Articles — notice

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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Why Landlords Should Embrace the URLTA

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

“All the laws favor the tenants” is a phrase I hear often in the rental industry. As a Kentucky attorney who only represents landlords, I spend close to 150 days a year in court advocating for landlords, and many hours consulting and giving advice to landlords on how to structure their leases and applications, and how to deal with their tenants. While my practice is located near two jurisdictions that have adopted the URLTA (Lexington and Georgetown), I do plenty of work in surrounding counties that have not. As a result, I have had to develop expertise in landlord-tenant relationships...

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Lessons from Eviction Court: Help Your Officer Serve Your Eviction

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

Lessons from Eviction Court: Help Your Officer Serve Your Eviction

I recently encountered an interesting situation in eviction court that provided an opportunity for clarification on the best practices for evictions. The tenant being evicted lived in a building containing multiple units. The building had access doors in the front and rear. Each access door was locked, but had a coded entry pad. When the tenant failed to pay the monthly rent, the landlord taped a notice on the door of the tenant’s rental unit indicating that the tenant would be evicted if the rent was not paid in full. When the tenant failed to pay within the proper time...

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Lessons from Eviction Court: Multiple Notices Can Ruin Your Eviction

Posted by Stephen Marshall on

Lessons from Eviction Court: Multiple Notices Can Ruin Your Eviction

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...

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