If you have been searching for legal advice on how to evict a tenant, you may have noticed a few things.
First of all, you need to avoid doing things in a disorderly manner. You first need justifiable reasons to start the eviction process. A lease agreement in compliance is more than enough.
Secondly, you need to avoid starting the eviction process after your tenant has legally complained about the rental. This can be considered a retaliatory eviction, and you can suffer legal consequences such as expensive fines. Also, you should avoid harassing or intimidating your tenant into leaving the premises. This conduct is illegal and can even get you jail time. Deportation scares are included, even if the said tenant is an actual illegal immigrant.
Thirdly, if you are sure about the eviction process and cannot come to an agreement with your tenant, you should state your intentions first. If the eviction is due to failure to pay the rent, you should send a three-day notice to the tenant. If the tenant doesn’t pay, then you should send this person a new notice, notifying the imminent eviction if the court approves your reasoning.
Assuming you know how to perform the previous steps adequately, now we can Learn More and explore the next steps into eviction with more detail.
Waiting for the notices to expire
As obvious as it may seem, this step is important because it means that you have paid attention to the law and observed your tenant’s right to improve their situation in which they are. The law is clear with this, and any tenant should be given the opportunity to pay, repair damage or solve any situation in which they were a nuance for other tenants in the property.
Do the required paperwork for all the court processes
Remember that in legal terms, the order you need to evict a tenant is called Unlawful Detainer Complaint. There are four forms you need to start a process of eviction.
Civil Case Cover Sheet
Unlawful detainer summons
Unlawful Detainer Complaint
Prejudgment Right of Possession Form
The Civil Case Cover Sheet and the Unlawful Detainer Complaint must be submitted to a court along with the summons for filing. You must go to the Courthouse that corresponds to the County in which the property you are renting out is located. They mustn’t contain factual errors at all to be valid later on, so don’t exaggerate or make up any event. The employee on the courthouse, oftentimes a clerk, will present a summons in return and a copy of the Unlawful Detainer Complaint that has been stamped.
Regarding the Prejudgment Right of Possession, you must have a copy served on your tenant and it must be done by a registered process server, you cannot serve the summons yourself, the law does not allow that. This is the form that corresponds with the offense of getting someone who lives on the property, someone that is not on the lease agreement. You will need this to evict this person (or group of persons) too. In the Prejudgment Right of Possession, you will list this one person or group of persons and not necessarily by name. If you don’t know their names, then they will be named as unknown occupants. Then you serve this document along with the complaint and the summons. Doing so will make this potential person or group of people, part of the other side of the lawsuit: the defendants.
It can take up to two months is said to be the typical amount of time getting tenants evicted can take. It is advised, however, that the whole process can take longer if the tenant contests the eviction.
You must give the tenant the appropriate legal paperwork
Then again, you should give the tenant or tenants all the documents that pertain to them. These are the complaint and the summons. Be sure to have these documents served legally and usually in person, not just send them via mail. Next, you will need to file a paper called a proof of service. For this, you need to go to court. Then abstain from sending the tenant further notices, because doing so opens new cases and closes the one you started originally.
The next steps would be waiting for the tenant to respond to your lawsuit contacting the court and challenge it in any form. If they fail to do so, the landlord can always ask for a default judgment. Remember that you have to go through court and eviction cannot start until the court process is complete.
