Tenant Trouble

[AKpilot]

Aloha,

I am having Tenant trouble. My perfect tenants turned out to be lazy entitled Millennials. I need to evict them, however the only people who can do so are the Hawaii County Sheriffs. For the foreseeable future, the Hawaii Sheriffs no longer carry out evictions. Big Island Landlords are forced to pay for airline tickets for Sheriffs from Maui County to come and do them along with those officer's hourly pay.

This process can cost 10-12K. I am seeking alternatives. Any ideas from my fellow landlords?

Lucky we live Hawaii!

AKpilot

We're all here, because we're not all there!

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Be careful, there was an incident in Hawi earlier this week where the landlord tried to evict his 20something year old tenants. The woman starting shooting, police were called, then she held them off for a few hours. I assume the tenants were hauled off to jail, maybe in the meantime the landlord had time to put their possessions out on the lawn and change the locks?

https://www.bigislandwatch.com/2018/01/2...-eviction/

Percentage change in the level of glyphosate, an herbicide, in Americans’ urine since 1993 : +1,200. Harper's Index

[AKpilot]

Oh I know about Hawi, just looking for suggestions

We're all here, because we're not all there!

[Mr nice guy]

I bounced in busy night clubs for 5 years.

I'm working until Feb 7 and will tgen be available.

I can move in with them.

They will be gone in two days tops if they do it on their own or if I help them out.

I won't break anything.

[SBH]

There is no such thing as the Hawai‘i County Sheriffs.

http://dps.hawaii.gov/about/divisions/la...-division/

Do you have any more reasons for wanting to evict them other than that they are lazy, entitled millennials?

Some possible solutions including the suggestion that it would be cheaper to pay them to leave to also avoid property damage during the process...

http://punaweb.org/Forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=23508&SearchTerms=Tenants

[Tink]

Not to rub salt in the wound if I am correct, but learned a lesson on a similar experience I would like to share.
Had a renter that I gave cheap rent for an exchange of doing maintenence/upkeep while I was away. Problem was when I returned nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing was done on the maintenence/upkeep. Lawn overgrown to weeds and dead, paint blistering off of the house, leaking faucets, on and on.
Problem in evicting was how I wrote the contract in my being too vague in responsibilities of maintenence and upkeep. I was informed that I had to be very specific in the maintenence and upkeep responsibilities in the rental contract, along with the price of monthly rent to be able to prove neglect on the tenant, and their breach of contract.
The only thing that "saved" my home and myself is that it was under a lease contract that came due, and in the next lease contract I doubled the rent portion with no maintenence/upkeep option which got them to move.
Best of luck in your situation, if month to month, raise the rent to help offset the cost of repairs!

Community begins with Aloha

[Chunkster]

The legal eviction process in Hawaii is completely skewed in favor of the tenants, and the sheriff situation only made that worse. It would he be helpful to know the details of just what the problems are, though, because as Tink points out, there are some workarounds depending on the exact circumstances.

[geochem]

quote:

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Originally posted by AKpilot

Aloha,

I am having Tenant trouble. My perfect tenants turned out to be lazy entitled Millennials. I need to evict them...

This process can cost 10-12K. I am seeking alternatives. Any ideas from my fellow landlords?

Lucky we live Hawaii...

---

Sorry to have to say that you're toast... you are not one of the voters that the county or state is interested in, beyond getting their hands deeper into your pocket. I had to go through this exercise and having to pay the law to fly over from another island is only the last step in the process - you have several months of effort to go through before you even get to that step. You have to submit documents to the District Court, having a hearing before a judge (where the tenant can dispute your request for eviction); get a judgement notifying the tenant to vacate, then go back to court to request an eviction order, get that order served on them, and then, when they fail to leave, you have to go back to court to have the judge approve the eviction process. (that's only an approximate description of the process - you can do it yourself or hire a lawyer$$$ to do it for you...). But the process will likely take months - and you better have all your documentation in hand (rental agreements, etc.).

I was very lucky (all a matter of perspective...) - went through the process through the hiring of the process server to deliver the last set of eviction documents to the tenant. During his presentation of the documents to the tenant, the server (bless him) explained in detail what was going to happen during the removal and made it clear to the tenant that, if he valued any of his possessions, it was far better to vacate voluntarily rather than have movers come in and move them out and then the tenant would have to pay get them out of storage. (However, you will have the privilege of paying $$$ the (bonded) movers up front to move the possessions out of the dwelling and into storage). That convinced the tenant to move out on his own, leaving behind truckloads of junk and thousands in damage and cleaning costs, but I was at least saved the expense of hiring the sheriffs. (I'm expecting to sign the papers on the sale of the unit in the next week or so...).

As painful as it might be, the quickest, and possibly cheapest, way to get rid of them may be to ask what it will cost you for them to leave - and write them a check when they move out (more like deposit a check with a third party who will do that)... I've had that work, but was successful only under some fairly special circumstances.

But the bottom line is that the bias of the legal system is entirely in favor of the tenant - the landlord tenant code restricts your taking any but a very limited number of actions to remove the defaulting tenants: "you're on your own, you filthy capitalist...".

And the State and County wonders why there's such a scarcity of rental housing for the poor and downtrodden...

[Rob Tucker]

I had several rental properties out of state years ago> Concerned about the potential for evicting a tenant if needed I asked my property manager how he would handle that. What he said was that the eviction process was so difficult and expensive and fraught with risk of damage to the property itself that he avoided official eviction and preferred to simply pay the tenant $500 to leave fairly quickly and without further damage to the property. He said it worked every time. $500 cash in the hands of a deadbeat was attractive.

Personally I think an tactic of this type is best achieved by a emotionally uninvolved third party.

His line was along the lines of: "Hey, this isn't working out for either of us. We need to move on. I'll offer you $500 cash to vacate in a week without further damage to the property. On the day you leave I will come over to change the locks and hand you five $100 bills."

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

hand you five $100 bills

When I first moved to Maui from the mainland, I had 3 roommates. One was The Worst Person In The World. We tried everything to get along, but finally offered her $300-$400 to move out. She appeared utterly delighted by the proposal. It turned out to be some of the best money I ever spent. The month after she left was like heaven on earth, even the birds in the yard started singing again.

Percentage change in the level of glyphosate, an herbicide, in Americans’ urine since 1993 : +1,200. Harper's Index