Today I received mail from the bank. It was a returned check for the FREAK tenant that I discussed in an earlier post (see Freak Show, Part Deux). This wack-job tenant wrote me a bad check for her June rent!
This is not the first bad tenant that I've dealt with and so I immediately took action. As soon as I got the letter from the bank, I immediately printed off a 3-day eviction notice. When I went into town to work on my rentals, I posted the eviction notice on her door. That gets the eviction process started! On Thursday morning, I'll have my attorney file the eviction with the court.
After working on a couple of projects with my rentals, I returned home and wrote a letter to the tenant giving her 10 days to take care of the bad check. That is required by law in Ohio before you can file a criminal complaint for writing bad checks. If she hasn't made the check good within the 10 days, I WILL press charges against her. The only other time that someone else gave me a bad check, this was enough to get the tenant to make the check good. In reality, I don't care either way. I despise criminals and I'd be just as happy to see her go to jail as make the check good. Since she is trying to stiff me with this bad check, she's probably gotten away with it many times before! She won't get away with it this time!
There is a good lesson in all of this. I made a big mistake by accepting this tenant. She passed our screening, but there was a warning sign that she was a freak. When we were signing the lease, she asked if we exterminated the property every month. That is certainly not a normal question. I almost didn't sign the lease with her because of that question. It was totally abnormal and shows some sort of obsession about pests, even though the apartment was spotless when she moved in. That was my clue; I did recognize that it was a problem; and I didn't act on it. I won't be that stupid again!!!
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