All Forum Posts by: Sujit Silla

section 8 can and do decrease rents.. 

all depends on who is managing a rent increase request.. They have a very opaque process with zero transparency.. 

They just decreased my rent on a house I rented a year ago in Southern California.. To say that market rents have gone down here in the past year is a ridiculous statement, and yet my rent is down and I have no way to contest it..

I just did some digging and found out that California just passed AB2819. Governor Brown signed this law in September 2016. Under this law, tenant info cannot be made public for the first 60 days, and after that, it will be made public only if the landlord wins the judgement, and only if the landlord fights to make the judgement a public record.

All of these are easily fought off by Tenant Attorneys.. The law is hopelessly stacked against small landlords

Now we are completely helpless against such tenants. Very soon we will see a flood of tenants refusing to pay rent.. 

One more task of due diligence can be carried out by the landlord for new tenants -  to ask for rental payment history.. Previous landlords may be too scared to speak out against such tenants, but rental payment history will show if the tenant actually paid the rent, and on what days..

My questions is a very generic question, that is applicable to all landlords.

While checking a tenant's credit, we get to see if the tenant has any eviction judgement against him or her.. What we don't see is whether an eviction was filed against the tenant regardless of judgement or the case being withdrawn..

I ask this because these days evictions are being filed in court, but landlords are hounded into accepting a settlement with the tenant..

Most evictions are against professional tenants, who force a landlord to settle, forgive back rent, instead force landlord to pay relocation, add 2-3 more months of rent-free stay...and to top it all, NOT have an eviction recorded against their credit.. Then those tenants move to another place and resume the same operation. Not only that, they  also destroy the property of the helpless landlord, and live rent-free for months (or years)!!

It is very easy these days to take advantage of tenant friendly laws and live rent-free, and also make relocation  (read ransom) money from landlords. 

To combat this, we all need information whether an eviction was just filed in court in the first place for such tenants...any information regarding this will be appreciated.. Professional tenants need to be identified, for protecting landlords, and also to protect good tenants who needlessly suffer the passed on higher costs imposed by this unethical trend..

Thanks

Sujit Silla..