YOU CAN’T HAVE SYMPATHY FOR YOUR TENANTS. A landlord client just phoned to inform me that her tenants – who had just been evicted — placed a dead fish in the air conditioning filter when they moved out. The smell of dead fish was so heavy in the house, the landlord needed a respirator to enter the residence. Why did this happen? Because the landlord had sympathy for the tenants before the tenants moved in.

A young woman with a baby answered the landlord’s rental advertisement. The young woman said that she needed a two bedroom home for she and her baby. The landlord took pity on the young mother and allowed her to move in with no security deposit, no last month’s rent, and no written lease. The first month’s rent is the only rent that the young mother ever paid.

Two months later, the Baby Daddy gets out of jail. The next thing you know, the Baby Daddy starts selling drugs out of the house. The landlord then hires my office to perform an eviction. Could the tenants just admit they duped the unsuspecting landlord and move out quietly? Of course not.

The tenants got angry that the landlord would not let them live in the house for free, so the tenants put a dead fish in the air conditioning filter. What is the lesson here? YOU CAN’T HAVE SYMPATHY FOR YOUR TENANTS! It will almost always come back to bite you.