1 week ago
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I recently came across a Reddit thread asking, "Landlords of reddit, what are your tenants from hell stories?" and let me tell you, some of these are WILD. Landlords already have a reputation for being strict about rent, but after reading what some of these people have been through, I can kind of see why. Turns out, all it takes is a few nightmare tenants to make renting out a property a whole lot more stressful than it needs to be.
Here are 32 tenant-from-hell stories that might make you think twice about renting out your property.
1. "Guy gets evicted, and instead of just trashing the place, this fucking guy cuts out chunks of drywall, puts dead fish inside the walls, and seals them back up. The tenant was a carpenter, too. Couldn't figure out where the smell was coming from for weeks. Repainted, had the place professionally cleaned multiple times, and searched everywhere. Eventually, figured something had to be dead inside the walls and started knocking holes in them. Turns out, it was that piece-of-shit move by the tenant."
2. "My parents decided to rent out my childhood home, and I suggested renting it to a coworker. I'd worked with this woman for several years and thought she and her family were decent people, so I trusted them. They brought bedbugs into the house and did quite a bit of damage to the walls. They also ripped out and sold 100-year-old hardwood trim, removed the central air conditioning unit and sold that, too, and generally fucked the place up. After they were kicked out, they skipped town once they found out their wages were being garnished."
3. "We had one tenant who wouldn't pay rent. We followed the proper protocols to evict him, but he kept getting the judge to grant him extensions. He ended up staying rent-free for seven months. He also complained about absolutely everything. "The neighbors are too loud." "Someone's car alarm went off across the street." "One of the neighbors has a cat, and I'm allergic." There was literally nothing I could do to remedy any of those situations. When he was finally evicted, he left the apartment in shambles. There were holes in the walls, curtains stained with what I can only assume was doo-doo, and cigarette burns all over the rug. I wouldn't wish a tenant like that on my worst enemy."
4. "My mom had some tenants in a rental property who were apparently serial crap sacks, moving into a place until they got evicted and then moving on to the next one. They'd do things like stop paying rent while claiming the AC was broken or there was some other property-related issue, then avoid actually letting anyone inspect the problem or fix it. Long story short, after getting evicted, they waited until the very last minute to move out, left a bunch of their stuff behind, and filled a microwave with hot dogs that they left to rot. While my mom was in the process of getting a court order, the TV show Hot Bench (a Judge Judy spinoff) called and asked them to appear on the show. Everyone got flown out to LA, my mom got her money, and the crap sacks got berated on national daytime TV, so I suppose it all worked out in the end."
5. "We had some tenants who never paid rent and eventually got evicted. My parents decided they could save some money by cleaning the place up themselves. This was the worst idea ever. I didn't understand what a lot of the stuff I saw that day was until much later in life. The first thing I saw when we walked through the door was a fish tank full of dead, exotic fishies. In the bedroom, we found used condoms, used tampons, and used needles just lying around. Once my parents saw that bedroom, they gave up and hired a cleaner, but I heard about what else they found. They found a cat shoved into the toilet in the master bathroom. It was terrible."
6. "In 2007, an older couple decided to stop paying rent, but they had pretty good excuses, so I didn't evict them until they'd gone three months without paying. Finally, I went down to the courthouse to file an unlawful detainer against them. We eventually had our day in court. The woman, who usually dressed nicely and wore fake nails and an expensive weave, showed up looking like an old hag. The guy was using a walker (eye roll—this fucker didn't need one). They claimed I was a slumlord who never fixed anything, but I had receipts for every repair, including a new AC unit. After I got the judgment against them, I tried to garnish the man's wages and was told he worked for Coca-Cola Co."
"Turns out, they'd never heard of him. After a little digging, I found out they'd both been arrested for selling coke. The officer even showed me mugshots dating back to the early '80s! They also stole the refrigerator."
7. "I rented one of my houses to a woman I worked with. She was married and had two kids, and she seemed to do fine at work, so I didn't think much of it. It was my first and last time renting out a property. I didn't know the laws in my state very well, and I was very lenient about rent being a few days late. She never even paid the security deposit, but I was a student, busy with school, and needed someone in that second home so I wouldn't have to cover the expenses myself. She really took me for a ride. She knew all the laws, and I ended up having to go to court twice. I was lucky in two ways. First, we communicated via text, and I had SAVED every message and gave the judge a copy. Second, her boss wouldn't give her the day off to go to court, so her husband, who seemed to be in on the whole thing, was stuck trying to defend them for not paying rent."
"She tried to claim I'd said things I hadn't, but those messages saved my ass. Luckily, they were eventually kicked out, and the house suffered very little damage."
8. "I had a tenant remove the kitchen island and move it outside by the pool because they needed an outdoor serving area."
9. "A tenant rented an apartment that didn't come with a parking space. When an apartment in the building that did come with one became available, he asked if he could have it. I told him it would cost $XXX.00 extra per month. He then started posting propaganda all over the property about the injustices I'd supposedly committed by not giving him a parking space for free. He even tried to get other tenants to sign a petition demanding that I give up my own parking space on the property. He then took us to court. He lost, but not before putting us through a fucking nightmare with his shitty personality and sociopathic tendencies."
10. "My dad owned a property that used to be a restaurant, and one day, he asked me what I knew about "Kim." She was a year ahead of me in school, and she seemed smart and reliable, so my dad decided to rent the old restaurant to her family. Big mistake. They TRASHED the place. Their two gross, big, ugly dogs shit and peed everywhere; they put holes in the walls, and they took plates and cups from the restaurant's original collection out back to use as target practice. They just generally fucked the place up, and it was horrible. They eventually stopped paying rent for several months, and my dad finally kicked them out, but not before they'd made the place completely unlivable."
- why___me
11. "We had a young couple move into a house. They were young and relied on benefits to pay their rent, but the landlord wanted to give them a chance. Two months later, we got a call from a locksmith contracted by the police. The police had raided the house the night before because the young man was a drug dealer. They had literally smashed the front doorframe out of the wall, and the locksmith had been called in to repair the damage. We called the woman. The young man was in police custody, and she couldn't afford the rent. She wanted out of both the tenancy and the relationship. We visited the house to check the door, and it was in pretty bad shape. They had a dog, despite the no-pets policy, and it had apparently been shut in a bedroom a lot. There were feces and chew-and-scratch marks everywhere."
"They'd also been smoking despite the no-smoking policy, and the house stank of stale cigarettes.
Agreed to let them out of the tenancy and put the house back on the market. It cost thousands to get the place back into shape, including installing a new front door, redecorating, and replacing all the carpets. The house was just about ready to advertise when we got a call from the neighbor. There had been a disturbance the night before, and he'd had to call the police. It turned out that after being released from custody and being unable to get back together with his girlfriend, the young man had broken back into the property a couple of days earlier to squat there. He then had a visit from his supplier, whom he owed a lot of money to. The supplier ended up stabbing him, and he almost bled to death on the brand-new cream carpets."
- fazzoo42
12. "We rented a two-bedroom unit to two grown women who both had jobs, mind you. They complained that there were roaches, even though the previous tenants hadn't had any problems with them and we'd had the unit cleaned before they moved in. We got the issue resolved, but they kept complaining about roaches. At that point, we started wondering if one of them or her roommate had brought them in. Fast-forward to October 31, when they both moved out. We got the keys and went to check the unit, only to find it absolutely trashed. They'd left most of their belongings behind, including bottles on the counter, glasses, plates, cutlery, clothes, shoes, and food just scattered everywhere. Oh, and there were roaches. LOTS of them. We called junk removers, but they wouldn't remove anything until the place was roach-free. We called pest control, and they told us to remove all the stuff before they could do their job. FML."
- m2k88
13. "I had a resident who would constantly complain about things that were out of our control and then ask for a rent credit for his "inconvenience." His complaints included too many homeless people in the area, the restaurant across the street smelling bad, and the dog next door barking when its owners came home (it only barked for a couple of minutes). My personal favorite, though, was when I finally went off on him. He was parked in a designated loading zone in front of our building and received a parking ticket. This was a public street, mind you, so the only people who could issue tickets there were city parking enforcement officers. He came in barking at me about the ticket and demanded reimbursement, along with an additional credit to his account for the emotional stress he'd experienced."
"I explained that the ticket had been issued by the city, that we had absolutely nothing to do with it, and that his request was absurd. People will ask for reimbursement for the stupidest things."
14. "One particular asshole decided to pack plumber's putty into the sink and bathtub drains, then turn on the taps before he left. Had to hire professional contractors to fix most of the damage, but I got to rip out a bunch of stinky, wet carpet and water-damaged floorboards."
15. "I have an eviction story! I found another veteran Marine on Craigslist who was looking to rent a room in my house. When dealing with Craigslist, I always meet the person several times before they move in so I can get a feel for them. He seemed very chill, and his dog was calm, so I gave him the green light! Well, it turned out his dog had severe separation anxiety and would bark and scratch constantly until Brayden came home. The problem was that Brayden was a bartender and would be out of the house for up to 12 hours at a time. Once, he was gone for TWO DAYS! He'd just leave the dog inside to shit and piss everywhere. I eventually got fed up and moved the dog to the garage so I could actually sleep."
"Now, I have a big-boy job. I wake up at 4:45 a.m. to go to work, which means I expect quiet hours to start at 10 p.m. But Brayden would come home from bartending at 2 a.m., hammered drunk, with several friends in tow, blasting music and arguing about politics.
On more than one occasion, I had to pick up broken glass bottles from my lawn after his girlfriend got pissed off and threw them. The final straw was when he threw a party on a Monday night, left my door open, and both my cats escaped. My wallet had been rifled through, and he'd jizzed on my ottoman. I broke up the party with an (unloaded) shotgun.
I told him he could have his rent comped if he just moved out without me having to go to court to get eviction papers drawn up. Jizz never really comes out."
16. "My family has had rental properties for as long as I can remember, and by far, the worst tenants have been family and friends. My mom's worst experience was with her longtime boyfriend's daughter. Her apartment caught fire, so my mom let her rent an old mobile home. Not long after moving in, she almost burned that place down, too. My mom eventually had to evict her for nonpayment. That same mobile home was later rented by my older sister, who neglected to tell us about any repairs that needed to be done. We ended up having to replace the carpet and the subfloor throughout the entire place. The last tenants in my mom's nicest unit ruined the brand-new laminate flooring with spills, broke a pedestal sink in half, and left pretty much every appliance nonfunctional. They even changed the locks without telling us. I spent 10 hours vacuuming three rooms, and dirt was still coming up. I honestly don't think those people ever vacuumed."
- Ikihara
17. "I was a landlord when my girlfriend moved in with me, and she had an empty condo. The first two renters were fine, but then there was Kevin. He was single, had a good income, and seemed like the perfect tenant. We got to month three, and the rent checks stopped coming in. So, we went to the condo to find out what was going on. First off, there was a nice new flat-screen TV, but no furniture apart from a giant beanbag chair. We asked Kevin where the hell the money was, and he frantically searched through his Bible before saying, "I lost the money order, sorry." Pissed off, we looked around a little more and discovered that he had a roommate: a silent, muscular Black man."
"Okay, whatever, but if you're going to have a roommate, you've got to tell us, Kevin, so we can put him on the lease.
Long story short, Kevin stayed silent, and a few days later, we came by to serve him papers and begin the eviction process. That's when we discovered that Kevin's unnamed roommate was a rapist who was out on parole. Great, right? The condo was directly across the street from a school, and it turned out Kevin was violating sex offender legislation.
Thank God he left without much of a fight, and we were able to sell the condo for a modest profit."
18. "When I was a little kid, my parents bought a cheap house in a neighboring town, fixed it up, and rented it out. Two young women moved in and were great tenants. They'd just graduated from college, were working entry-level jobs, and were kind of getting by. No trouble at all. Then, at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, they called because there was a spider. My dad called them back when we got home from church and asked what they wanted him to do about it. They said they wanted him to kill it. So, my dad went out on Christmas Eve to kill their spider. They seemed to think this was completely normal, like it was about on par with what you'd expect your landlord to do if your water pipes burst on Christmas Eve. Just the least he could do, given the situation."
19. "I own a few houses, all of which have tenants. For the most part, everything has been fine... except for one tenant. A few important details: I pay for everything and include it in the rent because I didn't want to deal with tenants falling behind on utility bills. It's just easier to have everything covered in one price. Each property has a basement suite and a main-floor suite. Now, onto the tenant from hell. The first thing she did was get a duck. Yes, a LIVE duck. It shit everywhere and squawked constantly. Thanks to a loophole in the lease caused by my own naivety (I'd allowed "small pets" without specifying what that meant), it took me quite some time to get the duck out of there. Next came the rats. Except she let them breed, so they were EVERYWHERE, along with their shit. She also seemed to think old takeout containers were a great way to decorate a home."
"So, we had a colony of semi-domesticated rats, old food scattered everywhere, and, yes, her two children living in the middle of all this.
She would somehow manage to set the stove on fire at least once every other week, frequently had "family" stay longer than the lease allowed (including drunk and high people passed out on the lawn), and apparently decided she could sublet my garage to other people to help cover the rent. It took me about eight months and thousands of dollars in legal fees to get her out. After that, I had to spend another thousand-plus dollars on professional cleaning.
The worst part? She was my friend when all of this started."
20. "I'm renting a room to my girlfriend's friend because she got kicked out of her old place. She lost her first job within a week of moving in, got a new one, and started using a guy as a sugar daddy (he bought her cigarettes, weed, booze, clothes, etc.). Apparently, he wanted more from her, so she quit that job. She then got another job as a custodian but was fired within a month for refusing to work her scheduled shifts. After that, she went on welfare. This whole time, she hasn't bought a single thing for the apartment, not even toilet paper or soap. She's lazy as all hell, leaves all the lights on when she leaves, never cleans anything except her own room, and throws full bags of garbage on top of the not-yet-full kitchen trash. I once saw her stack three bags on top of each other. A few months ago, I confronted her about leaving everything on all the time."
"Today, I came home to find a passive-aggressive note complaining about us leaving the fan on in our room. She proceeded to scream at me and tried her hardest to turn my girlfriend against me, telling me she wanted to leave me and blah, blah, blah. Every time I proved her wrong, she changed the subject so she could keep yelling. She eventually threw my Xbox onto the floor and threatened me with violence if I moved her stuff out of her room when she left."
- jmanunit
21. "Had a nightmare family staying in a flat. Eventually had to kick them out because they caused nothing but trouble. Their son was sitting his exams, though, so they asked if he could stay until they were finished, and we agreed. Eventually, the son left, and we went to inspect the damage. Found the flat immaculate. Everything was clean and tidy, yet something seemed off. My uncle went from room to room but couldn't find so much as a stain. Satisfied with the condition the flat had been left in, he walked out of a room and went to close the door. That's when he realized what was wrong. There were no doors. Anywhere. "
22. "When I was a teenager, my family rented our downstairs unit to a small family. Nothing too crazy happened, but the mom annoyed the crap out of me. My bedroom was right above theirs, and she was constantly calling my parents to complain about "noise." And when I say noise, I mean the faint sound of someone walking down a hallway or some other BS. My parents decided to accommodate them by buying a rug to line our hallway and making it a rule that I couldn't be on the phone or up and about after 10 p.m. But even after all that, she still found something to call about. Keep in mind that we'd had several tenants in that unit before they moved in, and none of them had ever complained about noise. One night, I was up late in my room watching TV when the remote rolled off my bed and hit our hardwood floor."
"I immediately grabbed it to mute the TV, but moments later, guess what? Our home phone started ringing at one in the fucking morning. The mother had called to complain about the loud noise she'd just heard, even though it lasted less than a second. This kind of thing happened all the time, and when their lease ended, they moved out. We rented the unit to another family and never heard any further noise complaints. Good fucking riddance."
- Rileybon
23. "My dad rents out commercial property in our hometown in a developing country. In the early 2000s, a Chinese man rented a supermarket-style property from him. My dad would stop by every now and then to collect the rent and didn't notice anything particularly strange at first. In fact, there were lots of customers, which, from his perspective, was great! But then he noticed some structures at the back of the building, and over time they began moving toward the front. Upon closer inspection, he realized the tenant had vertically divided the supermarket into two floors using zinc panels. Something dodgy was clearly going on. My dad asked him to leave, and when he refused, he threatened to call the police. By the time my dad returned with the police, the tenants had disappeared."
"He climbed up to the makeshift second floor and found dozens of towel "beds," clothes, including children's clothing, and other belongings. The police suspected that the landlord was trafficking Chinese people and that this was where they had been living. There were also two large pots of broth, which, when emptied, revealed two dog corpses."
24. "I had a guy rent a studio apartment in a high-rise building with more than 300 units that I had. He seemed only semi-creepy, but when his brother arrived from Canada for a weeklong visit, I realized it definitely ran in the family. At 6 a.m., the brother stepped out onto their balcony and started screaming that he wanted to blow up a large nearby tech company where Semi-Creepy worked. As if that weren't bad enough, he was wearing an open bathrobe. Nothing else. Thankfully, one of his neighbors called 911. We had SWAT on-site for about four hours, evacuating other residents, setting up snipers, and all the usual stuff. Basically, just another Monday."
25. "My grandparents rent out some extremely nice houses on Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. A very young couple moved into one of the homes. They didn't have much furniture, but, oddly enough, they could afford the extremely high monthly rent. Long story short, they had a huge marijuana farm growing in pretty much the entire house. My grandparents found out from the landscaper who came to cut the grass. Yeah."
26. "I had a Section 8 rental property (government-subsidized housing for low-income people). The woman I rented it to was arrested for shoplifting. It was her sixth arrest, so she was facing mandatory jail time. When she left, she canceled her natural gas service. The gas company never notified me, and a week later, I visited the property to find a waterfall in the kitchen. Multiple pipes had frozen and burst, leaving me with a water bill of about $3,000 and roughly $20,000 in damages. Thankfully, insurance covered everything except my $1,000 deductible."
27. "I had a female tenant in her 50s. She was a tall, thin white woman with nasty dreadlocks who considered herself a true believer in the Rastafari faith. She rented one unit in a fourplex. One day, I got a complaint from another tenant that she'd been pacing around the entire building all night, shouting incoherently at people who weren't there. It was the first of the month, so I went over to talk to her about the rent. She started yelling and screaming, then wrote the rent check out to the "Devil and his followers" and signed it "I am signing under duress!!!" in the signature box. The amount was correct, though. Once I had the check in my hand, I noticed it had her father's name and phone number on it. He lived in a neighboring state, so I called him and explained the situation."
"He said, "Please have her arrested. She is off her meds, and her mother was the Devil yesterday, and I was the Devil this morning." I explained that he was off the hook because I was now the Devil, and then I called the cops.
They had to fight to get her into the car, even after handcuffing her."
28. "One tenant brought bedbugs into the apartment building, which had four units in total, and then called the health department to complain about the bedbugs. Another tenant walked across the grass to go out for a smoke while dragging their oxygen tank, tripped, fell, and sued. A third tenant moved out of her apartment but left the window open in the middle of winter. A water pipe in the ceiling froze and cracked, and by the time we got to the apartment an hour later, the entire ceiling had collapsed."
29. "We had a nice old lady rent a room in our house, but then she stopped taking her schizophrenia medication. The police wouldn't do a damn thing, even after she attacked both me and my wife with a knife. It took her stabbing our neighbor six times for them to finally do something about it."
30. "The best one was a man who lived in a studio flat and seemed to have a few issues. He covered his entire floor in bin bags and essentially tried to create an indoor swimming pool. He lived on the ground floor, though, and the sheer weight of his (presumably semi-successful?) plan caused part of the floor to collapse, sending him crashing through into the flat below."
31. "Rabbits running loose and breeding in the master bedroom. They literally just let them loose on the carpet. There was also a pig in the side yard. Yes, an actual PIG. And this house was in the middle of a town! They also removed the shower spigot and handles, so there was no way to shower in the house. They pulled down the curtain rods, curtains, and everything else, too. Two years ago, a parent rented the house for one year, and their kid rented it the next. When they finally moved out, there were TWO YEARS' worth of dog shit in the backyard. They hadn't picked up a single turd! Many years ago, another tenant built a fenced-in pen against the back of the house and threw all their garbage in it."
"I paid for garbage collection, so all they had to do was take the trash to the curb! Instead, I had to clean up two years' worth of garbage, dirty diapers, food scraps, and everything else. The whole thing was crawling with rats, mice, roaches, and various other beasties. OMG!"
English (US) 