Why Do People Do These Things?

Eleven years ago, when real estate looked like it was a good investment, we took some equity in our home and built two new townhouses in an established and growing community 20 miles away.  We planned, of course, to rent them and, hopefully, break even on the monthly costs while the properties appreciated over time.

A few years later the market crashed, taking the appreciation that had indeed occurred away, and wiping out value to below what we had originally paid to build the properties.  When we sold one of them a few weeks ago to prepare for our upcoming relocation, we took a loss of about $80,000 vs. what we paid to build it.  That's not a pleasant memory.

We had a series of genuinely decent people renting the properties over the years, from families to tenants who rented while they were building their own houses.  It was actually the last tenant, another very nice person, who bought the one house we just sold.

The other house was occupied by a single gentleman for nine years, from the time we built it.  He took reasonable care of the place, thank you, and when he left we did repaint the whole inside and clean carpets, but structurally it was intact.  He treated it like it was his home.

When he left, we found a family to rent it whom we hoped would be there for a long time.  They were also very nice, and when a year later they had a job transfer to Colorado, it seemed like they, too had treated it as their home and left it reluctantly -- but in need of no real work save a touch-up here and there.

A year ago, however, a new tenant -- a woman and her teenage son -- took over occupancy.  Unlike every other tenant, however, rent checks from her came late, when they came at all.  The last full rent check was late last year.  The intervening months were laden with promises but empty of payment, as if it were the obligation of my wife and me to provide free lodging.

We have paid over $20,000 in mortgage payments without a cent of rent to offset it.  Ultimately we were forced into going to court to get an eviction notice, which was unchallenged as the tenant did not show up for either court date, as well a judgment for default for the unpaid rent.

During this time, I received a series of messages asserting the tenant's desire to purchase the home and that she would be able to do so "very soon", given her work.  Many messages.  You would want to assume that if that were the case, she would have taken pains to keep the property perfectly, exactly as she would have wanted to have had on assuming ownership.

The eviction took place yesterday.  Unfortunately, when our property manager (who has, way above and beyond, kindly taken care of the recent events including the court appearances) arrived to meet the sheriff and the locksmith, they discovered that the home had been vandalized beyond belief.  Carpet had been completely removed from one room and stairs; holes had been punched in the walls in most rooms.  Doors had been damaged and jambs splintered.

If -- and this is a big "if" -- we are lucky, our insurance company will be willing to cover the damage under our homeowner's policy, less a large deductible.  Either way, an inordinate amount of work will have to be done to get the house on the market again, during which time even more mortgage payments will need to be made with no offset.

I do not know what possesses a human being to act in such a way as to cause such damage, either to property or to the finances of others or, in this case, both.  As I write this, I am shaking my head in wonderment.  When push comes to shove, this person ended up paying zero for many months of living in what had been a nice townhouse.  In return, she has the house vandalized.

I did not grow up in such a way that I either would consider doing such a thing or even imagining doing such a thing.  I get why, say, religious fanatics like the Islamic terrorists do what they do -- they think their god is telling them to do so.  I do not get this.  This is spitting on people who stretched far longer with her than most people would, and then spitting again -- and ripping up carpets and putting holes in walls.

We will have the damage fixed, repair the place and put it up for sale, losing even more in the process.  And for the rest of my life I will never understand what caused this person to take out whatever she had wrong with her, on the last people who tried to accommodate her.

But here, for the world, I forgive her.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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