Post mortem summary of potential legal issues
Hi. I'm new here and wanted to share a recent issue I had with my renters. I'm looking for a little knowledge. I apologize if this gets long winded.
I'm a novice landlord and have been renting my townhouse for over 5 years. My last tenant officially vacated Nov 1st 2014. She was the ideal tenant for almost 4 years. Never late and hardly ever had any maintenance issues (that were her fault) and she left virtually no damage to the house after leaving (except for normal ware and tear on walls, etc). But she tainted all that in the last 3 days before moving out. By not moving out on time, leaving all sorts of junk in and outside the house. She hasn't paid her water bill or transferred services back to me. And the worst thing was she left me a squatter!!
She was the only official tenant on the lease and never told me this other guy moved in. He had been there for at least a year. I did discover he was there about a year ago when I went over to fix an issue but I let it slide (i know; I shouldn't have).
Thankfully, it only took me a week to get rid of the squatter (literally as of last night). I've heard horror stories of it taking almost a year to get rid of squatters. But if the person was never on the lease (and he never paid rent according to my tenant) does he have any legal rights if he had decided to fight me on this?