My eyes were opened to the more bizarre side of life when I became real estate landlord. For it is here that very few people are as they seem to be and even though everyone knows the rules, they don’t abide by them. Case in point: my latest ex-tenant Travis*

Speaking with this nice young man on the phone was easy and he seemed earnest.  His clean credit check and other rental intelligence systems seemed to support what I already thought about him. I called his former employer as he was relocating to our city for a new job and listened to him extol the virtues of this clean and quiet young man. With everything checking out I offered him the room in our condo where he would share space with two other gentlemen.  It sounded like I had just found another great tenant to match the two we already had there.  Unfortunately it was not to be.

 Although he signed a year lease, it was only two months later that Travis lost his job. He would be staying with us another month while he looked for another job. In the red hot Alberta economy he should have had another one that afternoon but it didn’t work out that way.  He didn’t get another job though and instead worsened in his attitude toward the condo and the other tenants. It was a slippery slope from there as he accused the others of stealing his food and threatening to kill him if he didn’t turn his computer speakers off while they were trying to sleep.  It was shortly after they came home one day to find him watching TV in his towel that they issued the ultimatum of he goes or we go.

You certainly can’t blame them and neither did I.  While I urged him to hastily make other living arrangements elsewhere, I had to wonder if his references really didn’t know him or if they were just glad to find another schlep to pawn him off on.  I doubt I will ever figure that one out. All I can do as a landlord is my best due diligence and hope others are as honest as I am. *Names have been changed to protect the not so innocent as I too know how to play the game

Rhonda Hoffman

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