Dealing With Difficult Tenants

When managing residential properties one bad tenant can often undo the good work that one hundred excellent ones may have achieved. A bad tenant is a bad tenant regardless of whether they are in the West Riding, Western Australia, Westchester, Wanganui or the Western Isles.

And those bad tenants come in six fishy flavours, and any professional letting agent will soon recognise them. They are:

· The Piranha. The rowdy snapper who upsets the neighbours
· The disappearing Dogfish who ups and does a runner
· The Sprat, who can't or won't pay the rent
· The destroyer Shark who damages or wrecks the place
· The moaning Marlin who will find fault with everything
· And lastly good old Barnacle Bill, who downs anchors and refuses to move

Any letting agent who tells you they have never housed a bad tenant has their pants on fire. All letting agents experience bad tenants from time to time, the test of their expertise is in how they deal with them. Amateur and new letting agents can often be bamboozled by dealing with the six difficult fishes. Worse than that, they can often overstep the mark in trying to solve the problem.

Occasionally landlords and property owners will try and bully the letting agent into taking inappropriate or even illegal action in an effort to bring the matter to a successful conclusion. Agents should always resist this. Flirting with and overstepping the legal line when dealing with bad tenants is fraught with danger, as it will be the Agent and not the landlord, who will always be held to account.

Property Agents run the risk of changing from operating within the law, with the full weight of the law behind them, to being outside the law, and at real risk of prosecution themselves. It's a risk never worth taking.

There are ways and means of dealing with all the six fishes, legal ways and means, and anyone letting residential property should always bear that in mind. Stay within the law, and you will experience far less sleepless nights.

Copyright David Carter 2005. Reproduced with permission.

David Carter was for more than ten years the manager of a property letting agency where he presided over thousands of successful property lets, sales, and refurbishment projects. His new book, SPLAM! Successful Property Letting And Management runs to over 240 pages and can be bought from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or ordered through your usual bookstore. The ISBN is 1-4116-3444-6. You can read extracts from the book, or buy a downloaded copy, at http://www.splam.co.uk. You can contact David on any matter at supalife@aol.com

There is something emotionally charged about the buying and selling of New York high-end real estate. How else to explain the juggernaut of reality TV shows about high-end brokers?

After 30 years of marriage, Sharon and Michael Newman decided it was finally time to move from the Catskills to New York City.

On blocks near Kissena Park streets are quiet, houses are small, and the electricity that charges the atmosphere in downtown Flushing is nowhere to be found.

A five-story, seven-bedroom house in Brooklyn Heights has sweeping views of New York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline.

Demand is so intense that there are waiting lists in some buildings, and a few landlords report that eager renters are even bidding up rents.

Sales at the very high end of the market barely missed a beat in the recession. But that prosperity hasn’t yet trickled down.

A Flatiron condo, a Midtown South co-op and a Brooklyn Heights carriage house.

A four-bedroom ranch in Montclair, N.J., and a four-bedroom colonial Cape in Babylon, N.Y.

For a century, Roosevelt Island housed a grim penitentiary. It was demolished in the 1930s.

More borrowers are opting for fixed-rate loans with terms other than the standard 30 or 15 years, especially when it comes to refinancings.

Two more glass skyscrapers are added to a group of towers on the waterfront of Long Island City.

Insurance coverage for a co-op unit; when a tenant is ‘blacklisted’; a co-op is smaller than estimated.

The market for $500,000-to-$600,000 houses in Westchester has become especially active.

A shaky real estate market means more sellers are providing buyer concessions, from gift cards to help with paying property taxes.

Houses of worship are adaptable to residential and other uses as congregations dwindle.

Nearly two million Americans could benefit from mortgage relief from the nation’s biggest banks, as part of a broad government settlement to be announced on Thursday.

A cold war-era satellite relay station is for sale in California after a Silicon Valley mogul gave up on plans to turn it into a weekend home.

How can I make my front porch more appealing to buyers?

Court hearings meant to protect New York homeowners from foreclosure are hopelessly slowed by endless paperwork and requests for additional information.

The Bay Area and Silicon Valley expect the windfall from the Facebook stock offering to make their in-demand region even hotter.

The house, designed by the architect Eric Fisher, looms over the street like a big industrial arm.

A town house in Dallas, a midcentury modern in Rhode Island and a Tudor in Denver.

Prices in some parts of the country are still off by as much as 25 percent from their 2007 peak.

Trinity Church is the largest landlord in Hudson Square and is part of the effort to rezone the area to residential from manufacturing.

Rising oil prices and a boom in shale exploration are leading companies to add office space in the Houston area, most notably Exxon Mobil.

Ms. de França is the president and chief executive of Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, which focuses on new residential developments.

Meet the real estate broker’s interns: an ambitious group willing to do anything, earn nothing and wake up early on a Sunday to fluff the couch cushions at open houses.

A Flatiron condo, a Midtown South co-op and a Brooklyn Heights carriage house.

A four-bedroom ranch in Montclair, N.J., and a four-bedroom colonial Cape in Babylon, N.Y.

Homes in Dallas, Rhode Island and Denver.

Compare the cost of renting and buying equivalent homes.

For recently divorced men, a new breed of decorators offers help navigating a strange new world.

Plants that light up the winter garden can be found at Broken Arrow Nursery in Connecticut, which has long been a favorite of gardening geeks.

A sister in need drew the painter Beverly McIver back home to North Carolina, unaware that a new beginning was in store for both of them.

A jewelry designer finds striking new objects for storage.

Timothy Sakamoto and Jochen Repolust are part of the small but growing niche making mobile apps focused on specific works of architecture.

To promote an auction of 20th- and 21st-century design, the interior designer Stephen Sills has created a preview exhibition in an apartment at the Apthorp.

Fishs Eddy now sells plates acquired from the archives of the now-defunct Syracuse China Corporation, many more than 100 years old.

The designer Russell Greenberg creates custom baby rattles with ends shaped like profiles of mom and dad.