01-28-2018, 04:41 AM
quote:
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...