A tenant from Hell is every landlord’s worst nightmare, but when one of your tenants causes £20,000 of damage and he walks away without paying a penny, it hardly seems fair. Well, as unbelievable as it sounds, this is exactly what happened to one poor landlord after a teenager tenant trashed his property out of spite because the landlord had started eviction proceedings over unpaid rent.
We all know how difficult it can be to evict tenants, so I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that it took months of frustrating court action to finally secure an eviction notice on the property. Sadly, by that point, the tenant and his girlfriend had caused an unbelievable amount of damage throughout the property—it was so bad that the police were forced to board up the house just to make it safe.
Once he had been traced to a new address, the teenager was charged with criminal damage, but because he was not in work and therefore had no money to pay for the damage he had caused, the judge was forced to give him a community order and 300 hours of unpaid work. The Judge said he would have jailed the teenager but for his intention to join the army (his application would have been rejected with a criminal record).
The landlord expressed his disappointment at the lenient sentence: ‘I would have liked him to do some hard labour – maybe cleaning somewhere would have been appropriate.”
Let’s hope that when (if) the teenager eventually starts work, the insurers will pursue him for the cost of repairing the damage to the property
