Our Experience with Roommate Abuse Claims

Domestic abuse protections in rental housing are something most landlords hope they never have to deal with. Unfortunately, situations involving harassment, intimidation, or safety concerns can arise unexpectedly, and when they do, landlords must understand the legal protections involved.

We share a real experience encountered when a tenant invoked domestic abuse protection and legally withdrew from their lease after only four months. While the situation did not involve physical violence, the tenant claimed ongoing bullying and emotional harassment and provided legal documentation that allowed their lease termination with only 14 days’ notice.

We walk through what happened behind the scenes, including the difficulty landlords can face when privacy laws prevent them from sharing information with other tenants involved. Even though our lease contained clauses related to tenant behavior and the right to quiet enjoyment, we learned that eviction decisions require very specific types of evidence that landlords can legally present.

This experience reminded us that being a landlord isn’t only about collecting rent and maintaining property. Sometimes it means navigating sensitive human situations while carefully following housing laws and protecting everyone involved.

If you’ve never encountered a tenant’s domestic abuse claim, this episode will help you understand the legal basics, privacy considerations, and practical lessons we learned the hard way.

LINKS & REFERENCES

Episode 119 Roommate Tenants, Why We Don’t Prefer Them

EZLandlord Forms 

TurboTenant

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Transcript

Kevin 0:00

Even when landlords follow the law, situations like this can create unexpected vacancies, increased turnover cost, and ultimately lost rent. For this unit, because of the domestic abuse issue, we lost over$7,500 in rental income. And that does not include the legal fees we had to pay. That does not include the time it took to process the move out with inspection, photos, and turning the unit. And that does not include the administrative time it takes to process the security deposit, which was a mess because we had to charge for utility fees that the other tenant canceled. Along with a cleaning fee, because even though we are very specific with our move out instructions, there were several items that clearly had not been touched. We had time spent on marketing the unit, meeting prospects to do showings, processing multiple applications, and ultimately the lease. The unit binder had to be updated to include some changes that were made to our policies. So turnovers are not just the physical stuff you have to do to a unit, there's also a lot of time pushing paperwork as well. Sometimes doing the right thing still costs money.

Stacie 1:23

Welcome to Your Landlord Resource podcast. Many moons ago when I started as a landlord, I was as green as it gets. I may have had my real estate license, but I lack confidence and the hands-on experience needed when it came to dealing with tenants, leases, maintenance, and bookkeeping after many failed attempts. Fast forward to today, Kevin and I have doubled our doors and created an organized. Professionally operated rental property business. Want to go from overwhelm to confident if you're an ambitious landlord or maybe one in the making. Join us as we provide strategies and teach actionable steps to help you reach your goals and the lifestyle you desire, all well building is streamlined and profitable rental property business. This is Your Landlord Resource Podcast. Well hello there landlords and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Your Landlord Resource Podcast. I am your host Stacie, and I'm here with my co-host, co-business partner and the person I cohabitate with, my husband Kevin.

Kevin 2:31

Oh, nice. We, we cohabitate, huh?, You are aware that means we're committed but not married, right?

Stacie 2:40

I guess it's, it's just getting harder to find ways to introduce you. Maybe we should just have you begin and then you can introduce me.

Kevin 2:49

Oh, no, no. Thank you. I, I'm sure you'll find other creative ways to introduce me. Just make sure it's as your husband, not your boyfriend.

Stacie 2:59

What did your mom's friend used to call me before we were married? What was your sidekick?

Kevin 3:04

Sidekick? Geez. No, you were my companion.

Stacie 3:08

Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I don't, I don't think I was able to control the look on my face when she said that.

Kevin 3:16

Yeah, well, she had been married twice already and then dated more after that. And this is in her like at least mid eighties mind you. So I guess she decided all older couples should just unmarried and call each other their companions.

Stacie 3:32

Yeah. Well that's a very romantic term.

Kevin 3:36

Isn't it?

Stacie 3:36

Yeah. Okay. I'll make sure I remember that for the next episode. All right on with the show. So on our last episode, that was number 119, we discussed roommates and how we prefer not to rent to unrelated people. And how we wished we could just find families or couples, or at least people who have some sort of history together to live in our two bedroom unit as roommates. And during that episode, we mentioned that one time we had tenants who had to break the lease early because one of'em felt that they were being bullied by the other one. And this person had absolutely done their research because they had everything that they needed to legally withdraw themselves from our lease only four months in. And for clarification, we have no idea if what happened was true or false or somewhere in between. All we know is that we were provided with the necessary legal paperwork to allow our tenant to give that 14 day notice. I believe the legal term is that the tenant invoked their domestic abuse protections to break their lease. Now, let me be clear, this 14 day notice is only a California state law for domestic abuse. There are national laws and then usually each state has their own domestic violence laws that may take precedence over the federal law, much like this 14 day notice. So this is something we had never dealt with before. And if you have not heard the story, we received this notice as we were boarding the flight home from Kid One's wedding in Mexico. We were exhausted. We had eight family members who were traveling with us and we were herd'em all onto the plane. And then my phone dings, and of course I'm gonna look at my Apple watch to see who it is.

Kevin 5:38

And right away, I could tell she was not happy about what she read.

Stacie 5:44

Right. Again, another situation where my facial expressions are usually quite clear about how I feel. So after we get everyone in their respective seats and all the things from their carry-on bags in their hands, so we can put the bags up in the luggage bins, I get in my seat and I check my phone to read the whole text. Again, I am just awestruck. I had to read it several times to truly understand what it was saying. And essentially they claimed they were experiencing ongoing bullying and emotional harassment. They also said that they no longer felt safe living in the unit. Now, let me be clear, this was not a violent physical altercation. So before we took off, I did text'em back and let them know that I was boarding an international flight and I would address it the next day, which I did. And as we always do when we travel, all tenants had been notified that we were out of town and not gonna be available unless it was an emergency. And for context, the text that I got was noted that the tenant was staying with friends and not in harm's way. They just didn't realize that we were still unavailable. But anyway, that next morning, I hop on the computer and updated myself and learned everything I could about domestic violence laws. We utilized our free hour of legal service that we get through the California Department Association. We called our own attorney and we used good old Google and Chat GTP to fill in those gaps.

Kevin 7:23

I will say I was pretty impressed with chat GPT. Its response was very close to what the legal helpline emailed. Which, if we're being honest, essentially said we were screwed and had to let them outta their lease. Now, the other thing is that as we process this, we became angry. You know, much like grief, we had to go through all the stages of emotions, right? What is it? Uh, shock, denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and I guess finally acceptance. Well, when we were in the angry stage, we wanted to see what our rights were with the remaining tenant. So we went through our lease with a fine tooth comb, and we did find a clause in there that says, residents shall not annoy, molest, or interfere with any other person on the premises. This would be grounds for immediate termination. And we thought we were good to go. But thank goodness we had the wherewithal to wait for our attorney because the evidence the victim submitted was sufficient for getting out of the lease, but not sufficient enough for us to evict the remaining tenant. For that, we needed a police report, a restraining order, or actual copies of audio or texts of the bullying that made this person feel threatened. And the bottom line was that we had no concrete proof that they did bully and make the other tenant feel unsafe. So we ended up being stuck with this person in the unit for the time being.

Stacie 9:07

And the thing was, is that we were given that 14 day notice. So for two weeks we knew that this person was gonna move out and that the other tenant knew nothing. By law, we could not tell that other tenant anything, so we had to keep it all to ourselves until the other tenant finally contacted us to ask what was going on. Again, by law we could not say a word. So other than so-and-so provided California legally recognized paperwork to vacate the unit within 14 days, that was it. And to be honest, we did not really want to be involved in their whole situation. What we really wanted was to force the other tenant out so that we could just start over. Now, keep in mind that all of this went down in the middle of December, right before the holidays. So we told the remaining tenant that they were paid through the month and to let us know within a week how they wanted to proceed. So we gave'em the options, do you wanna move out? Do you wanna stay and try to find a qualified roommate? And they did decide that they wanted to stay. So we emailed them all of the criteria that we needed to process an application for their new roommate. Mind you, this is the same information that this person had to provide to us just five months prior. And do you know that the people who applied were not even close to being able to being accepted? One had a FCO score in the low five hundreds. One never even responded to our email and one asked us where the property was located and then said, oh, it's not in the right area. So basically we found out that our tenant had put an ad on Facebook Marketplace that if they were interested to contact them. So finally, after doing a bunch of work that led to absolutely nothing, I contacted the tenant and asked'em to please screen the people before referring'em to us. And essentially after that, we didn't get one application. The tenant did end up giving 30 days notice and they moved out. And I will tell you that as we were going through it and dealing with a domestic violence issue as a landlord, we were very nervous about making a mistake that could come back and cause legal problems later. So we shared what happened to us. Now we'll discuss the law in a general sense and what we learned from this experience.

Kevin 11:51

So, as Stacie mentioned, our experience was not one that included physical abuse. It was described as bullying, emotional harassment, and verbal intimidation. And even though there wasn't physical violence, harassment and intimidation can still fall under domestic abuse protections depending on the circumstances. Now, when we started researching the situation, the first law that came up was the national law called the Violence Against Woman Act, often called VAWA. And this law provides housing protections primarily for federally assisted housing. So think Section eight, public housing, voucher programs, you know, stuff like that. This does not directly apply to small private landlords, which is why state laws are very important. But the bottom line was that VAWA allows something called lease bifurcation. This means that a landlord may be able to remove the abusive tenant, allowing the victim to stay. The reason behind this is to protect the victim from becoming homeless due to someone else's actions. Now, In our case, we could not remove the quote unquote abuser because we did not have proof and of what we did know the situation did not fall under the parameters of VAWA. For us here in California, the law is much broader than federal law, and it does apply to most private rental housing, which is us. So this law includes early lease termination. Which means victims of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, human trafficking, and abuse that creates a credible threat of safety. Now, in some situations, ongoing harassment or intimidation can qualify, especially when it creates a documented safety concern. So to invoke this protection, tenants must provide documentation such as a police report, a restraining order, or documentation from a licensed professional, such as a therapist or counselor, which is what was provided to us. And once this information is provided, the tenant may terminate their lease with 14 days written notice. Now I want to reiterate that we are discussing California law, but many states have similar laws in place that override federal law. So as we say often, please go learn your state and local laws and ordinances that pertain to landlord tenant protections.

Stacie 14:35

Yeah, we really wanted to give you guys some deep background information on the laws, but we found that they really can vary greatly from state to state. So this is our disclaimer, advising you to know and understand the laws in the states where your rental properties are located. I will say, I believe most states have privacy protections in place. In our case, we were not allowed to share the documentation that was provided to us. We could not reveal any of the details to the other tenant. Like we could not tell'em that the victim was moving out. We had to wait for them to contact us to discuss the options. And when they finally did reach out, we could not, nor would we anyway, discuss any evidence of the alleged abuser. So we were in the strange position of having information that suggested a serious problem, but legally we couldn't tell the other tenant what the information was. This protects the victims, but can create a lot of confusion for landlords and their other tenants. Which leads me to the remaining tenant. Our first thought was she can no longer qualify to live there. You know, should we evict her?

Kevin 15:52

Well, I think our first thought was, if this person is capable of doing these things, let's get'em out of our unit.

Stacie 15:59

Right, and I think that was the anger part that we talked about earlier. You know, we were mad and thinking, if this was all true, that this tenant had put us in a really crappy position. So after verifying that the outgoing tenant had indeed provided us with the necessary paperwork to exit the lease early, what were our rights for evicting the remaining tenant? And what we found was that our lease had several areas that covered tenant behavior. And all leases should have a clause that is titled The Right to Quiet Enjoyment. And where many think that this clause pertains to noise, it also prohibits tenants from harassing, bullying, disturbing, or interfering with the peaceful enjoyment of other residents. So technically if harassment or intimidation is proven, that can be grounds for eviction under nuisance or quiet enjoyment violations. Now, in theory, we felt we could have pursued eviction based on that clause, but there was one complication we did not hold any evidence that we could legally provide. The only evidence we had was provided by the victim, and that person was protected.

Kevin 17:20

Right. Because of privacy laws, we could not disclose the documentation provided by the victim and we cannot explain the evidence supporting their claim. And this created a difficult position. We could only evict them if there was public evidence. So if this was a physical abuse issue, think of a video camera that we may have on property that caught this person in the act. However, in our case, because we cannot record audio on video cameras, we would not legally be able to provide verbal abuse caught on camera. But another tenant who was a witness that comes forward would've been acceptable. Unfortunately, we did not have any other concrete evidence to evict this other tenant. And we did not want to evict someone without being able to explain the evidence, because that could lead to disputes, legal challenges, and accusations of unfair treatment. As landlords, we're not investigators or judges, so we chose to follow the law, release the victim from the lease and allow the remaining tenant to stay.

Stacie 18:31

So the tenant gave her notice and moved out when the other tenant was out of the unit at work all day. And I believe this was like a Wednesday or a Thursday. And then we had to wait until the remaining tenant reached out, which was about five days later. And once we got the notice, the lease situation changed. Under law the remaining tenant became responsible for the full rent under that joint and several liability clause that's in our lease. And you guys, we knew that they could not pay that full rent. So we offered them a 50% reduction in the rent and up to 60 days to find a replacement tenant. And as we discussed earlier, a suitable replacement was never found and the tenant eventually moved out.

Kevin 19:19

So let me take a minute to discuss the business side of the circumstance. Even when landlords follow the law, situations like this can create unexpected vacancies, increased turnover cost, and ultimately lost rent. For this unit, because of the domestic abuse issue, we lost over$7,500 in rental income. And that does not include the legal fees we had to pay. That does not include the time it took to process the move out with inspection, photos, and turning the unit. And that does not include the administrative time it takes to process the security deposit, which was a mess because we had to charge for utility fees that the other tenant canceled. Along with a cleaning fee, because even though we are very specific with our move out instructions, there were several items that clearly had not been touched. We had time spent on marketing the unit, meeting prospects to do showings, processing multiple applications, and ultimately the lease. The unit binder had to be updated to include some changes that were made to our policies. So turnovers are not just the physical stuff you have to do to a unit, there's also a lot of time pushing paperwork as well. Sometimes doing the right thing still costs money.

Stacie 20:44

Yeah. This whole situation just, it just sucked all the way around. As we discussed in our last episode about roommates, we usually only have tenants stay for a year, and in this case it was four months and happened in the dead of winter months, which is one of the hardest times for us to find a new tenant.

Kevin 21:05

Yeah, this is one of the situations that really can throw a landlord back on their heels and make you think long and hard about owning rental property. So with all that, I want to share some practical advice for all of our listeners. It's not new, and we will say this again and again, but know your state's domestic abuse housing laws. At least know the basics in case it comes up for you, which we hope it never does. Understand documentation requirements. And for this we mean two ways. Document everything. Have notes of when you were informed and what you did with that information. Keep good records and make sure all tenant information is organized in case you have to provide information to your legal advisor. For documentation, we also mean have a solid lease. Most state leases will include what you need to cover yourself should a domestic violence issue present itself. And we always recommend EZ Landlord Forms for leases and addendums. But if you do use Turbo Tenant, they also have a great lease you can access. Always double check that they have the separate and several liability clause and the right to a personal enjoyment clause. You also must maintain confidentiality. Be very careful about sharing details with anyone involved. Become a good listener and use caution when answering someone's questions. And this goes without saying, but always avoid taking sides in tenant disputes, especially when it comes to disputes between roommates. This is where becoming a good listener and not engaging emotionally is a huge advantage. And one last piece of advice is when situations feel legally complex, like this one did for us, consult your real estate attorney.

Stacie 23:05

Yeah, we can't express that enough. Every landlord needs a solid team. You guys need a CPA, an attorney, a Realtor, and a contractor at minimum. All right, let me end this episode with some key takeaways. Domestic abuse protections apply even when there is no physical violence. Harassment and intimidation can fall under these laws. Documentation from qualified professionals can support these claims. But if you have a restraining order or police report, that's even better. Privacy laws limit what landlords can disclose, so know your landlord tenant laws, in addition to domestic violence protection laws. Lease clauses about quiet enjoyment may technically allow eviction, but you have to handle situations very carefully. Without consulting our legal team, we would not have realized that we couldn't evict, based on the evidence that was presented to us.

Kevin 24:10

And I want to say that being a landlord isn't just about property management.

Stacie 24:15

Yep. Sometimes it's about navigating real human situations with compassion and with professionalism. All right, you guys, that's our show for today. Thank you so much for taking the time outta your business schedule to listen to all we have to say about self-managing your rental properties. And we're very grateful and humbled to be able to share what we know to help you in your journey. Of course, we hope you got some helpful information out of this episode. And if you wouldn't mind helping us out, we would really appreciate you leaving us a kind review or sharing the podcast with another landlord that you might know. If you want to hear more, follow or subscribe to the podcast so that each week the episodes are downloaded right to your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to stay in contact with you. So if you have a question or you want to suggest a subject for our podcast, you can text us at 6 5 0 4 8 9 4 4 4 7. Or you can email us at stacie@yourlandlordresource.com. That's Stacie with an IE or kevin@yourlandlordresource.com. And we'll put the link in the show notes for all that too. Also in the show notes you can find links to all the downloads that we offer, ways to sign up for our newsletter, links to our private Facebook group that's just for landlords. And of course, all the social media accounts and our YouTube account where we share very informative and detailed tips and tricks for landlords. So go check those out. I think that's about it. Thanks again, and until next time, you've got this landlords.