“Will you work with me?”  and “Will you work with us?” are tenant’s two favorite phrases.  Tenants use them all the time.  Let’s dissect them to find out what those phrases actually mean and the psychological impact they are supposed to have on a landlord.

Landlords work.  All the time.  A landlord’s job never ends.  From placing ads on Craigslist to find new tenants, to responding to nasty letters from Code Inspectors, a landlord has a full time job.  So, landlords respect the word “work”.  The word work is serious.  When a tenant asks if the landlord will “work with them”, the tenant is playing on the landlord’s belief that the word “work” is a serious word and that the tenant must therefore be serious about fixing the problem of the unpaid rent.  And, of course, if two people are working on a problem together, the problem will usually get fixed faster than if only one person is working on the problem.

Unfortunately, the tenant is the only person that can fix the problem of the unpaid rent.  The landlord can’t “work” on that problem at all.

The phrases ‘Will you work with me?’ and ‘Will you work with us?’ don’t mean the following:

WILL YOU, THE LANDLORD, AGREE TO ACCEPT IN THE FUTURE, MONEY THAT IS OWED RIGHT NOW?

The answers to this question should always be no.  Never agree to “work with” a tenant unless you are working to remove the tenant’s crap from the unit after the tenant hasn’t paid.