Making money as a property manager seems like a pleasant side gig until you hand the keys to the wrong people. It’s amazing how inconsiderate and downright filthy some people can be with something that isn’t theirs. These landlords recall horror stories of the worst tenants they ever allowed to step foot on their property.
All stories have been edited for clarity.
Dead Or Alive
“This home wasn’t my property but another belonged to a property owner I was working with. He bought the house in foreclosure without going to view it. The tenant had to be removed by the sheriff after literally years of going back and forth with the bank. He had lived in the house for twenty years. I went with the property owner to see what we were working with.
Just a few steps away from the porch I could smell something awful. Thinking back on it, I could smell it as soon as I got out of my car. We grabbed bandanas for our faces and prepared ourselves for whatever horrors awaited us inside the house. As soon as we opened the door, I was positive we were going to find a dead body.
We stepped in and were immediately sickened by the stench. I began to wretch uncontrollably. Once I finally got a hold of myself, I fought my way to the kitchen to open the patio door, only to upchuck again, losing my dinner in the process. Deep down, part of me wanted to set fire to the disgusting home and be done with it, but I knew it wasn’t my call to make.
So we made a few calls and had discussions about what to do, which all heavily leaned towards bulldozing the place but we ended up settling on some serious respirators and Tyvek suits, so we could at least see what was in there.
One day we put on the suits, turned on the respirators, and dove back in. The neighbors sat in lawn chairs and gawked like we were going off to some alien world. It was clear the tenant had been a hoarder. All that was once the tenant’s belongings were piled on top of mounds of grime-infested furniture.
The cockroaches were everywhere. Dead and alive. I still gag when I think about it. The smell was the worst, and no it wasn’t a dead body. At least not human. But rats. I joke around a lot, but I am not kidding in the least when I say one rat was the size of my size twelve workboot. At first glance, I thought it was a cat or a small dog. Nope. It was right then that I knew, I was outmatched, on his turf. I slowly backed up, ran out, and left my buddy with his new nightmare home and his furry tenants.
He ended up spending one hundred twenty thousand dollars on that place. It’s beautiful now. I asked the property manager why he didn’t burn it or doze it. He told me after the hazmat teams cleared it, he was sixty thousand in the hole on top of the initial purchase price of seventy-five thousand. At that point, he would never recover his money so he made it into a dream home that he could be happy in.”
We’ve Got A Runner
“I rented out a room to an ex-military guy and thought he would be extra clean because of his background.
Little did I know he was a heavy drinker who spent every day in his room playing violent computer games. As time passed, a horrible smell came from his room but he wouldn’t let me inside to see what was wrong. So, I served him a legal 3-day inspection notice.
He ended up bailing and I never saw him again. We opened the door only to be hit by the most violent stench. I couldn’t believe my eyes at what he left behind.
He sat at his computer playing games and had literally peed up the wall and on the new carpet instead of getting up to go to the toilet. The bed had an even worse odor. We took the coverings off and found human excrement between the sheets. We folded everything up inside the mattress and took it to the dump. Then we deep cleaned the walls and spent one-thousand five hundred dollars on replacing the carpet. I will never forget the smell. Ever.”
Doggone
“I had tenants who had trouble paying the rent. Once I would file an eviction notice they would suddenly get caught up. This was a property I managed and I inherited the tenant. They quit paying one final time and then refused to contact me. The eviction process started and I finally got judgment.
Once the papers were served, I received a call from the man on the lease. He told me that he and his wife had split up and he had no idea she wasn’t paying. He said she had been released from jail recently and she was on her own. I reminded him that he was on the lease and he was fully responsible for any and all damage. He was livid!
His ex-wife finally called me after the court date, which she attended, and I scheduled a move-out inspection with her. She, of course, did not show up. I called her from the house when her friend suddenly pulled into the driveway. The friend explained that the tenant was too embarrassed so she refused to show up.
The friend did not have a key to the house. I walked around the property and it was trashed on the outside. There were clothes, furniture, and filth everywhere. The friend then told me there should be one dog in the house. I walked down the driveway to the back of the house and had to stop at the gate across it. I will never forget the horror of what I saw that day.
The entire double-wide concrete pad was completely covered in dog feces. The garage door on the detached two-car garage had been dismantled and was laying in pieces all over the driveway, also covered in dog feces.
I could hear at least three dogs in the house frantically trying to escape. Somehow I was able to find a path through the dog feces. You could clearly see three large dogs barking out three different windows from the back of the house. The friend, however, kept insisting there was only one. Her face flushed red when I insisted she come to the backyard.
The property was so gross I just wanted to walk away, forever. The tenant eventually agreed to meet me the next day. When I arrived, she was sitting in her car. She opened the door to the house and all three dogs flew out. The stench coming from the house was so bad I thought I was going to throw up. She left food and water for the dogs but said she hadn’t actually been in the house for four days. Both the power and the water were off in the house. I read her the riot act but at that point, it was too late.
Long story short, the interior of the home was destroyed. The exterior wasn’t much better. Urine and feces were on almost every surface, including all of the belongings left in the house. She ended up taking her clothes and a few other things and walked away.
The clean-out crew that we hired normally charges three hundred to four hundred dollars to remove all belongings. However, they charged over two thousand dollars and required me to provide hazmat-type suites, booties for their shoes, duct tape, masks, gloves, and garbage bags as well as a dumpster. They quickly found out the house was infested with roaches and bed bugs.
This was a small roughly one-thousand-square-foot house with 3 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. The bill ended up being nearly forty-thousand dollars. I notified both tenants and then sent it over for collection.
Her husband threw a huge fit. He said there was no way it cost that much then hired an attorney. At this point, he had a job and was divorcing his wife. His soon-to-be ex-wife was living with a friend and didn’t have a job. I had extensive videos and about three hundred pictures. I also had the spec sheet, four quotes from four different contractors as well as the final bill. One contractor gave a really high quote because the house was so disgusting that he flat-out refused the job.
I have had a lot of other really gross houses but this one was, by far, the very worst.”
No More Chances
“I had a lovely, newly renovated studio, with a walkout to a ravine lot. It was once a rather high-end place. My mother paid for the renovation because she wanted extra income with her pension money and despite my protests, I cooperated.
I ended up renting it to a young couple. He was a construction worker and she was a college student. They threw in the application that they wanted to be close to their parents and that they visited the community center often.
To make a long story short, I quickly noticed the young man never seemed to go to work. Later, I found out he was the short-notice guy and nobody really wanted him. The girl only went to school part-time.
It gets worse.
They would fry food in reused oil for every meal. They would not use the range-hood stove because ‘it was noisy.’ My whole house constantly smelled like grease because of them. The oils even stuck to the HVAC system!
After some time, I could smell garbage through the vents. They stopped putting their garbage out! I was never able to avoid the stench. I complained to my sister that was visiting about the stinky smell and expressed my suspicions that it may have been from not doing laundry because I never saw them carrying clothes outside, ever. Their unit didn’t have a washer and dryer hookup.
My sister ended up calling me a stalker and said to mind my own business!
When I went to do an inspection, there was a pile of unwashed dishes with food residue in the sink in dirty water, and there was moldy food in the fridge. I will never forget seeing a casserole-type dish that had turned green. Yuck!
Their bedroom was FULL of clothes on the FLOOR that they never washed. The pile was two or three feet high and reeked. They didn’t do laundry because the male’s mother didn’t want him in her house when she wasn’t home. Not only that, but it also turned out the young man didn’t like to bathe, so he didn’t. He walked around barefoot and warned me not to come close to him because his feet smelled.
They begged me for another chance, washed all their clothes and bedding, and hung it all over the basement only to blow it in a week.
When they left, I kept getting debt-collection letters for the girl even years later. I never rented again after that.”
A Stinky Situation
“I’m not a landlord, but my mom’s friend was. She rented a nice 3-family house. My mom’s friend lived on the first floor, a young family on the second floor, and 2 girls on the 3rd floor.
The tenants on the 3rd floor didn’t like to pay rent, so it was time for an eviction. My mom’s friend hadn’t seen the inside of the apartment for months because they wouldn’t let her in to do anything. When she took it to court, the tenants complained about all the broken things that she refused to fix. That was far from the truth because they never asked. My mom’s friend later found out that the ceiling fan was hanging dangerously low and had two blades left. Unfortunately, she was fined for it and some other things.
The 2 girls were promptly evicted. They left their stuff there, so my mom’s friend had to have a scheduled removal and storage with a company, all on her dime. Once the first company went to inspect the house and perform the clean-up, they immediately refused service. She ended up contacting three other companies that all gave her the same response.
Everything was extremely gross to the point that they simply refused to touch it. After more legal shenanigans, she eventually got permission to completely discard the stuff they left behind since literally no one would move it or store it.
A friend and I ended up taking on the task. Apparently, there was also a kid that lived in that apartment. It was honestly the most disgusting thing I had ever dealt with in my life. The smell brought tears to my eyes. They had cats and ferrets, but not a single litterbox in sight.
Rotten food was sprawled out everywhere. Amazingly, one of the girls was slightly responsible when shagging up as evidenced by the large number of used rubbers thrown all over the bedroom. Used feminine products didn’t make it into the trash either.
Dirty diapers decorated the floor.
Another thing I’ll share that honestly depressed me was the few pieces of ‘vintage’ furniture that were pretty cool. There was a neat little metal desk I liked so much, I ended up taking it home to see if I could salvage it.
It was METAL, so I couldn’t get the smell out of it. I scrubbed it, hosed it, soaped it, and bleached it, but the stench refused to disappear. It sat in my parent’s barn for about a year, and it made the barn smell!
Their apartment was by far the grossest I’ve ever seen. My mom’s friend ended up selling the house right after we finally cleaned it out.
She was done dealing with tenants.”
She’s Not Coming Back…
“I rented our small farmhouse to a ‘contractor.’ She was single, seemed well-kept, and wanted to get out of the big city. I still regret not doing a background check.
The house was immaculate with brand-new everything. It had a 1-year-old carpet, a new paint job, and clean windows. I also made the mistake of not inspecting it periodically once she moved in. She ended up getting married and said she was going on vacation for a week.
She left the farmhouse completely locked up before she left. I’m talking no windows open, and she left the AC off in the heat of summer. I sent her a message informing her that I was going to open an upstairs window for ventilation. I went in, ran upstairs not looking at anything, opened the window, and went back out the front door. I felt like I walked through spiderwebs but I didn’t think much of it considering she had been gone almost a week.
Not too long after, we received a message stating she was now going to be gone for 2 weeks, then a month! My husband said she wasn’t coming back and I needed to go take a look. I sent her another message letting her know I was going in again.
This time, the feeling of spider webs was undeniable. It was very dark with the blackout curtains on the windows. The stench of cat urine burned my eyes as I walked deeper inside the house. What I found in the kitchen still gives me nightmares.
I looked in kitchen cupboards and found hundreds if not thousands of German roaches! The food in the refrigerator even had roaches on it. The ‘cobwebs’ I felt throughout the house were actually fleas.
The ‘contractor,’ whom I later found out was actually an exotic dancer had moved most of her belonging out with her mattress in the middle of the bedroom floor and a 4′ x 12′ closet filled with junk! Pee pads hung on the walls with cat urine in puddles on the floor and embedded in the carpets.
We hired help to move everything left into a shed. Countless roaches scurried from under the mattress. We ripped out every bit of carpet throughout the home.
One day, the exotic dancer said she was coming back for her belongings. It was impossible to exterminate all the roaches that she caused before her departure. Pictures could never do what I saw justice.
Four months later, after I was confident all bugs were gone, the new tenant gave me the bad news.
I can’t believe she had the nerve to ask twice for a rental referral.”
A Bitter Sweet Ending
“In 2006, we purchased an investment property and rented it to a lovely family, or so we thought!
The home was brand new with 4 bedrooms and 2 baths. We handed over the keys to this family who made quite an impression on us. The lady cried tears of joy as she thanked us for choosing her family to live there. She promised to care for it as her own. Little did we know those words meant nothing! She paid her rent on time every month for the first year, then the nightmare began.
Soon after they reached their one-year mark, I stopped receiving the rent on time with a million excuses from her on why it was late. Really they were all a bunch of sob stories. I put up with it for 4 months, but couldn’t anymore as each month the rent was being paid later, and later to the point she was almost a whole month behind on her rent.
I told her that if in thirty days she wasn’t caught up, I would be giving her a thirty-day notice to move out. She begged for sixty days and assured me she would catch up and I would have no problems with her anymore. I was skeptical but wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. So I agreed.
However, she never caught up and was almost impossible to get a hold of. The sixty days were up so I decided to personally hand her the move-out notice. The home was a few hours away from where I lived so I had to wait for the following weekend because I couldn’t get the time off from work. We drove to the house the following Saturday to find the home empty and completely destroyed. We were shocked, angry, and confused about how someone could do this. In a period of 1.5 years, the brand-new home was turned into a completely run-down house.
The kitchen and bathroom cabinets were broken off their hinges. The toilets had stains as if they had never been cleaned. The carpet had burnt spots and had changed from a light beige color to an unsightly brown. There were broken tiles in the kitchen and the entire home had to be repainted. The kitchen appliances were stained and had never been cleaned. Everything was covered in grime, and the home was infested with mice and roaches! There were even a couple of holes in the walls and one of the bedrooms had a broken window.
I wanted to cry! I told my husband I felt like just walking away from the property and never dealing with it again, but of course, we didn’t want to damage our credit. So, we did what we could and hired a group of handymen to do the rest. We bought new toilets, and a new stove, replaced the tile, replaced the carpet in all but 2 bedrooms, and had the entire interior painted. With patience, hard work, and a good chunk of money the home was ready to rent again.
I wish we would have just walked away as I had previously thought since we ended up losing the home anyways. While we did rent it to a good family that took really good care of it, the economy crashed and the home lost so much value that it just wasn’t worth keeping anymore.
We tried short-selling it to the family that was renting it at the time, but the bank made it impossible. Our precious home ended up going into foreclosure. Our credit was ruined, and we lost so much but I was happy the nightmare was finally over. Our credit has since recovered and we’ve had the opportunity to purchase another investment property, but we quickly said ‘no, thanks!’ My sanity is not worth it.
We’re happy just as we are and thankfully live a peaceful life.”
Where’s The Pool?
“This happened several years ago.
I leased a property with an in-ground swimming pool. Under the terms of the lease, the tenants moved in, and every so often were late in paying rent. However, I always got my money.
The lease stated that they were responsible for the pool maintenance, including chemicals. They started off using a pool service I was familiar with, but discontinued it, claiming they were unreliable.
I was out of town for a couple of months due to a family emergency. I came back to discover that the tenants weren’t home when I went by to collect the current rent. I walked around the house to the backyard to check out the pool and it wasn’t there.
As it turns out, the tenants decided the cost and hassle of pool maintenance were too much for them, and they weren’t using the pool that much. Since one of the tenants worked in construction, he called in a buddy for a favor—and said buddy brought in dump truck loads of dirt to fill the pool level with the surrounding ground! And yes, they had sod installed, so they got extra yard space.
Inside the house was trashed due to their quick move. I later discovered he’d lost his job, so they ‘downsized’ to another property. That poor landlord at their new place never checked with me as a reference.
Yeah, he was in for a surprise. It turned out they were running an illegal daycare center for six or eight kids at their new place in order to make ends meet.
In the meantime, we filed a lawsuit and won a judgment against them for the damages.
Whether we’ll ever recover those damages is still an open question.”
Nightmare Tenants
“I rented my parents’ home after my father passed away and mom moved in with us.
The house was my parents’ pride and joy that they purchased brand new in 2007. It still looked new inside because two of the three bedrooms were never used. A family with two children moved in.
My first clue that something was amiss was when the gardener reported that sprinkler heads were broken on a weekly basis. Then in response to a high water bill, the renter sabotaged the computer terminal for the sprinkler control to the point it had to be replaced. This was after they bent and broke the a/c grill in an attempt to ‘change’ the filter. Not changing the a/c filter often enough burnt out the a/c motor.
They relied heavily on the use of extension cords because they had people living in the garage and there weren’t enough outlets. This resulted in the breakers having to be replaced.
The carpet was covered with Kool-Aid and had to be replaced. The walls were filthy from greasy handprints. All of the rooms reeked of pot. Two of the bedrooms had been repainted in flat black. The shower faucet was damaged so badly that the water leak alerted the next-door neighbor as the water ran outside of the house.
The five children that lived in the home passed their time by throwing rocks in the neighbor’s pool and climbing over the locked fence because they lost the gate key.
When they moved out, without paying the last month’s rent, they threw some of their furniture over the back fence, which required a 4-wheel drive truck to retrieve. They left behind an SSI application and not ONE magazine, newspaper, or book. They also left all of their living room furniture on the lawn which required immediate removal to keep from killing the pristine lawn.
After spending twelve thousand on a new carpet, paint job, and drywall repair, I was able to rent out the home again.
It was a complete nightmare.”
A Lesson To Be Learned
“We had a tenant who had been with us for nearly 15 years. She had to travel for her work often. Her two children were nearly grown and the son eventually moved out. The daughter, on the other hand, was a bit of a problem child but the mother agreed to let her stay on the property when she was traveling or visiting her boyfriend.
We got a call one night from the neighbor informing us that water had flooded her unit and it was coming from our property.
When my husband got there, neither the tenant nor her daughter were present. He was dumbfounded when he opened the door. Yes, water was leaking from the first-floor bathroom because of a loose-fitting spigot, but that was not the horror.
The tenant’s daughter, her boyfriend, and their friends apparently decided to trash the property and they did it in good style. The front door looked as if it had been shot with a sidearm. The back deck sliding glass doors were clouded with water stains from the inside. Saying the carpet was ‘dirty’ was an understatement. We wondered if they had deliberately let the water run, but after a plumber came to inspect it, he ruled out that it was just an old fitting that finally gave out. Just our bad luck that nobody was on the property when the fitting expired.
Upstairs was the worst. The beds had no sheets on them. There were cups, food bags, pizza boxes, cancer sticks, pet stains (although we never allowed pets), broken light fixtures, a mysterious liquid was splashed up against nearly all the walls, spoons thrown around, papers, clothes on the floor, and the bathrooms were had blood stains.
In the basement, we found multiple empty bottles and remanents of different substances. The basement sliding glass door was broken and the backyard shed was filthy. The basement wasn’t finished, but still, there was trash and junk on the floor.
Obviously, their tenancy was over.
For nearly thirty years, we have had only one problem with a tenant. This one took the cake.
We trusted someone and didn’t do annual inspections. We won’t make that mistake again.”
