As I said below, when you do it legally, someone from the sheriffs department is involved. A clean out crew is often made up of day laborers anyway.
You also don’t have to be gentle with the tenants stuff. You just throw it out on the curb.
Edit: I usually don’t comment on downvotes. But why is a factually correct comment being downvoted? I was a landlord, this is exactly the process in my state.
You're being downvoted because "You also don’t have to be gentle with the tenants stuff." has a tone that implies you are particularly spiteful or disdainful of people who are essentially the least powerful in society. It suggests a level of cruelty beyond a transactional business relationship.
I disagree, I read it as “it is not necessary to ensure that property remains unscathed from the eviction process, thus an untrained crew removing someone’s possessions from their former home is a reasonable/sensible idea”
I haven’t been a landlord in over decade and I only had to do one eviction. Again I am stating facts. You don’t have to be gentle. These are the facts. I didn’t say you shouldn’t be.
After that one eviction , the next time my rental properties became empty, I started getting rid of the properties. They weren’t worth the trouble.
Facts aren’t always nice. That doesn’t mean they aren’t facts.
Money is never “personal” to me. Once the real estate crash happened and my tenants started leaving, I did strategic defaults. I actually let one tenant stay at one of my properties for months without paying rent. I knew I was going to walk away from the underwater property anyway. I told them they could stay until the bank kicks them out. I told them I was going to let it go in foreclosure. They were fine with it. They had a place to stay for months, saved money and left before the bank evicted them. No eviction on their record.
Edit: it seems to be endemic to this post, anyone care to reply why I am incorrect or why they disagree?
Regarding your edit; a section of the people who browse Hacker News comments HATE landlords. Every comment I've seen from someone who has experience as one has seen a lot of downvotes. Even if they are just stating a fact or expanding on something.
Not everyone wants to be a homeowner. Heck I didn’t want to be a homeowner in 2016 when I bought my current house. I thought I might be moving to the west coast to work for Big Tech this summer (2020) when my son graduated. Rent was going up so fast as people started moving into the area that it didn’t make sense to wait.
Luckily, I found a remote job at Big Tech. But I dreaded thinking I might have to go through the hassle of moving pre-Covid.
I hate to get meta. But I really haven’t seen anything this weird in the years I’ve been posting here. Easily verifiable facts with no opinions being added getting downvoted and no one disagreeing with me.
You have to schedule an eviction with the sheriff’s department. The police are there during the process. To get to the landlord, you have to go through the police first.
Like they say where I hail from: "None a 'yer bizness."
That said, a "scientific" analysis of a "representative sample" of the above links indicates that very few (if any) deal make any mention at all of the case to which we are referring: that is, where the tenant has vacated the premises (leaving their belongings on site) after the landlord has reclaimed possession.
To use just one example that does make mention - California - it says:
Any property of the tenant left on the premises will be turned over to the landlord for storage.
That is - the landlord may not, as you suggest, dispose of it as they will. Rather, they need to put it in storage for the tenant to reclaim it a future date.
And in Florida:
If the renter leaves any personal property at the rental unit, the Florida eviction laws mandate you to notify them in writing. In Florida, the law requires that you give the tenant at least 10 days to claim the property. The 10-day period is if the notice was personally delivered to the renter. If mailed, the tenant has 15 days to claim the property. You can charge the tenant for storage of the property. The costs should be reasonable. If the tenant fails to claim the property within that time, you are at liberty to dispose of it whichever way you please.
Again -- the guidelines (that you yourself posted a link to) clearly state that the landlord may not simply dispose of the property as they see fit. Rather, they need to put it (safely) in storage for a certain minimum period as prescribed by law.
That's just checking 2 of the links that you provided - both of which clearly contradict the assertion you made.
I ask again, have you been a landlord? Have you ever been on either side of the eviction process in any state?
Yes there is a process. After 18 days, what do you think the landlord does with the property? Do you think they keep it forever?
The eviction process in some states and getting rid of the property have separate timelines. But after that holding period, you are still allowed to remove the property as you see fit.
As far as the article is concerned, the landlord would just have to wait 18 days before calling the company.
Even your own citation says “you are at liberty to dispose of it whichever way you please.” Just as I said.
There are plenty of Byzantine steps to the eviction process. But at the end of the day, someone from the sheriff’s department removes the person and ultimately you are responsible for disposing of the property. Whether that happens the same day is immaterial.
I ask again, have you been a landlord? Have you ever been on either side of the eviction process in any state?
This is a typical debating "technique": bully the other party with questions like "Have you ever lived in country X? No? Then you have no right to question anything I say about the politics or history of country X."
Yes there is a process. After 18 days, what do you think the landlord does with the property? Do you think they keep it forever?
The point is, your initial message 100 percent, straight up said the complete opposite of what you're saying now: that as a landlord you can just "throw their stuff out on the curb" with no process whatsoever.
I’m not explicitly backpedaling on anything. I argued against the narrative that
A) it’s dangerous to hire a third party inverted movers because their might be an interaction between the evicted tenant and the crew moving things out. The police are always involved during a legal eviction when you move the tenant out.
B) inverted movers may destroy the property. Secure “storage” in states where the two don’t happen the same day - moving the tenant out and moving their stuff could just be leave it in the house and if they don’t come for it dispose of it however you want - including using inverted movers.
Have you ever lived in country X? No? Then you have no right to question anything I say about the politics or history of country X."
You are allowed to have your own opinions but not your own facts. One of us have actually gone through the legal eviction process. One of us haven’t. I think I have more credibility.
Why are you telling me? I’m just stating the facts. People seem to think that getting random people to move tenants stuff on the street have to be gentle or they put themselves at risk of being sued.
My statements are
A) at least in my state, the police are there monitoring the actual eviction either way.
B) you don’t hire professional movers who are careful with the tenants stuff. No one does. There is no increased liability from using this service over getting day laborers.
I wonder what kind of controls they have to ensure you actually have the right to evict tenants before hiring a crew. Or heck, that you even own the property.
Maybe someone will create a startup where you can hire another crew of gig workers to fight the landlord's crew and then create some sort of social media platform to stream the fights and make money from it by making the viewers pay to keep the stream online...
I understand evictions trigger lots of emotions and can be terrible situations for the tenant. But so many comments here seem to treat an apartment as something the tenant is entitled to, even without payment.
How is living at a property without paying for it any different than walking out of Walmart without paying for bread?
Staying at a place without paying rent is a form of direct theft. The non-paying-tenant is stealing use of the property without payment. It's somewhat normalized, but that doesn't make it ok or something anyone needs to tolerate.
I really don't understand what people expect to happen. The moratorium doesn't mean tenants are living rent-free, it just means landlords can't evict. All the missed rent payments are still due. What do people think is going to happen on January 1st, 2021, when the moratorium ends and people have many months of back rent? That rent is immediately due in order to avoid eviction.
It just seems comically short sighted. The most idiotic temporary punt of 2020.
What's worse is that the moratorium doesn't prevent landlords from starting the eviction process ahead of time. They just can't kick people out until January.
While I might not agree with a lot of the opinions in these comments the sheer ignorance of the eviction process is what bothers me more. Opinions are pretty easy to write off but anyone here also has a multitude of search engines at their fingertips so there's no excuse for ignorance.
It varies by state but evicting someone is not the "just show up and kick out the tenant with threat of violence" process that many comments seem to be operating under the assumption that it is. You might be able to get away with that once or twice but (in the US) even the most shady of slumlord make a profit on a timeline longer than that approach is tenable.
Those people would be surprised to learn how common "cash for keys" agreements are...
When a landlord wants to evict a tenant who hasn't been paying rent, it's not uncommon for the landlord to actually pay the tenant cash to leave! This is so the landlord doesn't need to wait months with no rent income while spending significant time going to court, etc[1].
In much of the country it likely takes several months. Each step in the multi-step process generally has lots of loopholes, gotchas and potentially weeks of waiting.
If I had known what I know now, instead of going through the entire eviction process, I would have done that.
It’s a win/win for everyone.
The tenant won’t have an eviction on their record making it harder to rent somewhere else, they can move their own stuff out without the risk of it being damaged, they have cash in hand to stay somewhere else temporarily like a weekly stay hotel [1], and/or they could put their stuff in storage.
I should have been willing to pay up to two to three months mortgage for a cash for keys deal. They weren’t paying anyway, I could have saved the aggravation and they wouldn’t have trashed the place.
[1] all weekly hotels aren’t bad. I stayed in one with my wife and son for months after my lease was up and we were waiting for our house to be built.
It varies by state but evicting someone is not the "just show up and kick out the tenant with threat of violence" process that many comments seem to be operating under the assumption that it is.
It's a lot easier to just leave when the semester is almost over, you find out your roommate was maybe pocketing your rent, and the landlord shows up and says "I don't want to rent to singles any more. I've got a family moving in on Monday." That one had ripple effects in my life for years even with the highly undesirable safety net of moving in with family on short notice.
I also know how much damage a bad tenant can do to a property -- graffiti, smoke damage, pet stains -- on top of not paying rent.
I can see why people get pretty heated about tenants' rights, but I've also seen how badly both sides of the transaction can behave. Sometimes eviction is the best course of action for both parties.
I don’t believe that is the point the parent poster is making. It’s the entire Dunning Kruger Effect of most people who are posting who have no idea how a legal eviction process works.
> How is living at a property without paying for it any different than walking out of Walmart without paying for bread?
The difference is that failing to pay the rent isn't a crime.
Furthermore, according to the article
> The CDC has ordered a moratorium on evictions amid COVID-19 — making it illegal for landlords to force out tenants who can't afford rent during the pandemic
Which makes a certain number of evictions illegal at first place.
Maliciously failing to pay should be a crime, in my lowly opinion. It's one thing if you lose your job, but some folks out there are living and working like usual, while simply withholding rent because they can. Obviously this hurts impressions of those who seriously need and deserve the help. Shameful, but some have no shame...
The article is incorrect about the CDC eviction moratorium as it makes it sound to be some automatic thing. The tenants needs to file a letter (template is at bottom of CDC order) to the landlord or court and only after that they “might” be covered by the moratorium. It’s still up to the court to make the final decision.
I am replying repeatedly that many of the comments are factually incorrect and how evictions actually work - that police are there at least in my state to monitor the process - and people seem to disagree with the facts (witnessed by all of my gray replies) and no one has cited anything to the contrary.
I guess I am arguing against some type of narrative that I don’t know about.
Landlords usually provide little value compared to what they ask for and for a lot of them, it's essentially passive income, an investment if you want, but one that is basic survival for others. The US should not be having a homelessness crisis. We have more empty places than homeless.
The same way I personally believe Nestle or anyone else should not be trying to commodify drinking water beyond the "utility" grade.
Goes right past my comment. I don't want apartments owned by people for any other than their personal use to begin with because the profit motive incentivizes bad behavior and is inflexible in handling situations like Covid.
So you believe that buying a house should be legal, selling a house should be legal, but renting a house should be illegal? Or you believe all land+buildings should be government owned?
And you believe the government should have a monopoly on buying/renting houses?
And how would government renting houses be different than landlords? If the government wanted to give rent flexibility they can do it other ways besides owning the houses.
I don't have all the answers, but the current system cannot continue and needs to find a way to treat housing more as a public or heavily regulated utility with no profit motive.
I'm also fine with incremental change. We can start by moving ownership of unused decrepit housing to a public body that transfers based on real occupancy. Essentially expanding adverse possession.
You don’t just knock on people’s door and start putting their things out. There is a legal process and you have to get approval from the court. I’m assuming they are doing it legally.
They do mostly. They also like to remind you of their intend with batons and knifes on their belt. Violence is implied, not enacted. They stay within the confines of the law.
When I was a landlord, rule 101 is that you don’t go near the tenant while the eviction process was winding its way through court. Also, police are monitoring the process on the day of the conviction.
Edit: Does someone care to share how the above statement is factually incorrect?
Makes sense and is perfectly understandable. Many people here actually let the renting be done by third party managing companies. Sure, that also costs you, but you can often save you quite some headaches. Even or especially if your tenants are friends of yours. Don't know the rates, but some even continue to pay you the rent if the tenant stops paying.
It’s hard enough to be cash flow positive with rental real estate for a single property. Especially when you consider the 75% occupancy rate that is considered the industry norm - at least when you go for a bank loan and need to count it as income - then you have the normal repair expenses and prepping for new tenants.
Then you add on the cost of a management company - 10% of rent + up to 50% of the first month’s rent. The only people who I know that can stay cash flow positive are those with no or a low mortgage and/or are very hands on with maintenance and repairs.
I didn’t see any reports of banks in the US showing up to people’s doors, coming into their house and removing their stuff. Everything around the loan and foreclosure may have been shady, but the actual eviction is usually above board by the banks.
Right, but we're not talking about banks. We're talking about a startup company enacting enforcement with untrained workers against the will of a person having the law enforced on them.
We've watched other companies in the startup space with lives on the line cut corners---What are the odds that this is going to go well?
There is no evidence that the startup is doing anything differently than landlords have been doing legally for years.
After you go through the eviction process, you schedule someone from the sheriff’s office to monitor the process and you get some day laborers if you don’t know anyone personally.
The other startups are in danger of civil penalties and fines. If you go into your own rental property and evict someone illegally, you personally can be charged with trespassing, assault, criminal threats, etc.
I'm not sure why you'd assume they're operating legally. Violating the law was the USP for Uber, Airbnb and various other valley startups. It's a proven model.
The others just took risks of civil penalties. There are criminal penalties if you evict someone forcible and unlawfully.
It’s really not even worth the civil penalties. The tenants can stay on your property longer and even when you do evict them, lawyers love suing landlords on a contingency basis.
Criminal penalties the gig workers would be liable for. I'm sure this startup has hired the best lawyers to make sure that liability doesn't extend to them.
But if you tell a bunch of thugs to do a job with ill specified parameters, and they try to solve the problem by harassing store owners, you can blame them for obviously going outside the bounds of intent, right?
You run a legitimate protection business. Of course you wouldn't extort money by breaking store owners' legs. ;)
Setting up a situation where there is risk of breakdown and structuring that situation so if the breakdown happens, all of the responsibility falls on the gig workers who lack the means to defend themselves and none of it falls on the company making all the money is an already understood pathology of the gig economy. Uber has spent so much time, effort, and money trying to convince legislatures and courts that they don't have any employees providing ride services for a reason.
There is really only one guideline to eviction procedures after you have won the court case - at least in my state. You must wait for someone from the sheriff’s office.
The sheriff is responsible for removing the person. You and your crew that you have hired is responsible for removing items and changing the locks. You aren’t responsible for any damage to personal items or what happens when you put them on the side of the road - where you are legally required to put the items at least for a single tenant house.
Until I see the United States with my own two eyes, I will continue believing it’s a made up place / simulation that tests the absolute dead limits you can push capitalism to without starting a revolution
I've always insisted that the USA doesn't really exist. Because no country so fucked up could possibly command so much power and influence in the world.
Some day I hope to prove my theory by earning enough money to buy a boat and then sailing due west from Ireland until I reach the east coast of Russia.
Yes, you should wait until you see it. Don't form your opinions of the world based solely on what you read in the news. Wherever you are from, I'm sure it's a nice place. And I'm sure I could find a hundred news articles saying the opposite.
This is kinda sick: hire someone desperate to have a job and that job is to evict someone from where they live. How many ways could this possibly go wrong?
(And has Fix television optioned this for reality TV yet?)
There's already a series in the UK where sheriffs come to your house to reposes items or evict you. It's brutal but it's their job. I would not be able to do such a job.
"Can't Pay? We'll Take It Away", it's some of the most egregious poverty porn out there. These High Court bailiffs (who are employees of a private company, because of course) show up at people's doorsteps; if it's because of a debt, they demand payment or start taking inventory of items to seize.
So my only knowledge of this part of UK law comes from watching this garbage TV, but what amazes me is how much freedom the officers seem to have with respect to how strict their enforcement actions are. In some cases they only ask for a small amount of the debt and a payment plan to make up the rest, but if the debtor's uncooperative or a bit of a dick, the officers are going to start towing cars and carrying out TVs.
Here in Florid an eviction is a legal process fought in the courts, once the tenant is 'convicted' the landlord can use the police to evict.
I don't understand how this could be better than the police other than the timing? This is going to end terribly, just some John Doe showing up to peoples homes?
There's also a service where you can hire somewhere to apologise for you/your company's fuck ups. I actually had a roommate that ran such a business. His clients will even issue him official name cards and an email address so he looks like a real employee, which they'll promptly burn once the case is over. Then they get to say that the guy that caused the issue has been fired and everythings all good now. Amazing guy, extremely resourceful, probably would've been running a successful start up if he ever found a way into SV.
> Here in Japan, you can hire people to resign your job for you.
Just the a facet of the Japanese work culture. They respect their bosses and upper management so much so that I’m sure the worker feels guilty or shameful when leaving.
Wasn't that the premise of the movie? Anna Kendrick's character was hired by the company to capture the process of firing people so they could do it remotely.
If you view the source of the agent onboarding page, you can read what appears to be an arbitration clause that is written for Uber. I am guessing they just copypasted the whole thing? Or...?
Who in their right mind would work this type of job? I suppose if you were going to get kicked out of your apartment, you might do this. Evicting people can be very dangerous, not to mention depressing.
Having regularly perused the uber drivers subreddit for a couple years back when I used to do that, the percentage of misanthropes commenting there seemed high.
Of course, it's a big leap from being willing to screw over strangers for a few bucks to being willing to throw them out of their homes on to the street, but I've got a feeling some would sadistically enjoy the transition. As long as it paid enough.
Honestly it seems to me like something out of a crappy, dystopian sci-fi B movie from the 90s. With everything else we've seen this year, though, I'm not even that surprised. People being horrible is normalized, and most of my outrage has been depleted. It's just expected now.
When I was a landlord and had to evict people, I hired a guy who got a crew of day laborers to actually move everything out.
If you evict people legally - at least in my state - you have to schedule a 2 hour window with the police and they are present supervising during the entire process.
Also, the eviction process required at least 5 people to be present to actual clean the unit out depending on the size of the house/apartment.
I don’t either. No one is commenting that any thing I’ve posted is factually incorrect.
The company is doing nothing differently except putting hiring day laborers online. Home Depot wasn’t liable when the guy I hired picked up a crew from the parking lot. We waited for someone from the police department to show up - as legally required - and started the cleanup process.
There is a long and storied tradition of members of lower classes being employed in jobs enforcing the will of the powerful against members of other lower classes.
Hey, it puts food on the table, and my kids are hungry. And it keeps the debt collector at bay.
The implied expectation of class / race / ethnic / ... loyalty is fundamentally flawed, though. I'm friends with people of many groups who are unlike me, and conversely, there are many people in my demographic whom I dislike. Not all [insert race][insert socioeconomic class][insert religion][insert ethnicity][insert career] people are the same, and we don't want segregation.
This is a particularly nasty cross-class alliance, but at the core, we WANT cross-class alliances.
> Hey, it puts food on the table, and my kids are hungry. And it keeps the debt collector at bay.
So does shovelling Jews into gas ovens and pulling out people's fingernails. I guess it just depends on where your internal "Do Not Cross" moral line lies.
I think you've made my point for me. If moral lines are easy enough to move that people will "shovel Jews into gas ovens and pull out people's fingernails," it's not hard to find people more than glad to cross class lines to enforce laws, whether those laws are just or corrupt (and most laws are in the middle).
At the core, there are few or no internal "Do Not Cross" moral lines. Moral lines are first culturally-situated, and second, individually-situated.
Incentive structures set by the ruling class drive a huge part of culture. Media does too. There are a lot of tools to manipulate culture, and they're actively (and increasingly scientifically) used. At the end of a Roman Triumph -- a big celebration -- captured war prisoners would be strangled in front of an audience. In that culture, that was okay.
From there, you need to find just a few people, either divided, disgruntled, or of low moral character. If I want to keep poor Southern whites in-line in 1870, I can find blacks who hate them. If I want to keep poor Southern blacks in-line, I find poor Southern whites. There, we had a nice 50/50 split, but there will always be a few.
The expectation that "it's the turncoats fault" isn't a productive one. You need to fix systems, not individuals (with incentive structures around individuals are part of systems, of course).
No. Systems are not just people. I know many organizations which have really good people, but completely toxic cultures due to systems.
Systems are things like checks-and-balances, incentive structures, power structures, organizational design, and conflict resolution structures.
The US didn't work better than Soviet Russia because it had better people, much as Americans would like to believe themselves superior. It worked better because it had better institutions, starting with a very well-drafted Constitution.
Given a 2020 context, those structures are starting to function less well. You won't fix them by asking politicians to behave better; you need to address the structural issues.
People make systems. Look to the people at the top to understand the foundation of culture and people-systems. People made principles as foundations for better systems.
People at the top are beholden to other people at the top. It's a cycle. If a CEO does not appease shareholders, board members, and executives, there will be a new CEO. That's structures.
And people at the top rarely understand implications of their actions. Organizational systems are HARD.
But so often it happens that the working class and the owning class ally to reduce the power of the working class. They rarely seem to ally against members of the owning class.
At the battle of Plataea during the Second Greco-Persian War, a number of Greek city-states fought on the Persian side. Why? Because the Persians were so big and powerful they were surely going to win.
Because the owning class have really good PR(you can also be like us if you just work hard enough) and can afford better physical segregation and legal protection against the working class.
Oh geez, I can only laugh at the absurdity and audacity. The psychopaths who started this sure have a great idea on what to do in this world of cut-throat capitalism.
I wonder when someone will start a retail mercenary business...
Edit to add: To quote what someone on HN said: the whole gig economy platform is basically like having day labourers hanging out outside your local DIY store until a pick-up truck shows up and tells a few of them to hop in, but this time, it's all happening online!
Another gig is working for Trump making deep learning adversarial networks to optimize riling up his voting base and passifying normal thinking voters.
The fact that this type of firm even exists - if they in fact are behaving as reported (not just cleaning out vacated places, but in fact acting as enforcers) - is why i dislike American style capitalism. I'm not saying this firm can't exist elsewhere in the world, mind you. It just feels like awful things are allowed to happen here with justification being something along the lines of "hey, the market presented an opportunity, and someone filled it, yay America!" <sigh>
To clarify: I am a proud American, but am frustrated with how distorted life has become to allow business to supersede seemingly almost everything.
An eviction moratorium that does not include help for the landlords is one of the dumbest ideas of 2020. What do people expect to happen? This is going to be an absolute bloodbath.
Edit: I'd really like to hear what people think will happen when landlords don't have income for 9+ months. Or what they expect to happen when the moratorium ends and people have 9 months back rent. Just what, exactly, do people expect the outcome here to be?
I can't imagine what could go wrong here.