If you saw the movie Pacific Heights about the couple who buys their dream home and rents the upstairs to tenant Michael Keaton you would have an idea how bad a very bad tenant could be. My tenant was worse. I landed the biggest fish their was. In the end, I found out that she was a serial offender and made a career of moving into peoples places, tormenting the landlords, being as destructive as possible and then extorting money from the landlord so that she would move and they could be done with her. Trust me. I would have paid almost any some of money to be done with her. She was that bad.

How did I get into that situation? Impatience is the answer. It was between Christmas and New Years and my place had been vacant too long. She came along and wanted to move in immediately. Two red flags should have warned me. First, she was an older woman with zero credit. How is that even possible? The second was that the lease signing took hours because she wanted to cross everything out and rewrite it. OK, so I sound pretty dumb you are thinking. The truth is at the time I was new to the landlord game and I was about to partake in a very steep learning curve.

Quite quickly I realized thing were headed south. There were lots of demanding emails. There were tree rats outside. There was a deafening sound of water rushing through the walls that only she could hear. The plumber was unable to convince her that there was no piping in the area where she heard the noise. Scary, right? It kept getting worse.

I was talking to a friend about how I was having a lot of trouble with a particular tenant. She laughed and said as long as her name isn’t Sybil Smith (not her real name) you are OK. Then we both looked at each other and my mouth dropped open. How did she know Sybil I thought. The next words that came out of her mouth were “Oh no, you are in a lot of trouble”. She had know one of Sybils previous landlords and the stories she told me terrified me.

I came home that day to a pile of citations from the health department. Sybil created her own violations. She ran the hot water in the shower for days to create moisture buildup. She flushed socks and the toilet paper roll down the toilet. She took all the light covers off so my place looked like a tenement. She took me to court for poisoning her dogs. Meanwhile I am the biggest animal lover on the planet and would not hurt a fly.

In the end, she stopped paying. I filed an unlawful detainer against her. She wheeled up the aisle in court with a huge file of paperwork and the best tenant attorney in town. She had turned my beautiful little studio house into a tenement dump and had lots of video to prove that I was a slumlord.

I too had an attorney. He was unprepared, in a cheap suit, and kept suggesting we settle and let Sybil stay a few more months for free. She had already done so much damage. I had to have her out. I had research online and found out about all the other landords she had cheated. Although this information was inadmissable in court, it made me determined to win and I did. Finally I had a judgment against her that would warn the next landlord. The sheriffs locked her out. As a little parting gift to me before she left she took the time to break off all the keys on the inside of the locks to make it extra hard for them to get in. She was extra hard.

The biggest lesson for me was to take my time and watch for the stop signs that spell trouble when it comes to new tenants. After all, it is true that patience is a virtue.