My last post was about bad landlords. Now it is time to talk about tenants.

As you know there was a post running on Letting Campus about tenants. But not one day sooner or later I got a call from an estate agent in Gauteng that just had to deal with a landlord that has a absconding tenant leaving him and the agency to deal with 26,000 and some change arrears in electricity.

Yuck, not nice, these things happen, but they can also be prevented. Now the landlord will have to pay all the arrears even THOUGH figures this…… the account was in the name of the tenants.

But the tenant left, and paid nothing to the municipality even though he promised to and made arrangements.

The only problem left with the empty property now is that it has to be rented out again, but to do that the bill has to be paid and if he pays the bill, the tenant gets away with not paying the electricity and the municipality not having to chase him because the landlord was forced to pay it.

What now? Now the landlord has to chase the tenant to get the arrears out of him and that will take long process of finding and suing and waiting and hopefully getting one day, (after all the legal costs) his money out of the tenant.

That is very sad. But unfortunately it was not necessary, it could have been avoided.

There are so many more problems with tenants, than I can’t count. You may want to see this Letting Video about tenants and try to stay safe and protect your letting business.

Build sound processes and procedures to ensure everyone is safe, the tenants get their rights and you get your money.

Other than processes, it could have easily been avoided with a simple pre-paid electricity meter that costs a few hundred bucks.  

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.