Real Estate Investing : One Small Step for the Tenant, One Giant Leap for Property Management

We recently had an interesting situation with a tenant and how they delivered payment to us. In the past, they rarely delivered it at all, or late at best. In talking to the tenant, we found out that he has no real job anymore (surprise!), and that the only way he could make payment was from a trust that his mother left him when she passed.

She set up this trust to pay his trustee, his aunt, a $1,000 per month on the 1st of every month to pay for his rent in the future because she knew he would eventually be homeless if she didn’t set it up this way (he has apparently been a winner for some time now!). The aunt had been just cutting him a check and trusting him to make his house payment every month.

Needless to say, life happened and he “needed” the money for something else that month and was unable to pay rent. I filed the eviction on him and received a wonderfully pleasant call from him when he got the note on his door from the magistrate. He informed me of how he received payment from his trustee and that this person wouldn’t return his calls because he was asking for more money than was scheduled for him to receive and their conversations were starting to get heated. NOT GOOD for us!

I offered to meet with the trustee and negotiate his situation for him. What we worked out is nothing short of beautiful! She cut me a check for the past month’s rent plus late fees and the next month’s rent. Not bad, right? And now for the real kicker…We set up our account to auto draft his trust account every single month on autopilot so the money is there every single month for years to come! He has enough money in the account to pay us rent for the next 15 years, and he said he is in that property to stay!

Can anybody say, “Free & Clear property?”

Category: Property Management