The rental business is about as simple as it comes. Well in theory anyways...

 Buy property.  Rent property to well screened tenants.  Collect rent.  Clean furnace from time to time.  And repeat. 

Of course, it doesn’t always go that way.  Sometimes problems arise between landlords and tenants that are, well, problematic.  Tenants damage property or refuse to pay rent.  Landlords fail to fix the broken fridge.  Tempers flair and before long no one is happy.

Nobody wants to face a difficult conversation with a landlord OR a tenant.  By and large we all just want to get long, right? But sometimes difficult conversations are necessary. 

This is usually the stage when most landlords think of hiring a lawyer and most tenants hope that something will happen to prevent them from having to talk to a lawyer. 

My first bit of advise is to avoid lawyers as best as you can.  At Hope Street we deal with lawyers every day.  It can be a necessary evil, but it is not a good FIRST step to resolving whatever issue is knocking on your door.  Lawyers are expensive and for most landlord - tenant issues they will charge you an arm and a leg to do something you’re quite capable of doing yourself.

 My second bit of advice is to review what is pushing you to want a lawyer.  In most cases it’s one of two reasons:  damage to your property or a failure to pay rent.  HONESTLY THOUGH it is the thought of a difficult conversation that really motivates us to make that call.  We don’t want to have a difficult conversation with the other party.  We want to hide behind a lawyer - distance ourselves from the problem. 

So what if we don’t call the lawyer and we do have the conversation instead?  You may not know but you can hire a professional mediator to help with the discussion.  These trained professionals can help with difficult discussions.  You may discover that your tenant is only withholding rent because YOU promised to fix something and never did.  They’d be happy to pay, but they don’t know how else to get your attention.  Or maybe the landlord is not fixing the leaky sink because the real problem is in the pipes and they’d have to evict YOU, the tenant,  to fix it and since they know you need the place till the end of your semester they are waiting on it.

More often than not when the roots of the issues are exposed in a face-to-face dialogue a lot of the anger can be diffused and both parties can come out feeling happy. Creative solutions may even arise whereby both parties come out ahead.  Again, these difficult conversations can be hard without a mediator as it can be hard for both sides to remain objective.

The cost of evicting can be very high and should act as a deterrent to evicting unnecessarily.  Explore your options and communicate with the other party.  You may find the need to evict can be avoided entirely. 
Sometimes solutions cannot be reached.  If you can’t come up with a creative solution you may still need to pursue a higher level of intervention: most notably eviction.  You may want to read our article on eviction if you are already at that point.