tenant problem
I own a 3 family which I also live in. One of my tenants decided that he wanted to paint his apartment and bought paint last winter. He later asked me to help him paint and I painted his bedroom. Now he has decided that I must paint his entire aprtment and has become hostile…
I own a 3 family which I also live in. One of my tenants decided that he wanted to paint his apartment and bought paint last winter. He later asked me to help him paint and I painted his bedroom.
Now he has decided that I must paint his entire aprtment and has become hostile and aggressive, ,barraging me with nasty emails and phone calls. I have told him that I will paint his apartment, on my own schedule, and have not made any promises. Today he paid his rent, a week late, and deducted 220.00 for the paint he bought. He provided me with a credit card receipt from a paint store, with the total of his purchase, but not an itemized receipt. Is it legal for him to do this? I want to return his rent check and tell him I will reimburse him for the paint,separately from his rent when he gives me an itemized receipt and that he cannot deduct anything from his rent. Is it okay for me to do that? In 12 years, I have never had a tenant like this and am not sure how to handle the situation.
Flora – communication is what gets communicated between two people – it doesn’t (and can’t) exist solely on one side or another.
Did you agree to let him paint? I wouldn’t have until he repainted the horrible color the girlfriend painted. In fact, if I had a tenant who painted (or allowed his girlfriend to paint) walls a horrible color, I’d never allow him to paint again – ever – I’d take care of all the painting myself. Same if he painted without your permission. And anyways, I’d always approve the colors first, whoever does the painting.
Yes, you do need to learn better communication skills. It was stupid to threaten to evict him – you just escalated the situation. It could be predicted that he would then tell you he talked to an attorney and would fight. Let him threaten – it’s the expected reaction to a threat. If he doesn’t pay, call a lawyer – no need to threaten.
Don’t threaten him back. Stop escalating the situation. You have the upper hand here – you just don’t seem to act like you do, and that shows him that you are weak. Not where you want to be in this situation with a raging guy. But your actions have partly created this situation. You need to see it as a business with agreements made in writing. And when those agreements are violated, then act.
I think he made the rent deduction because he is stressed for money now. Who knows if it is a legit receipt – it doesn’t really matter anyway at this point.
If you had his bedroom painted with paint he bought, why didn’t you discuss at that time who would be responsible for paying for the paint? Seems like a logical thing to discuss upfront to me. And if he expected you to pay for it, you should have asked for the receipt before you applied paint to the walls. Deal with situations logically in advance and you save yourself a lot of hassle.
If you’ve never been to housing court you really don’t understand how time-consuming and expensive the process is, even using the “best” lawyer and having the “best” case. It’s not a place you want to find yourself under ordinary circumstances. Is the unknown length of his tenancy adding to your tenant’s stress? I suggest you ask him. Many extraordinary time- and money-wasting tactics can and will be used if you and your tenant become truly adversarial and wind up in court. At minimum, prepare a short-term lease for your tenant (that is, a 30-day lease), which you can choose to renew or not every thirty days. Let your tenant know that to avoid any confusion in the future you realize it’s best for both parties to have terms and conditions in writing and to adhere to them. Since you’re not well, and don’t want added stress yourself, maybe you should communicate that to your tenant and suggest that he begin looking for a new place (but be aware that such notice can work either way). A sample lease with a month-to-month clause you can discuss with your attorney can be viewed at:
http://www.ilrg.com/forms/lease-res/us/ny
Actually I agree with you, 2:26, especially about being very clear with tenants and setting clear limits. All of this looks avoidable if you’ve got a very clear lease and clear terms that you, the landlord, follow and enforce to the letter.
I don’t think that the tenant’s behavior is OK because he broke up with girlfriend. I inferred from the post that this tenant has been a good in the past and that his behavior changed. I was suggesting that if he is undergoing a life change and is otherwise a good guy, then maybe the best tactic is to ask him what’s wrong or otherwise level with him. I mean, who among us hasn’t been in a bad situation and acted badly?
I was suggesting that I have received grace in the past, and that giving someone else some grace is often the right choice.
In rereading the post and seeing the followups coming from the poster, I see that I am inferring this and don’t know. Harassing emails with overblown claims of infestations are not OK. And if he’s always been a jerk, then there’s no reason to cut him slack.
In fact, if this is a chronic jerkiness problem, then perhaps the problem is too much slack in the first place.
I painted his bedroom. His ex painted the ugly color in the *living room*. Maybe we need to learn better blog communication skills?
There has been some miscommunication here, but I don’t think it was so much on my part as the tenants. Looking back, I suspect that by asking me what kind of paint he should buy before doing so, he really may have been hinting that he wanted me to paint his place. But he didn’t say so and I’m not a mind reader.
There’s a lot more to this than I previously posted, it’s looooooong. First, right after he and the Ex moved in, I was fixing something in their kitchen and noticed how crappy the paint looked. I offered to repaint their kitchen, more than once, and they kept saying “No, we want to paint ourselves”. So when he asked me about buying the paint, why would I assume anything but that he wanted to paint himself, as previously stated?
Sorry about your problem, Flora. As an resident owner of a 2-fam, I hope never to have your tenant problems, with or without the heart condition. Nothing much to add here, except it sounds like you are proceeding with common sense. You know your rights and are trying not to escalate. Unless this is a temproary blip in your tenant’s psyche, I fear you are likely to end up going the eviction route, but there is no harm in riding it out slowly (if there is no further rent withholding) as long as you make your limits clear and stick to them, and document everything. The one thing I would add is to keep a contemporaneous log or diary of all your interactions, so you are not trying to remember later the chronology of events or the substance of your conversations. It may come in handy.
Good luck.
It may be that your tenant is raging at you. I don’t agree with vanburenproud that this is acceptable behavior from him because he broke up with his girlfriend. Have a heart, indeed – rather, he should not be abusive to one woman because he broke up with another – this is not acceptable.
Or it may be that there was some miscommunication between the two of you. It isn’t clear from your post – did you agree to pay for paint he bought? If so, did you make it clear he needed to give you an itemized receipt? (some people need to be told these things….) If you agreed to pay for paint, and you think the amount sounds reasonable (did he buy paint supplies and expensive paint?), pay him for it – it is easier than fighting. (For the future, you make you life easier if you purchase the stuff yourself – then there’s no room for miscommunication.)
Secondly, he bought paint for the whole apartment (which you may, or may not, have authorized him to buy.) He thinks you’ve agreed to have the entire apartment painted. Does he have some basis for believing this? (It sounds like he might from your posts.) If so, have it painted and be done with it. Just do it – it shouldn’t take long to have done.
If you do what you agreed to do, and your tenant still is a problem, you have an easy solution since he is month-to-month. If you don’t want to fight due to your health, have a lawyer handle it, and just do it. It won’t get any easier for you if he acts inappropriately towards you and you ignore it.
But it sounds to me like you need to work on your skills in communicating as a landlord dealing with difficult tenants. Why would you agree to repaint a room his girlfriend painted a horrible color anyway? – that’s his responsibility! And I wouldn’t have agreed to pay for paint after he bought it – that was also his problem. (He buys, he paints, but only with your permission. If you pay for painting, you buy the paint.) You have to be firm with difficult people, or it only gets worse.
Yes, vanburen, he is definitely having issues. His hostile emails to me are full of overblown statements like this:
“When we had a rodent infestation in the building you REFUSED to pay for an exterminator!”
We had a mouse. Once. One scrawny pathetic little mouse, which I caught in a sticky trap. My response to that accusation was calm and factual.
And Johnny, I have already mentioned this flexiblity to him in response to one of his bullying emails. When he sent me an email on June 24 and said if I didn’t paint his entire apartment by July 1, he’d withhold rent, I calmly replied that if he didn’t pay rent I would evict him. When I went up to measure his apartment, he got in my face and told me that he’d spoken to a lawyer and if I evicted him he’d fight.
So you see the situation I’m in.
You’re doing the right thing Flora. Try and keep everything calm . . . until you don’t have a choice.
Had a similar problem with a prior tenant. You’re being specific and putting things (professionally) in writing. Any more problems, perhaps remind him that he’s free to go with 30 days notice and see if he gets the hint that leaving flexibility is a two way street.
Good luck,
Great that you talked to housing court, this all makes sense.
Former girlfriend?
Sounds like he’s having a life thing that’s squirting out on you. I wouldn’t kick him out over it at this point… have a heart, people!