I'm often asked this question.  When should I start the eviction process?

Their's actually a two part answer to that question.

Part 1 - You should always start your eviction during...

the screening process before the tenant ever moves into your property.  Here's the best way to do that.

Always contact their current and previous landlord to see if they would lease to them again.

Also be sure to run a background check with your tenant screening service to check their eviction history and credit report to find out if they have any eviction judgements.  Learn more about filing and collection judgements in my article on Judgements - How to File and Collect.

I use National Tenant Network - NTNonline.com.  You can register for about $45 and then you can run as many tenant screening reports for about $20 per name.

Make sure they have stable employment.  As a general rule of thumb I like my tenants to have a take home pay of 3 times the rent.

Another good thing to check is to see if they have at least 2 years of rental history, preferrably at one address.  That way you don't have to train them from scratch.

Plus, you will probably get a tenant who will stay with you long term.  To learn more about Finding and Keeping Long Term Tenants, make sure you look for that article.

Now, if you have to train a tenant from scratch, make sure you are firm and consistent with them every month, especially in the beginning.  Actually, you need to be firm with all your tenants in the beginning.

If you let your guard down, they will rush in and try to take advantage of your niceness and you'll find them giving you all sorts of excuses for not paying rent.

Take my advice.  Don't listen to them, at all.

This brings me to Part 2 - You should always start your eviction process on the first day that your tenant is late.

In my lease, the rent is due on the 1st and late on the 2nd and we mail or drop off their 3 day notice to vacate on the 2nd or at the end of the day on the 1st, if they have not paid their rent or made their deposit. Learn more about Collection Rents on Time in an upcoming article.

We always mail off two copies of the eviction notice.

We mail one copy with regular mail and one copy via certified mail with return receipt. This will get their attention right away.  They will wonder what hit them.  We want to shock them into the reality that they cannot stay if they will not pay.

Now, keep in mind, we don't want to have to evict our tenants, we just want them to pay their rent and pay it on time.

In addition to this, we charge them an additional rent fee, as outlined in our lease.  This is what most leases identify as a late fee.

We charge an additional rent fee because we can evict for non- payment of rent, not non-payment of late fees and we can include it in the amount owed when we attend the court hearing.

Whatever we ask for in court, if awarded, is what we get a judgement for.  This is huge, when you file the judgement, because if the former tenant contact you about the judgement and wants to settle, you are settling from a much larger starting point.

Here's what this means to us as the landlord. If they pay their rent and don't include their additional rents then we can continue on with the eviction process because they did not pay in full.

Now, even if your lease does not have the term "additional rent", your lease should include a paragraph that states the order in which funds are to be applied.

What this means is that when a tenant pays rent late, the money is first applied to outstanding fees & additional rents first and then the balance is applied to the unpaid rents.

Normally our additional rent is 10% of the rent plus $10 per day until paid in full.

In a nutshell what this means is that if our tenant pays his $950 rent on the 4th then he will also need to include additional rents of $95 on the 2nd plus $10 per day for two days for a total of $95 + $20 = 115.

Although we want our tenant to always pay on time, where else can you get this kind of return on investment.  Not even a payday loan pays this kind of return (if you actually enforce and collect it).

We work with our tenants and sometimes we waive their additional rents / late fees if they have communicated with us and have a valid situation that caused them to be late, granted they paid it on the date they said they would.

So to recap, you should always, start your eviction process right away, because the longer you let them "get away" with being late or not paying the more they're going to expect you to let them slide and get away with not paying on time and skipping out on paying the additional rents / late fees.

To your success!

Greg Bell