Three Tips To Tell If Tenants Are Using Drugs in Your Property
I was busy cleaning up a room in one of my weekly furnished rental properties the other day and guess what I found under the mattress? This was a sure sign there was some drug use by tenants going on.
Hopefully most of you don’t recognize this, but it’s a crack pipe. This one is a rather obvious tell-tale sign of drug use by a tenant, so I’ll give you some more subtle ones.
Missing aerators on your taps. The aerators are the little caps that go over the end of your taps in the kitchen and bathroom and have the little screens on them.
They screw on and rarely ever just fall off. So why do tenants remove them? The screens work great as filters for makeshift crack pipes.
During a property inspection do you see lots of steel wool around, you know the kind used for scrubbing pots? Maybe they just like scrubbing, but it apparently also makes great filters as well and might be a sign of potential trouble!
Are you missing door stops and cannot figure out where they go? Well when used with steel wool, they make great makeshift crack pipes. It is simply amazing how many different ways drug users can come up with to take advantage of their surroundings to get their high.
Disposing of Drug Paraphernalia
As you can tell I have obviously been hanging out with the wrong people who have been kind enough to share this with me and now I can pass it on to you. There are likely dozens of other signs, but these are ones I have noticed time and time again.
So phase two, if you do happen to find pipes, drugs, needles or any other drug paraphernalia, what do you do with them? Well, you have a couple of options. If you can safely handle them, you can drop them off at most fire stations or police stations.
If it is something like needles though, you can often contact the local firehall and they will come collect them, but it’s usually not on your schedule, so make sure you have time available (and this is not a 911 call!!!!). Even if it’s just a pipe there are health concerns, so always be cautious.
Hopefully you are doing your diligent screening in advance and never find out about the darker side of some tenants. If not, at least you are now armed with a little more knowledge!