How to Deal with Threatening, Aggressive and Abusive Tenants

If you’re a landlord, the chances are that you don’t want to become too involved with your tenants, and want to keep the relationship professional and distanced. This might extend to collecting the rent, dealing with any concerns or repairs, and renewing or ending tenancies.

Although on occasion issues arise which require your involvement, usually these fall in to three general categories: The contact could be initiated by the tenant who has reported a genuine problem at the property; the tenant (or their indirect behaviour) has caused damage to the property which you need to repair to secure the property (smashed windows etc); or the tenant has failed to pay the rent so the landlord needs to get in touch to find out why.

In most cases the issue is dealt with quickly and positively, however some landlords do experience unpleasant behaviour from their tenant, whether that is because they do not like the landlord asking them to pay the rental arrears, or they are unhappy with being asked to pay for the unreasonable damage they have caused which the landlord has to put right. Sadly some landlords do feel threatened by their tenants behaviour, and some are even verbally or physically abused as a result.

Has your tenant recent become aggressive, abusive or threatening?

It could be that your tenant is unhappy with a rent increase, which was necessary because of the rising cost of landlord insurance: this happened to Sam, a landlord from Kent. Sam had agreed with his tenant to raise the rent on the flat he owned by £25.00 a month, to cover the increase in landlord insurance. Sam explained that, initially, his tenant signed the updated contract but then asked Sam to reduce the rent back to the original amount as they could not afford the increased rent.

Sam explained that this was not possible, and was soon receiving begging calls from his tenant almost every day. When these calls increased, and when the tenant’s family began to get involved, Sam knew that he needed to act and that he no longer wanted the tenant to stay in his property. Sam used a professional eviction service, who were able to deal with the situation quickly and without emotion.

Likewise, if you’ve decided that you need to evict your tenant, for another reason, then the procedure should be straightforward and professional. As a landlord, you are protected under the law from a tenant who might call you constantly, apologising for their behaviour and asking to stay in the property, or from one who becomes threatening to you.

Both tenants and landlords are protected against harassment by law

You are well supported under the law, and not being harassed is your legal, as well as moral, right. Many landlords are well aware of the law in terms of making sure they do not cause any harassment (or anything which could be viewed as harassment) when it comes to dealing with their tenant(s), but many landlords do not realise that this goes both ways – and landlords themselves are also legally protected. Indeed many landlords do not realise when they are being harassed and just consider it as part of the ‘job’.

Tenants have no grounds to interfere with the landlord’s peace, and they also have no grounds to interfere with any other tenants that you may have in the vicinity of the property from where you are trying to evict the tenant (for instance, if you had multiple tenancies running in a block of flats)

Dealing with aggressive and abusive tenants

Evictions South East are experts at dealing with tenancy evictions, and can efficiently deal with the problem. Often, we find that if there is a case of harassment from the tenant towards the landlord, the tenant often stops the behaviour when they find that they are dealing with a company, and not an individual landlord.

Evictions South East can deal with the situation quickly: we can issue either a Section 21 Notice, or a Section 8 Notice under the Housing Act 1988 (or, if appropriate, both simultaneously) and we can then ensure that the tenant is evicted quickly. If we deal with the eviction for you, not only can you be saved the aggravation, especially if you have been being harassed or threatened, but you can also be sure that we prepare all documents and details correctly, so that we ensure a speedy eviction, first time.

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Evictions SouthEast has a dedicated team of legal personnel ready to help you with your tenancy problems. We offer a free initial case review to give you some helpful information on how best to proceed with the case and what the likely outcome will be. Should you wish to proceed we will take on your case immediately with our transparent 3 step eviction process all based on a fixed fee pricing structure.

Evictions South East have a 100% success rate to date.