We've all heard a hundred "bad landlord" stories, but how about awful tenants? These ridiculous renters will have you thinking twice about renting out that spare bedroom!
Tenants? More like Hen-ants
“Buddy of mine owned a 3 story house. Got a call from the 2nd floor tenants that water was coming though his roof. He went to the 3rd floor and when the tenants opened the door he could see one of those blow up swimming pools in the living room. Not the little ones mind you but one of the big 24 inch deep ones. As if this wasn’t shocking enough, the tenant had also removed all the kitchen cabinet doors and replaced them with chicken wire and had a dozen chickens living in them.” (source)
A Woman Scorned
“A middle-aged tenant, 40ish guy who was single and some kind of care worker lived upstairs for a while. Every other night he’d have a lady friend over; no biggie that’s normal.
We thought it was the same lady friend, but apparently not. This guy had been playing about four or five girls and one night one of them found out and started a s**tstorm on the landing outside our front door.
Next day I came home to about 50 sexual health leaflets with the words ‘you dirty bastard’ on them, four bottles of cheap ladies perfume each with a different woman’s name written on them and a bottle of antiseptic cream with an instruction to ‘put this on your d**k’, all lying behind the shared front door.” (source)
Well That’s Terrifying…
“This guy (a double murderer who took nine hostages) decided make make his last stand in one of my duplexes. Didn’t know about it until I saw “CHANNEL 11 NEWS” pop up on the caller ID. Then I realized why I’d heard a bunch of helicopters outside. Happened around 4:50 on a Friday. F**k that guy and the night he caused me.” (source)
Can’t Catch A Break
“One tenant I had was a great handyman/construction/deckbuilding/remodeling kinda guy who by all accounts would out work three normal people on any job site. Unfortunately, he decided to apply this same hustle to dealing drugs after about a year of living there. Cops got onto him, swooped in on him SWAT style, and kicked in both doors of my house, tossed tear gas in through most of the windows, and generally fucked the place up in the process of arresting him and searching for drugs. The cops ripped up carpet, one fell through the ceiling from the attic, and they punched holes in walls. I finally get the house fixed and rented, and some of his former “associates” came by and trashed the house looking for cash/drugs/whatever drug people look for. The tenants were not home, but were terrified and moved out. This is a nice, quiet street in a decent neighborhood. Next tenant was a nice couple who were school teachers. Then one day the husband banged a high school freshman and got arrested. The kids father, not content to let the Criminal Justice system do its thing kicked in the front door and went bats**t crazy on the dude, the house, and everything in it.” (source)
This Guy Needs Some New Friends
“One tenant,who i use to live with and still is a very good friend of mine, would make food, only eat half of it and leave it out on the counter for days.
I told him that it was disgusting and I will get mice in my house… Needless to say a couple weeks later everything was going well until i looked for random dishes to make food… As i looked into a cabinet not normally used…I find 6 half eaten pizzas stacked on top of each other, a couple half eaten bean burritos from taco bell and a lot of rat turds….they must have been there for a couple weeks
I go to his room to ensure everything is all right in his room…boy was i wrong… he had left out food everywhere under his bed, on the floor, stains and the wonderful aroma of urine…. He had dirty cloths stacked in his closet about 4 feet high…
Some how I had no idea and I lived with the guy for 6 months…needless to say we had a nice little chat and he moved out with in a month… He moved back in with his parents. ( i fear for their sanity and health).
The thing that boggles my mind is he could have easily just put the pizza/burritos in the fridge 2 feet away or in the garbage can 3 feet away…” (source)
Questionable Decor Choice
“My landlords told me that they used to allow tenants to paint the walls but no longer did. This restriction can all be blamed on one girl who decided she wanted to paint the entire room (walls and ceiling) in dark midnight blue and then, while the paint was still wet, throw handfuls of glitter in it. My landlady said it was the biggest pain in the neck to get rid of because if you tried to paint over, the glitter would still show through. They had to scrape every surface. Now the whole house is the plainest of plain taupes.” (source)
This Guy’s Like A Cockroach
“I grew up in Washington, DC where my parents rented out our entire basement floor. We had one tenant absolutely living in filth. The smell got so bad we decided to evict them. That was when we learned about DC’s Renters Right’s laws. First, you have to prove they are not only in violation of their lease, but also that they have not paid you in excess of three months. So if you do that, you have to inform them of your intention to evict. Then, after three months, you can submit your request to the US Marshal Service, they handle evictions for DC. It is an office of six people, for a city of 600,000. So then you have to wait six months for them to process your eviction. In the meantime, your tenant, that has been living rent free for nine months, has completely trashed the space because he knows he is being evicted.” (source)
These Upstanding Citizens
“My father had a tenant who asked if her brother could come stay with her for a few months. My father agreed without meeting the guy, and he showed up and it turned out that he was in some kind of Neo-Nazi motorcycle group. He had swastikas and even Hitler’s face tattooed on him and his Nazi motorcycle buddies were at the house constantly. They were very careful never to cause any kind of disturbance, but of course all the other tenants hated them and were constantly trying to come up with complaints about them to have them evicted.”(source)
She’s A Real Firecracker
“Interned for a building in NYC cleaning out their tenant files. Found a woman on rent control since the sixties who spent a decade mailing trash she found in the hallways to the management.
Dear __,
here’s a cigar butt I found by the trash today.
Good times.” (source)
Hmmm… Very Suspicious
“Tenants stopped paying rent. Right before they were evicted, the house burned down. Folks were just happy no one was hurt… until the cops told them it had been arson. Meanwhile, the tenants had been living in the garage- where they had moved all of their stuff before the fire. Tried to file a lawsuit saying that the house had been improperly maintained and the fire was our fault.
Took another month to get them evicted.
Insurance covered building a new house, though, so wooo!” (source)
Good Housekeeping
“Had a tenant back in the mid 90’s with 3 boys and 2 pit-bulls, let the dogs piss on the floor so much that when you walked across the room it came up out of the carpet, she let her boys shoot up the air conditioner and siding with BB guns and there were several holes punched in the walls, ended up evicting them for late rent, and getting a settlement for about 8k against them, almost 20 years later we haven’t seen a dime.”(source)
Thats Just Gross
“We have a duplex that we rent out and we couldn’t find anyone as a suitable tenant so we went to Lambros and they said they’d found a family for us. They were these Russian immigrants, and I’d like to preface the rest of the story by saying that I hold nothing against immigrants of any country. Unless you’re a Native American, odds are you’re an immigrant too. Anyway, things went okay for the first couple of months. They managed to destroy a toilet somehow but other than that it was all good. Gradually though every time we would check on their half of the duplex s**t was getting more and more out of hand. There would be garbage strewn about, random stains on the walls etc etc. Eventually we evicted them and as we were cleaning the place up we got to one of the back bedrooms and this horrible smell just hit us like a brick wall. They’d let their little kid pee all over the carpet for the better part of 6 months and the carpet was starting to deteriorate. We had to go in there with respirators and cut out the entire carpet and had to remove parts of the plywood underneath with a sawzall.” (source)
That’s Too Close, Man
“I rented my garage apartment to an acquaintance and first night after he moved in we both went to the bar down the street. We drank for a while, and I got pretty lit, but I went home by myself, locked up the house and crashed. I woke up the next morning and someone is spooning me… I roll over and it’s the guy. I wake him up with a resounding “WHAT THE F**K?!” He apologized and said he had gotten wasted and lost his keys, so he’d broken into through a back window of MY house, found a bed and just passed out.” (source)