All you needed to know about tenant evictions

Tenant Evictions

We have been managing properties for more than a decade and have never resorted to evictions, but the night is young and it could still happen.    In fact, the more time and energy you devote to your tenant screening, you will not have to worry about evictions since you won’t face it.

But just in case you needed to evict any of you Silicon Valley tenants, we wanted to document the necessary steps to take prior to evictions to make sure you are not creating more problems for yourself.

1) Violation Notice:  You need to serve notice to your tenants that they are in violation of the terms of their lease agreement.   You can offer them “reasonable” time to remedy the violation.   For instance we recently discovered that one of our Los Gatos tenants was keeping Chickens on the property in violation of their lease agreement which strictly prohibits keep live stock on the property.

We emailed the tenant with proof of these voilations which were pictures of these Chickens on the property and offered them 60 days to cure this problem which is  plenty of time to remove 3 Chickens from the property.   We also noted in this notice that failure to remedy the violation could lead to evictions, but that we were not seeking evictions.

Eviction reasons, processes, periods, and participants vary from state to state. Below is a general overview.

2) Reasons to Evict a Tenant:  Your reasons to evict a tenant has to be clearly defined.  These reasons can range from non-payment of rent to lease violations.

3) Eviction Process:  After your tenants have failed to remedy the violation of their rental lease agreement; then you file papers with the county court  to evict this tenant.  Then if the tenant does not respond to your court complaint, the sheriff can post an eviction notice on the door. The sheriff can then remove the tenant if they do not respond to the eviction notice.

In California, landlords are responsible to store their tenants personal belonging for at least 30 days and provide notice for them to collect these items.  It’s only after this hold period that you can dispose your tenants personal property.

Needless to say, evictions can get emotionally draining and challenging.   You would be well advise to focus more on tenant screening to avoid evictions.