Landlord Blues: Renting out the house from hell

Gethin Morris, who was one of the quieter tenants, had started to play up by now. It could happen very gradually, the transition from good to bad tenant. There would be a few late payments, a few missing payments, and then the person would go incommunicado, refusing to answer the ‘phone. This was now happening with Gethin, until one day Adrian received a text saying he was ‘going to see his Dad’ at lunchtime that day. What that was supposed to mean? Was he just telling us that he had social plans or did it mean he was going to borrow money off his Dad?

And why would he need to? He was earning £800 a month and his rent, including all his bills, was £217, so where was the problem? During months when he didn’t pay us, it meant he had £800 disposable income, just to spend on himself.

Naturally, he made no specific promise to pay anything in the texts he then sent us; instead, he went on about another tenant, Jason, keeping him awake at night with his music.

'Well you should have mentioned it before,' Adrian countered.

'It's made me late for work five times,' Gethin replied.

'Well, he's still got a bloody roof over his head,' Adrian fumed to me. ' Not to mention heat and light.'

But of course this was the ‘counter-attack’, implying that he shouldn’t have to pay the rent because one of the other tenants was annoying, but he hadn’t liked to say. Indeed, he said to Adrian that he didn’t want him to raise the matter with Jason as it would make things awkward.

This type of response was part of a pattern; if the rent hadn’t materialised, tenants would often tell us something negative about the house. As Adrian said, we were still paying the mortgage, council tax, water and electricity, without receiving a penny from him. And if Gethin found the behaviour of Jason so intolerable, was he saying he wanted to leave? ‘No’, Gethin replied, 'I like the house and want to stay.' (But still no mention of paying us any money for the privilege.)

'I'll be in the area, just near your workplace tomorrow,' Adrian texted to him one day. 'So I'll call in at lunchtime to see you.'

Gethin immediately texted back: 'No, I'd rather you didn't. I'd be uncomfortable with others at the garage, knowing my business.'

We should respect his wishes and feelings.

In fact, by law, we probably had to, although we had previously called into the pub where a tenant worked as a manager and eventually he coughed up what he owed us and got out of our house, purely because he was embarrassed by us calling in at his place of work.

We would never have got him to pay up, had we not had the leverage of being able to go into his public place of work. If he’d worked in an office in a closed building where you needed authorisation to enter, we'd have been impotent. He refused to speak to me, however, and insisted he would only speak to Adrian, man-to-man. He was scared of me; all five foot three of me. Some men just can’t have a woman tell them anything.