Evicting tenants HELP!

[Harry Wilson]

Hi there, my friend has a house with three units.

all need to be renovated lightly and adjusted to market rents (1k-1.3k).

when he bought the property he inherited a tenant with a pitbull, this was the previous owners grandson (property was bought in an estate sale), he agreed to let the tenant live there for 400 a month until he knocked the property down or renovated it.

Now we have carried out all major fixes and are painting and finishing the first floor and we plan to move some thoroughly screened tenants in with all measures in place etc, at 1,200 with all utilities.

the tenant and his dog will affect us getting these floors rented to quality tenants, and we also cant renovate his floor ( which is two bedroom we could rent for 1,100)  until he leaves, i have offered to pay him and help him move however he has a pitbull and he says it will be hard to find anywhere else and he doesnt want to leave.

in the past there has been issues while we have been doing work such as broken heating, and we don't have any official agreements that he has signed. 

how do i go about evicting him?

should i just increase his rent to 1,100$ and get him to sign a month to month lease and keep increasing until he leaves?

do we take him to court? we haven't argued or fell out yet and it was more of a polite offer i made to get him to move and he just told me about his dog saying he has nowhere to go and declined it.

Please help us!

[Deanna McCormick]

So no current written lease,, but he pays rent on the first every month,, then it's considered a month to month lease even if it's not on paper.

It's not an eviction is a NON renewal of lease term. Mutual termination type of agreement,  your giving notice and hopefully he understands he will need to relocate. If after you've given him proper notice, and he hasn't moved out then you would give notice of filing for eviction action due to failure to vacate as per proper notice of non-renewal.   But now this is how you'd proceed. 

Give him a non-renewal of rental agreement. which more than likely for most states is proper 30 day written notice given prior to the 1st of the month.. so you write up a letter :

.... your month to month rental agreement will not be renewed for another term of 30 days, this is proper notice to vacate the apartment located at xxxx by 12 noon on the 31st of March 2017. Please leave your apartment in clean condition and provided is a written reference with your rental history. Our renovations of the building now have come to the point where in order to complete the work we must have complete access to entire building. 

Follow your state landlord tenant laws.. google it .. follow it and personally any new tenants I would offer only Month to Month term leases. NO pets..   you can guarantee rental rate for 12 months with no increase, and this give you great flexibility of terminating renters