Rob B's worst tenant EVER! (It took bailiffs AND police to get him out)

0:01Rob B:Hey everyone, Rob B here with Rob D. I'm going to tell you a story today about the worst tenant experience I've ever known. It cost the owner of the property 10 to thousands of pounds. Years of struggle. And the owner was me.

0:28welcome to the property podcast thank you for joining us in case you don't know we run a business that has more than 100 million pounds worth of property deals every year for our clients you can find out about that at propertyhub.net slash invest and of course we invest ourselves and we like to bring our own experiences our own learnings our own observations to the podcast and my goodness are we doing the extreme version of that today you're not going to want to miss this episode.

0:49Rob B:Before we begin this tale of woe and many other words that probably aren't suitable for a podcast, let's give you our news story of the week. Because Rob, in the past we've talked about the lack of supply in London and there's been a really interesting news article out in the last week which builds on that story. Yeah, so this is related to the financial results of the Barclay Group, which you would not think necessarily a house builder putting out financials was the most exciting thing that happened all week but what it tells us about the challenges of the market is quite interesting so buckley mostly build in the southeast and they mostly build on brownfield land so they're basically building on hard mode they're facing the extreme version of the challenges that everyone's facing at the moment but the challenges are severe they're effectively pausing new land purchases because well we can't make this work giving building costs land costs financing costs and the current lack of demand in the market they're not confident that they're going to be able to build and supply something at a price that anyone will want to pay and still give them a profit.

1:51And in their announcement, they point to a whole range of factors. But what's particularly eye-catching, Rob, is a couple of themes that we've been talking about a lot recently. One being stamp duty. They blame stamp duty for slowing down the market, which in the Southeast, I'm sure it especially does. They call out the surcharges in particular for domestic and again for overseas investors as particular factors. And they point to the challenges of planning and regulation. Say, Rob, that it used to take five years to complete an apartment building in London. Now, thanks to regulation, it takes eight years.

2:21And if there's an appeal, that can add another 18 months to it. So everything that we've been saying about the challenges of supply, particularly in London, and how it's not going to get any better anytime soon, very much reflected by this announcement.

2:34Rob B:And this is why London made our ones to watch list at the beginning of the year, which I think did surprise a lot of people because we've not been the kindest to the capital when it comes to property investment. Love the city but as a property investment prospect it's been awful and that's not just our opinion over the last years the data has backed up that opinion as well but this can't last because the demand will continue. The London population increases, people are coming to the country, people want to live in London, it's always going to be a place that people want to live. The population each year is growing, but there is a chronic undersupply, and this issue has been exacerbated.

3:16Rob B:And at some point, there's going to be this tipping of the scales. And already in London, and again, this is why it made our list, the yields aren't that bad. They used to be awful. So you got nothing from London. You got no capital growth and you got no yields, but the yields are starting to become interesting. So is the time right now? Well, I think it's all about the right deal and I personally wouldn't be buying stock in London right now but we have looked at no deals but we have looked at off-plan opportunities in London because I think if you can lock in the price now but then wait for this problem to exaggerate further over the next few years I think it becomes really interesting not been able to put a deal together that we've been happy with yet but I think it's interesting for you listening to know that that is something we've started to explore at Property Hub Invest.

4:08Rob B:We of course will keep you posted with our thoughts on London and if we ever do a deal I think it'd be interesting to let you know about that as well. Well Rob I don't think we can put it off any longer. Let's get into this tale of woe. As we said earlier in the show this is bad, financially bad and I'm sure psychologically bad as well. But let's start at the very beginning because I'm sure this nightmare tenant didn't turn up draped in a red flag which you ignored how did it all begin how did this person end up in your flat in the first place so this was a brand new property it was through property of invest the development's been excellent i must say as an investment if you take this tenant out of it out the picture it's been great capital growth in this particular development has been absolutely fantastic and rob you've actually got a property in this very same development i think it's a very different tale for you because I think you sometimes forget you own this one which unfortunately I won't be forgetting at any time soon but this tenant came through to me from the letting agent and the referencing came back as a fail and he had failed on credit history and the tenant flagged this to me but the reason for the credit fail was because I was told at the time his identity had been cloned and he had a bit of a sob story and he produced documentation to you can't see me prove i can hear the air quotes yes prove that his identity had been cloned so based on the fact that the tenant said he seems like a all right guy and i'm not blaming the letting agency by the way because this guy as you're going to hear is a professional combat but the letting agent thought okay this person seems sound the story is unfortunate but it's explainable and he even went to the trouble of getting documentation to show that so i had to make a decision and you know what i've always been quite open-minded with things like this in the past where if someone's been a bit unlucky with a situation i've been more often than not been open to giving somebody a chance so i gave this guy a chance he'd had a bit of bad luck apparently so i let him in i let him let the property and then i thought no more of it because i had a fully explained evidence story of why i had a bit of trouble and expected it to be okay moving forward obviously that didn't happen no so you were happy with this story you're happy for him to move in he moves in what happens next did it become a problem straight away unfortunately yes i think the first month he paid maybe it was late i can't this is a long story this happened unfortunately over many many many months but what i do know it wasn't long before the payments started to become an issue it wasn't that he in the beginning didn't pay it was often short and there was always a reason there was always a reason why and it just started to creep up and maybe after a couple of months he'd catch up a little bit but the arrears just started to add up to meaningful numbers so it was then you know 1200 pounds before we knew it was two and a half thousand in arrears always paying some always trying to catch up but it just got bigger and bigger the deficit was getting bigger month by month it wasn't that he stopped paying completely it was just part payments late payments and it all began to add up to a quite significant number i wonder if that's part of the ploy because if somebody moves in and just doesn't pay then you're going to be like on it pretty much straight away as soon as you can but with the way he was doing it sounds like you could always tell yourself oh well i'm not going to start doing anything yet because he's probably going to sort it it just leaves you at this point where you go like when is it serious enough i have to go like all right enough i have to take action here when did it get to that point for you well i think it's worth saying that he always had and this this trend continued he always had a story always had a reason to why something was happening and it was bad fortune somebody had screwed him over there was there was always reasons right it wasn't silence there was always a story to go along with it but after eight or nine months in and remember it wasn't like you said immediately stopping it was trying to show some goodwill apparently and trying to make some payments but after eight or nine months in I instructed the solicitor to start the eviction for non-payments of rent and I think a lot of people will be listening to this and going what eight or nine months and looking back I should have moved sooner on that but it was like you said Rob it was just like death by a thousand cuts it wasn't anything dramatic at any one point and I have a lot going on in my world the property portfolio for me should be something that runs quietly in the background and thankfully most of the time you know i've been doing this circa 20 years now it has been and as i said earlier this is by far my worst ever experience by a country mile and not because of the eight or nine months it's going to get a lot worse but i think all those reasons combined meant that i just let it go until i thought right we just need to move this guy on hopefully get some of that money back and we'll just go again obviously i was wrong you said it's gonna get worse but this already sounds pretty bad you've got someone who's eight nine months in arrears owing you thousands of pounds but you decided all right it's time to do something about it it seems pretty cut and dried so surely you just go to court you show evidence of all this money that you're owed and you get your eviction order like surely now obviously I know that's not the case, but most people who are not in property would think, well, yeah, of course.

10:01But if someone's not paid you for months, you just show the evidence and off they go. I know that's not what happened. What did happen?

10:07Rob B:You know what? I think at this point it'd be useful for timelines. So when this guy moved in, it was the summer of 2023. I started the process of eviction in the spring of 24. And it took until October 24 until we got the first possession order. so the court ruled in our favor because we've done for procession on the grounds of arrears it gave us a money judgment of 5 800 pounds which was all the arrears plus costs to that point plus 41 pounds a day for every day he stayed on after so you know very much an incentive for him to leave and the order said he had to be out by the middle of november and you know at that point i'm thinking not great experience been in this situation before but i'm getting the tenant out i'm getting my money back learned a valuable lesson on referencing let's move on but the tenant wasn't quite ready for for me to move on at this point but he's got an eviction order a judge has said you have to go he just didn't go no and it was not that he just ignored the order he worked the system and every time we got close to getting him out he'd file something so he went down the legal route applications to suspend the warrant applications to set the order aside witness statements appeals every single time a deadline came for him to leave at the last minute and it was always the last minute within 24 hours of the deadline he'd file something which then And because he filed it at the last minute, he'd then get an extension of time for that to be reviewed.

11:48Rob B:What was very clear, it was probably becoming very clear to the listeners, is I was dealing with a complete professional here. There might be other words people would use, and off mic, I would definitely use some of the words as well. But he was a professional at this. It was clear this was not his first rodeo, and he knew exactly what he was doing. And he knew the system better than me. and worryingly he seems to know it better than my legal advisors as well because they'd never experienced this either they just didn't expect him to keep pulling out these cards these aces to say ah i've got this i'm going to do now and every time he was due to to be moved on he had another reason another legal loophole to play for an extension of time and of course rob i think it's pointing out that the deficit that he owes is growing because at this point he's got no incentive in his eyes to pay and the number that he owes is growing by the day what were these excuses because again to the naive listener or person in the public who doesn't know much about how the property system works you think well you clearly owe money you've been told you need to leave what possible excuses are there what cards did he play well besides the playing the system and waiting to the last moment some of the things he tried to demonstrate was that he was on the verge of a million pound settlement from a bank that he was suing yeah he loved the legal system this guy and he actually showed documentation whether it was true or not that he was on with that process so he was trying to demonstrate that he'd soon be able to afford it and it was just all a misunderstanding then he was on serious illness benefits so he'd moved from paid work to serious illness benefits then he had a child move in and the child wasn't there at the beginning but he used that situation to say his child was being homeschooled from that address and a school place had been lined up for that child and evicting that child would then disrupt their education he'd been out the country so he had to fly out the country for emergency medical work and he produced evidence for that a flight number so he couldn't leave on certain dates because he was out the country i'll just say the country was turkey i'm not sure if you'd say it was emergency work but um he had the money for that let's say um he kept promising to pay full by a certain date to the court as well so he said that you know i'm going to give it this date january 25 then rolled by so we're into another year then june dates came and went and one of the clever things he did was he started to pay 650 pounds a month every month and it was just enough to look reasonable to a judge and the other problem that we had it was a different judge every time so that each judge had to start afresh and he being a professional con man was able to present his stories his reasons his rationale why he'd been unlucky why it was unfair so you know using his child as a pawn in this situation all of that was then convincing the judges to not say okay it's cleared but give him extra time and that extra time financially and at this point like a little bit of stress i guess was starting to to add up so by this point you had the arrears situation for at least eight months then you're trying to get the eviction order then by this point jan 25 you're well at least three four months past having the eviction order and all these dates keep coming and going the money's one thing but i imagine that just mentally this is going to really mess with your head and i know you are not someone who gets bothered by things easily but even so it must just really mess with you having all these hopes that it's about to be resolved then something else comes up and with it just be so ridiculous and so obviously being played it would drive me absolutely mad yeah it was hugely frustrating and you know what people can believe this or not but rob you know me a long time i wasn't bothered about the money i'm not emotional around things like money like of course it's wrong what he was doing but it was more that he was playing the system and it was the frustration of the lying and i'm quite principled on things like that it was like i'm one of those old school people that if we shake on a deal a deal's done so it was the way that not only was he going against his word all the time but manipulating and that's the word right he was manipulating judges he was manipulating the legal system he was manipulating everybody he could he manipulated me at the beginning it was that that bothered me like in the grand scheme of things when you run a business these numbers that we're talking about here that we'll get to at the end you know it's a bill in a business like so I'm used to dealing with bigger numbers I'm used to dealing with huge amounts of stress from what a business can bring so i was all right from that point of view like i wasn't going to bed losing sleep over it but it was more annoyance at the manipulation that's what bothered me it was like it was that point like how is this allowed that's what really really peed me off yeah the injustice of it i think it would really get to me but then also even though you're not bothered about the money like in poker terms you're pot committed right like you have to get this person out it's not going to sort itself out but presumably with every delay with every new piece of work your solicitor has to do you're just chucking more and more money into this so the numbers going up week by week so while you said and i do believe you that you weren't bothered about the money it's becoming more and more of a financial problem because presumably every time there's another excuse your solicitor has another piece of work not just the amount that you're owed but the amount that you're having to put into it yourself is going up and up so this is just building and building over months and even years but i know it did eventually come to an end how did it come to an end how do you finally get him out well it's sort of come to an end which everyone's going to hear about in a moment so we got him out on the day of the final eviction when the bailiffs were there and by the way this wasn't the first time bailiffs had turned up he'd managed to get himself out of it the first time so this is the second time the bailiffs were there to get him out and he called the police to make it stop he presented a load of lies to the police luckily the agent was on the ground for this eviction normally they wouldn't go but knowing this character now they they went along and the agent was great they got solicitors on the phone to the police so that they could explain what was happening because he was trying to use his child as a pawn in this situation to say that they're going to be homeless that you can't evict me that if you take us out this property now then my child has nowhere to sleep tonight sounds awful right the police went and spoke to the child separately and the child said no i can live with my mom and i do live with my mom and i think that tells you a lot about this person right like what type of person would do that you know i don't like to get into personality of someone and get an abitable to use your child as a pawn to get out your own mess and put them through that experience i think when it didn't have to happen they could have been at their mom's when he was being evicted that told me everything i needed to know but he went he went not through choice but we got him out the property the locks were changed and physically that person was no longer in the property and that was great but not the end so he's out the locks presumably have been changed how is this not the end like there surely there are no more tricks left to play well unfortunately at this time as well ai is becoming more advanced so um his legal game got even stronger he started to fire off everything he could legally so first of all he claimed the eviction was void and said it never legally happened his argument that the enforcement paperwork had the wrong postcode on it on one of the letters that went out so in his words you evicted me from a property that doesn't exist that was actually true he'd found that one of the postcodes and one of the letters was wrong he claimed the agent had lied to the police on the day of the eviction he said he'd been paying his rent back without default and that was the 650 pounds and demanded to be put straight back in i mean this isn't all on day one right this is all unfolding i mean rob this this is a two year plus story so i'm missing so much out here we'd be going on for hours on this podcast and clearly he had form as well because he'd sued the bank so he sued for damages of unlawful eviction for tens of thousands of pounds the number quoted was between 85 000 and 115 000 as i say because it was ai involved the language was very legalistic and the document demands you know kept coming and if it's not obvious already you know that you're not dealing with just standard disputes anymore this is something i've never ever experienced not like i've said already once but i need to stress not even close to before and yeah unfortunately as i've just detailed the removal of the individual didn't end in the the faff i wonder what his mentality was at this point because like surely at this point it's game over once he's physically out surely kind of knows it's ridiculously unlikely that he's going to be let back in and he knows he must know that he doesn't really have a case he's not going to get any money out of you for unlawful eviction so i was wondering what the game was and whether it was all like coolly reasoned as part of some great plan or if he just went nuts and started lashing out everybody could because you mentioned before that you started suing your solicitors as well yeah um so the big one was when he turned on my solicitors for the cool sum of 1.2 million um he threatened complaints to their regulator so the solicitors had to get solicitors so this was costing the solicitors money as well and rob you talk about the mindset of this individual but the behavior from the start was never what you would call normal i don't think anyone is normal but like it wasn't like in even in the realms of what people would call normal so who knows what he was thinking what the rationale was in his head whether he believed it was possible or not we'll never know right we'll just never know and does he even know like this may all feel very normal to him like this may be all very much rationalized in this person's head like you have extremes in society right you have extremely incredibly beautiful people and then you have extremely challenging people.

22:41Rob B:Very podcast-friendly language here, Rob. And unfortunately, he was more of the challenge end. So it seems like he's not the kind of individual he's going to go, you know what? Fair enough. I fought my quarter, but now you're right. I owe you this money and I'm going to pay it. I'm going to settle up and we can all move on. Doesn't seem like that was his mindset. So assuming that that is the case, let's get into the financially painful bit because we talked about some of the mental difficulties of having this going on in the background for years and years and years and it might not be fun but for the good of the podcast rob because i was about to say entertaining that's probably not the word but it's certainly interesting to people people want to know how much this experience has cost you end to end so shall we try to break it down a bit okay so as i said he was behind the majority of the tenancy so the rent that i never got back was somewhere between 13 to 15 000 pounds so that's the rent the legal fees because you know there's a lot of work to be done here came to just over 10 000 pounds then there was court fees bailiffs enforcement lock changes getting this stuff back tracing him that was somewhere between 1500 to 2000 pounds so the number is somewhere between 25 and£30 ,000.

24:05Rob B:And you know what, Rob? Let's just give the biggest lesson right now and why this really hurts because I could have avoided a lot of this. Maybe not the hassle, but the financial hit I could have avoided if I'd taken insurance. Let's just be very, very clear. I will never, ever take a tenant on who I can't insure moving forward. And I think that's a sad thing, right? Because I said at the beginning that I was and had in the past given people the benefit of the doubt. I clearly can't take that risk ever again. And I will only take tenants that will pass insurance checks. And I will, from this day forth, always, always get insurance.

24:55Rob B:So I've pretty much not had insurance on my properties for 20 odd years i paid all that back i pay every penny i didn't pay has now caught up with me and some and i've changed you know i've changed my mind and something we talk about rob you know between us is people learn through pain and you know in life that's your biggest lessons that's when you change a course and i've changed course with how i act now with property investment and tenancies. I have insurance for everything, as you would probably expect after that experience. Well, yeah, after that experience, you would. I mean, I don't think what you're doing before was crazy.

25:35Self-insuring makes sense for small things. Like, I don't have my mobile phone covered because, well, that's very unlikely that I'm going to lose it or have it stolen. And if that does happen, then I can afford to get a new one without a great deal of pain. So it's fine. And the cost is capped. You know what it's going to be. You know the risk you're taking. I think the lesson here is that you might not be aware, landlords in general might not be aware of the risk that they're taking because the exposure is absolutely massive. Like getting over£30 ,000, that is not an easy cost to just absorb.

26:03So it's the same reason you always get building insurance, right? Like if your house burned down, you can't afford to rebuild it. So you get insurance. But I think what this story shows is that a single tenancy, just one thing, you just have to be unlucky once and the cost can be absolutely enormous.

26:17Rob B:yeah and it's not even the cost like i said rob it's more that you know you can move it mentally away and go the insurance company are dealing with it all and they've got their legal people working on it because they're paying the bills and you know it's passing the responsibility of going through it all to somebody else yeah i get that but let's not wave off the financials because there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to deal with that imagine if it was your only property yeah yeah yeah i think this whole story is just like will come as a shock because the narrative is always like oh landlords can just throw people out on a whim and clearly that is not the case i think what you've seen is the extreme end i definitely wouldn't want people to get the idea that this is something that happens all the time it's not or that it's something that happens to this degree of severity when it does happen because this was a very special case and how lucky we are to have personal experience of this as a case study on the podcast because you have lived the extreme end of this but the fact that the cost can be so high and the fact that the legal mechanisms exist to drag it out this long at this much expense i think people will be shocked by that i think they will be and rightly so but we do have to remember that this was a professional he was doing things that were catching legal experts off guard with like this person was at the top of their game of play the system we are on the absolute extremes of tenants experiences here between us Rob with our portfolios we must have had hundreds of tenancies you know live across the years and we've had a letting agents in the past so then that experience goes to thousands we speak to investors all the time our exposure to tenants and how they operate is vast there's not going to be many people who've experienced as much as we have.

28:11Rob B:I'm sure there will be people out there, but it's a very small number. This, as far as I'm aware, is by far the most extreme case of all that experience that I know of, like by a country mile. So while some people who haven't started investing yet may be absolutely terrified by this conversation, the reason we're having this conversation and it's podcast worthy is because it is so extreme you can probably tell by the tone of my voice that it still shocks me today at what played out like i just can't still get my head around that this i feel like it's like it's not even real because it's such an extreme story and i don't mean this i mean it i'm glad it happened to me because i've got the experience so i understand that this is extremely unlucky you said if someone had one property that's their only experience of property and they then must think it is the worst thing ever and like what are these guys talking about on the podcast like this is a game for the nuts this is like a terrible terrible thing to do but that's the beauty of experience and our exaggerated experience because of the reach that we have you kind of realize that something as dramatic as this is just incredibly unfortunate it is incredibly unfortunate but sadly i think the lesson from it has to be what do you do about this what's the practical advice well you have to be less trusting and that's really sad but you are somebody who gives the benefit of the doubt you're someone who assumes the best and you've said you're not going to do that anymore and i think that's rational and it is such a shame because even though people like this are so rare it's not a situation that anyone is likely to have but because of the possibility because people like this are out there.

30:00It means that the rational thing to do for any investor is to be less trusting. Of course, always take the insurance. Taking the insurance is the easy bit. It'll cost you a bit, but that's okay. But it's rational to take less of a chance in the first place. And it's rational to really not give people the benefit of the doubt once something starts. So the rational thing to do, and what I'm sure you'll be more likely to do now, is as soon as there is a flicker of trouble get on it and don't let things drag on for months and months and months because you can cap your exposure as much as you can and it's just such a shame that

30:32Rob B:that's the case it is but i want everyone listening to this to take my experience and if they've wavered on insurance in the past i think the way the renters rights act has come in like insurance is just something you should do now it's not really optional but if for some reason if you're listening to this and you're thinking it could be still optional it's not expensive it's just not worth it it's just not worth the risk so get yourself that insurance because like i said this not only financially wouldn't have been an issue but also just mentally it's not really your problem i think you can detach yourself from it when it's the insurance people who are on the hook and they've got to sort this they've got to foot the bill yes there'll be work involved but i just speaking like please if you're listening to this do get insurance and let my very extreme lesson not just be a you used the word entertaining rob but let's face it it is entertaining like we all watch the titanic movie right you know it's like so it's like this is my titanic episode on the podcast the ship did sink and you knew that from the title but you're still here listening because it's interesting but use it more than just an interesting listen use it more than just a shocking experience that you've got to listen to and take my pain and use it as a tool to go i will always get insurance in property like you rob i don't insure everything i've said the word everything before i mean i meant every property like i do not take that risk anymore because of that pain i never ever will again which in some ways is sad but you can very much know rob i've learned my lesson well in this episode we've been talking about your pain but now we're going to talk about the relief of your pain there you go i'm a pro podcaster i've got a great link aha very good rob so let's talk about something that um brings a lot more joy to me personally i think about that and i'm a paddle addict i think that's quite clear on the podcast and the very limited social media stuff that i do and my fitness around paddle it's it's all great but unfortunately rob we are in our early 40s and my body isn't quite as good at recovering as it used to be and now I put recovery plans together when I was in the gym I used a massage gun and it was amazing so I was like wait a minute I need a massage gun so my birthday came around and I was treated and pleased to say with a massage gun now it's one of those presents that I picked myself because I'm a bit weird and I research everything to great depths probably more than anybody should but that's why it makes a great resource because I giving this recommendation not offer a 30 second google or AI search this was something I've looked into properly and the one I'm going to recommend is around about 100 pounds and it's the Bob and Brad C2 that doesn't mean too much to you that brand don't worry they're youtubers I think I've come across some of their stuff in the past I'm not an avid watcher of their stuff but their product is very very good and i use it as part of my recovery process from either the gym or playing paddle now so i can be active most days of the week and i'm not going to say that i feel no muscle fatigue anymore it's greatly improved and alongside the google ai the fitbit air i mentioned a few weeks ago that also gives me lots of recovery tips as well um so that's been really helpful so the combination of using ai for recovery programs and my massage gun it's been a bit of a game changer so yeah it feels quite odd moving to this segment rob very different to what we talked about today but like you said it's brought me a lot of relief elsewhere yeah and you mentioned that they're youtubers i've actually watched when i've been injured a fair bit of their channel that's worth a recommendation as well because two guys who are both really really funny which you wouldn't expect when the people are talking about how to deal with knee pain or whatever but they are really really good so we'll link to the channel as well so if you're carrying an injury or you want to prevent one then we've got you covered never let it be said we don't cover a lot of ground on this podcast and also we've been talking about scary things in this episode and we talked about the need for insurance we don't have a specific insurance recommendation but also put a couple of links in the show notes to places where you can go and research potential options if you're suddenly feeling an urgent need to go and put something in place, which I would not blame you for after hearing today's story.

35:01But that is our stunt for this week. Thank you, Rob, for sharing that story. And thank you to you for listening, presumably with your head in your hands at places. And we'll be back with a happier episode, I hope, next week. We'll see you soon. Bye-bye.

35:11Rob B:Bye-bye.