I count on a rental property as part of my income. It’s a live/work space that houses a business. The tenant has two months left on his lease. In the last month he’s said words classified as expletives to our manager, refused to renew the lease unless we dealt with him directly and then when we offered a lease with no rent increase which is already below market rate through the manager, he demanded we lower the rent by $300 a month and because he thinks our manager is rude, we must deal with him directly. We have a firm boundary around this and this is why we have a manager, but the tenant found our email address and has sent multiple emails.

He has not paid rent this month. He says we need to let him live there and just take his last month’s rent and deposit and not charge him any further.

Several thoughts.

He did this on purpose because the eviction moratorium goes till December 31st.
He has the money and won’t pay us.
He’s milking the system even though he’s not experiencing “financial hardship”

In another model is the lost income that was to cover our expenses and taxes for the year. Now I don’t have the money coming. Now I have other thoughts

I can’t pay my bills
I’m going to have to quit scholars
We’re screwed
We can’t sell it off to pay taxes or get another renter while he’s in there.
He’s probably going to trash the place and we won’t be able to afford to fix it and will have to sell it as is for less
We can’t even evict him and that’s not fair
If we did try to evict him, people would think we were assholes because of COVID.

I’m mostly feeling a mixture of panic and anger. He was our tenant for 6 years and then became abusive with our manager over a broken air conditioner, then decided to move out and cry hardship. Not cool. I thought I could count on him as a solid person who would honor financial commitments. I was wrong and I feel like an idiot.

A soon to be broke idiot.