| I've had this situation before.
A tenant didn't pay rent and called and said she was leaving that night. Apparently, she had a deadbeat house guest, who also had been evicted from a previous residence. Birds of a feather. When my property manager went to survey the property, he found the deadbeat female friend of the deadbeat tenant sleeping on a lone couch. We called the police. They said they could do nothing. I eventually just filed an eviction on the tenant who had just left. The night before the set-out day the squatter left. She (squatter) didn't show up to court (obviously) but somehow knew when we were coming.
I suppose I could have gone through the weeks/months of trying to find out the squatter's name but I opted to treat the situation as if she didn't exist and leverage the set-out process to do the clean-up of the squatter situation. All in all, I had to go through the eviction process anyway to obtain the writ of restitution - getting the property back. Sometimes, you get "lucky" when a tenant leaves and takes all of their property and you're spared the expense of doing the eviction. But, if you want to cover all your bases, you should do the eviction anyway, because they could return if the lease hadn't expired.
Hope this helps. |