Articles — evictions

Every landlord has to deal with arrests at some point. For some, that day comes when you’re in the management office and look outside to see a convoy of police cars rolling onto your property with lights on and sirens blaring. Shortly thereafter, the officers are leading one of your tenants away in cuffs, for everyone to see. For others, the experience is not quite so dramatic, as you only deal with arrests on paper, typically when a criminal background check on an applicant shows a history of arrests. So what do we do when confronted with the arrest or...

The Background For years, Kentucky law was arguably unsettled on whether a non-attorney, such as a property manager, could file evictions in court on behalf of the owner of the property. As a result, the standard practice of many property owners was to have their property managers handle evictions. By "handle", I mean completely handle. The manager would sign the Forcible Detainer Complaint, file it with the local court, then appear at the hearing to present the case against the tenant in an effort to obtain a judgment of eviction. If successful, that same manager would then obtain a writ of...

Automation is a great feature of technology. We don’t have to write checks to pay our bills each month, we can just set them up to have the amounts deducted from our bank accounts. It simplifies life for us. Except when it doesn’t. Many landlords now use software that automates many of their daily and monthly tasks. I’m all for this, as we need to make technology work for us whenever possible. But it can create new obstacles. Your software that generates notices each month when a tenant hasn’t paid the rent can kill your eviction. Here’s how it usually...

The theme of Lessons From Eviction Court is typically the same: pay attention to details. Landlords really don’t have to prove very much in order to win evictions involving non-payment of rent. In most cases, you only have to prove that: The tenant is in possession of the rental unit The tenant has failed to pay rent that was due The tenant was given proper notice that he or she would be evicted if rent was not paid in full within a certain time frame; and The tenant failed to tender the full payment within the proper time frame However,...

          The lesson from my last post was to make sure to name every adult occupying the rental unit in your eviction complaint. Today, I have a short follow up: make sure you take the names of the occupants directly from the lease agreement, and use the same spelling as is used in the lease agreement. Close may count in horseshoes (should this reference be updated to “cornhole”?) and hand grenades, but not usually in legal matters.              As noted in the last post, winning evictions is about attention to detail....