either.
He was also forever trying to dream up arguments he could use against us. Because we’d done everything right, though, including Adrian going up regularly to clean up after the lot of them, he couldn’t come up with much. What was clear was that the man really hated us, although we’d always been decent towards him. 
‘I’ve got a mind to put in a counter claim,’ he said to Adrian on the ‘phone one day. 'Your house is damp and it’s not fit for children. I’m in the process of looking for somewhere else to live.’ 
Adrian immediately replied: ‘I’ll take that as you giving your notice. Let’s see, it’s the 20th today, so you will be out by the 20th of next month. Is that right?’ 
‘Yes, it is,’ Gerald mumbled. He had only said to Adrian that he was thinking of looking for somewhere else, but Adrian seized the chance to turn this into a notice. He then refused to say in what ways the house was unsafe for children; his imagination didn’t furnish with him any usable examples. In any case, we rented him a double room for single occupancy, sharing with three other adults. It wasn't a family home, although he had the habit of leaving his daughter’s things all over the house, in the lounge and in the spare room, including a bike, skates and a stack of toys. On his tenancy agreement was written his name, not his family’s. It was the usual attempt to slander the house in an attempt to get out of paying rent. 
‘If it isn’t good enough,’ I thought, 'GET OUT! And we’ll get in someone who pays the rent.’ 
He was now, allegedly, moving somewhere with space for his daughter. That was going to cost more than he was (or wasn’t) paying us. It was the same pattern we’d seen with another ex-tenant; he hadn't paid us the £220 per month rent but moved somewhere where he was supposed to pay £400. I pitied that landlord. Of course we weren’t given as referees. The tenant’s trick when they end a tenancy on a bad note is to say they're living with family and can’t therefore give a reference or maybe that they’ve sold their home and have never rented before. They then hope you don't check up on what they've said.
And the house was not damp (we were spending a fortune heating it 24 hours a day) and it was inspected all the time by the various departments of the council as they were determined to monitor landlords’ every move, regularly writing us threatening letters saying they were going to take legal action if they didn’t immediately see the latest gas safety certificate, even before the annual renewal date. We would get visits by Environmental Services, Trading Standards, House of Multiple Occupation officers and so on, who demanded us to do all manner of expensive ‘improvements.’ One of them once asked us to fix a neighbour’s guttering, because the water was dripping onto our wall (the neighbour had refused to do anything about it) and the officer then suggested we re-render the entire back wall. 
‘Have you any idea what that would cost?’ I countered, as I stood with him in the back garden; of course, he didn’t have a clue or care. I went on:
'The thing is, the monthly mortgage payment at the moment is over £600, and we get an income of less than half that every month.'
This was the same officer who wanted us to paint the small garden gate as it would ‘create a good impression.’ 
I had a moan with Adrian later on. 
'What about the non-paying tenant pissing in a pot because he can’t be bothered to use one of the two toilets?  Are we creating the good impression for him?'
So, back to Gerald and attack was the best form of defence, and quite common amongst our tenants. Of course judges were often happy to indulge them, so we couldn't just shrug off the threats. We’d had judgements against us for completely uncorroborated claims, like one tenant's suggestion that we were harassing her by hanging around the house in our ‘van’, when we hadn’t gone near the house in months for fear that she would try and pull a stunt like that and didn't own a van. The judge had taken the woman's word for it and withheld her forwarding address, which meant we had no chance of enforcing the judgement against her. So we couldn’t just dismiss malicious counter-claims, knowing they could be taken seriously. Weeks were now passing, however and Gerald showed no sign of getting out.