After Your First Tenant Eviction

You’ve just completed your first tenant eviction. Now the rubber hits the road.

Do you pack it in, sell the property go back to your nice safe GIC’s and money under the mattress so you don’t have to deal with this type of stress anymore, or do you put your head down and trudge forward?

Unfortunately, many landlords use this to call it quits which is pretty disappointing. Rather than taking this as an incredibly valuable lesson, they simply make the decision it’s not worth it.

And I can understand that, after all I’ve been there.

Tenants you’ve trusted with your property have betrayed you, they’ve left a massive mess behind in the home you lovingly fixed up, and you’re stuck cleaning it up, your debts are racking up as you don’t have income coming in to cover mortgages, taxes, insurance and utilities.

It’s a real kick to your pride, to your motivation and to your dreams.

The Tipping Point

It’s also a tipping point.

If you’re not familiar with a tipping point it’s that time when you’ve reached a pinnacle of a mountain and if you move just a little bit further forward, you tip forward and have cleared the peak.

Or alternatively you don’t quite break that crest and begin to slip backwards.

In my mind when you slip backwards, that’s when you’ve given up and decided to move on. You decide landlording isn’t for you and you fix the property up, sell it and move on.

Often that becomes the easy decision because after all who would want to go through the nightmares of another tenant eviction?

If it’s happened once, its going to happen again and what if it’s worse right?

Well, that would be one way to think about it, but what if you looked at it as a lesson you learned and can improve upon, rather than an indicator of future problems?

Lessons From Your First Tenant Eviction

I’m betting if you decide to move forward over that mountain top and past the tipping point you can take a ton of valuable experience from the situation.

Why was the tenant evicted?

Were they poor tenants to begin with? If so, would better screening processes have helped?

Was it a miscommunication that started the troubles? Would clearer communication have prevented this from getting to where it ended in an eviction?

Was it a breach in the lease? Perhaps explaining the ramifications of breaches right from the the start could have prevented it.

There are simply dozens of different paths that you could learn that will take you to better, more positive tenant experiences going forward.

I learned a ton from my first eviction (here’s a link to the article I wrote about it – Five Lessons From My First Eviction).

Big Picture Thinking

After your first eviction what if you realized you’ve now gone through one of the biggest challenges that almost every landlord faces, the eviction process.

What if after your first eviction you now understood how evictions work and it took the fear, the frustration and the confusion away from having to do it again?

What if you realized you simply chose the wrong people for tenants and that with more stringent screening you could easily avoid the mistake you made?

You do realize I have a course on Screening Tenants that teaches you all the secrets I learned from dealing with over 1,500 tenants and after having rejected literally tens of thousands more.
It will change the way you screen and make future (or even your first) eviction considerably less likely.
It’s a comprehensive course going through not just screening, but how to write your ad to attract better tenants, but what pre-screening questions to ask to help you avoid time wasting applicants that you’d never rent to anyway, explains the process of running credit checks along with where to get them done and how to understand them and perhaps most importantly, what to say to tenants you have to reject.
If knowing all this would help your ability to move forward you can go take this course here, Screening Tenants The Educated Landlord Way.

Big picture, after you’ve gone through evicting a tenant you;re going to be more diligent with choosing your next tenant. You’re going to be more thorough explaining ramifications of breaches. You will now understand the steps involved with evicting a tenant and the time it takes.

All of these will make you simply a better landlord.

Ultimately though it’s your choice. Do you take these valuable lessons and the experience you’ve already gained and throw it away due to one bad situation, or do you take the experience and use it to become an even more educated landlord?

What are your thoughts or experiences regarding your first eviction?