Picture this. You purchased a house in Stockton with the help of your father at age 25. You get married at age 26 and your husband moves in with you. Within a year, things in the marriage go terribly wrong and there is a looming divorce. Even though your ex is agreeable, there is still a pending split up and because you work so much you allow him to live in the house at least until he gets another job. At the same time, you get a promotion at work and you move to Sacramento. It is a clean break. No children, no real financial entanglements, no other obligations and no commingled assets.
You really dont want to sell your house and your soon to be ex convinces you to let him rent the house from you because he just got a job… or so you thought. The house is not community property, it’s yours, but you have a soft spot and allow yourself to be talked into this arrangement because its easy and you have already broken his heart so to speak. After all you wont be there and he promised to take care of the place, and its easy… No new people to meet and interview, no applications, credit or otherwise, no additional work… your ex even promises to take care of the house and even make improvements he know that you want. The payments are only $600 per month with insurance and property taxes… and the rent he promises is $900 per month. It’s positive cash flow. It’s a no brainer… right?
Buckle up, because the roller coaster of the next two years, had the young homeowner turned landlord, regretting not only her marriage, but her decisions to trust her ex husband with her most valuable asset.
There is an old adage that warns people not to mix business with ex-family or there should be, and yet we, as compassionate human beings, always like to bestow the benefit of the doubt and trust to those that have proven time and again that they are not worthy.
This video is a aftermath. It is the story of betrayal, eviction and almost the loss of a house because one ex spouse wanted to get even with the other. There is something to be said for clean breaks and a severing of the ties especially when there are NO children involved.
Guilt should never be your guide in these matters. Just say NO.
There is a moral to this story. Evicting tenants in Stockton is very expensive.
Video Transcription
Peter: Hello everyone. My name is Peter Westbrook. Today’s video is on unlawful detainer. An unlawful detainer is when a tenant takes possession of a house unlawfully, they haven’t paid their rent. Sooner or later you do get to get them out. That is also called the eviction. In this case, this house it’s been six months. And of course, there still was not enough time for them, so yesterday they wanted more time and they pleaded and of course the Sheriff came.
We changed locks on the door and they basically were removed from the house. When that happens, you get a lot of garbage that is left behind. You know, people do things for different reasons and I’m not even going get into that, but in an unlawful detainer it’s never pretty, it means that there’s just a lot of clean up. Certainly you can go back and try and get the money from them, but to do that is expensive, but from my experience it doesn’t work.
Generally there’s damage to house as well and of course. These people lived here for two years and never cleaned anything, never did anything at all. And of course didn’t pay their rent for the past eight months.
So now the job of clean up begins and in this case, the people who owned the house before I bought it from them rented this out to family. And family was the victim of family and that’s … I’m going to give a little advice here. It always works that way. Never rent your house to family. It’s harder to get them out than anybody else. Creates problems in the long run, but that’s just my two cents. Anyway, my name is Peter Westbrook, I’m with Westbrook Real Estate Investments and thanks for watching the video.