Articles — evictions

Lessons from Eviction Court: New Thoughts on Partial Payments

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

Lessons from Eviction Court: New Thoughts on Partial Payments

Last January, I published an article, linked here, on dealing with partial payments of rent from tenants. The issue of partial payments is largely governed by KRS 383.675 in URLTA areas. KRS 383.675 reads as follows: Acceptance of rent with knowledge of a default by the tenant or acceptance of performance by him that varies from the terms of the rental agreement constitutes a waiver of the landlord's right to terminate the rental agreement for that breach, unless otherwise agreed after the breach has occurred.  Three Options for Handling Partial Payments In my earlier article I described the three options...

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A Video about Videos: New Announcement

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

A Video about Videos: New Announcement

Video Course announcement from Stephen Marshall on Vimeo.

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Lessons from Eviction Court: Dealing with Partial Payments

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

Lessons from Eviction Court: Dealing with Partial Payments

If you’ve read many of my articles on evictions, you know my mantra: Details Matter. A simple miscalculation can easily lead to an eviction case being dismissed, and I see it happen almost every time that I go to court. In eviction cases, sequencing is everything. Here’s the proper sequence in a non-payment of rent case: tenant fails to pay → landlord gives notice → tenant fails to pay → notice expires → landlord files eviction But what happens to our sequence when the tenant wants to make a partial payment? Three Options for Partial Payments In that scenario, the...

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Only a Fool Learns from His Own Mistakes

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

I was in court in central Kentucky this week for a pretty complicated eviction case. There were eight witnesses on my side alone. The judge announced afterward that it was the longest eviction docket in his many years on the bench. After a two-hour hearing, my client had prevailed. However, one of the things that struck me about that day was that I watched three other landlords with much, much, much simpler cases have their evictions dismissed. Each of those cases involved non-payment of rent and, in each case, the dismissal was the result of the landlord failing to give...

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A Supreme Letdown: the Latest Supreme Court Opinion on Evictions

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

A Supreme Letdown: the Latest Supreme Court Opinion on Evictions

One week ago, I got really excited while checking Twitter. Actually, that happens every day. For those of you who don’t use Twitter, I highly recommend it if you’re into breaking news. Twitter is where you read about it first. Sorry for the digression. Anyway, I was scrolling through my Twitter feed last Thursday and saw that the Kentucky Supreme Court had issued an opinion in a landlord-tenant case. And not just in a landlord-tenant case, but in a forcible detainer case. I had found a unicorn! Very rarely do the appellate courts publish opinions on residential landlord-tenant cases, and...

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