I've been a landlord for almost 20 years now. I've had hundreds of tenants and 99% of them have been

wonderful. They paid on time, they treated the property well, and they followed the simple rules of our

rental contract. Especially when we as the property owners offer a good property and do our job of

screening tenants before they move in, this is the norm. And out of the other 1%, many of them couldn't pay because of legitimate issues, like a health problem or they lost their job. It wasn't that they were bad people, life just happened. In those situations, if the tenants couldn't make up the back payments over time, we worked together to help them find different housing. And in many cases, we also gave them some cash to help them get restarted.

But sometimes a tenant doesn't pay on time. They stop communicating with you, and they leave you

with no other choice but to file an eviction to legally take back your property. There's no sugarcoating

it. This rare situation is not fun. An eviction is not something I ever wanted to do as a landlord.

And of course, it's an awful experience

for the tenant as well. But especially for the small and mighty investors who typically watch this

channel, the reality is that you have a mortgage and taxes and insurance and other bills that have to

be paid each and every month whether or not you have rent coming in. So you can't prolong a situation

where you're not getting rent, where you're losing

money, and where you risk going out of business yourself. So if you find yourself in this situation,

or if you're just a new landlord who wants to understand how the eviction process works,

in this video, I'm going to explain the basics and take you through the process of how to

evict the tenant step by step. Let's get started.

Today's question came from someone on YouTube and said, hey, Chad, love your channel.

Can you discuss the eviction process? Maybe have a guest talk about what they went through.

So I'm definitely going to come back and do an interview with someone and talk about actual eviction processes and what the story was and what happened. But today's video, I'm going to answer your question about the eviction process. The first point I want to make about the eviction process, and I hope I made myself really clear about this up front, is that eviction is not the goal. In a way, an eviction is a failure, not only for the tenant who's living there, but also for you as the landlord. We should do everything we can to avoid an eviction, and that starts up front when you're actually screening your tenants. So having a tenant screening process, which I'm not going to talk about in detail in this video, but I have other videos that you can check out. I have a link above me where you can check out a conversation I had about tenant screening and best practices for that. But if you do a good job of making sure someone I can afford the property, you don't do a favor either to yourself or to the tenant if they can't afford it. So you've got to look at their financials, their expenses, make sure they can afford it with their job and they had demonstrated a history of paying people other people on time. That's a really important process. And if you do that, most of the time, your tenant's going to be fine. They're going to be able to pay. But again, if you find yourself in the situation where someone can't pay, talk to them, have communication up front. Too many landlords have the knee-jerk response of saying, I'm just going to file an eviction. I'm going to get them out of there. But we all know whether there's an eviction or any other problem we have in life with someone else, often getting face-to-face, having a phone conversation at a minimum, but maybe just going face-to-face, either you as the landlord of your self-managing it or the property manager, go directly to the person. Let's solve the problem. We often want to stick our heads in the sand and kind of avoid the problem. But if you talk about it, sometimes there's a solution. So what are the solutions in our case if someone can make a payment plan? Let's say they had a $1,000 bill doing a car repair. They still have a job. They still have the ability to pay. And they could kind of skimp on some other expenses for now while they pay their back rent for the next few months. If they can do that, that's great. And we've worked out tons of payment plans with tenants in the past. So if you can do that, if they can demonstrate they can afford that, put that in writing in an email, make a payment plan, and work it out. And so even if that doesn't work, though, so if they can't afford it,

even if they need to move out, then work with them to help them move out. Doing a cash for keys program is something we've often done. And so you give them some money to help them move. If they're out of money and they don't have any money from their job or whatever, they're not going to be able to move. So giving them some cash, kind of swallowing your pride as a landlord and saying,

I'm going to help them move. This could be better for them. This could be better for me. It's a lot less costly than going through an eviction and having to pay an attorney or having to miss rent for many, many months. All of that can be a win-win situation. But it takes talking to the person, communicating, having a real

difficult conversation, but an important conversation. If you can work that out together, it can be

...