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Our Nightmare on Rental Street: Lessons From Evicting a Tenant

My wife and I have long enjoyed the benefits that come with owning rental real estate. The extra income each month has given us freedom within our monthly budget to fund things like our personal mortgage payoff, vacations and other investments. Granted it hasn’t been the easiest side hustle and we have learned many lessons along the way. One of those was the process we had to go through while evicting a tenant.evicting a tenant

Evicting a tenant is one of rental real estate’s darker sides. No one ever thinks they will have to do this when a tenant signs the rental agreement. We trust our background research and intuition about the person we’ve selected to fill the property. And we expect the tenant to honor their part of the rental agreement.

We provide them with quality lodging. They pay us for that service. That’s how this business is supposed to work. So, what could possible go wrong with such a simple arrangement?

Actually, plenty can go wrong. Especially when the tenant sees an opening they feel like they can take advantage of.

This is our story of how we dealt with a tenant who refused to pay his rent, how we went about evicting him and the lessons we learned from it.

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