If you stay in the property management field long, you are bound to run across something that shocks you. This happened to the on-call maintenance tech during the recent Fourth of July holiday weekend. Apparently, he received a page from the Resident in apartment X reporting the air conditioning was not working. He received two different calls, as a matter of fact, and because he couldn’t make out the phone number of the second call he called me to decipher it. I have an excellent track record of doing this.
We confer and I figure out whose number it is and think nothing more about it. I call the Resident and tell him the on-call Tech will be there in about an hour. It was a Saturday night. At 11:02 P.M. I receive the first distress call, followed by another a couple minutes later. Suffice it to say it was not a good time for me… we’ll let it go at that. Two words: Food Poisoning. Use your imagination. Anyway, I call him to find out what the matter is.
Apparently, the first call went fine and he went to attend to the second page. When he reached this unit, he was greeted by an aggressive female, baring breasts and asking him for a little sexual escapade. Really, I’ll tell you, most Maintenance Techs at one time or another encounters this very thing. However, what my Maintenance Tech soon discovered was the female, who was not on the Lease, was staging the encounter to be “filmed” and broadcast over the internet by the actual Resident on the Lease. He was horrified. No kidding. I was horrified but not shocked. My Maintenance Tech was shocked. I worked a Section 8 property once where a couple was making pornographic “shorts” (no pun intended) to be viewed by paying customers on the internet. I caught a little discrepancy in their reported income when it came time for their annual recertification. <grin> They no longer live there.
The Tech kept asking me what I was going to do about this. I told him to report it to the police department and I’d take care of it on Monday.
On Monday I served the “Guest” a Trespass Notice with a police officer. In fact, we escorted her into a cab and sent her to the bus station. Once I had police reports in hand dating back to incidents from the previous month (Month!) I gave the Resident a Notice of Non-Renewal. It took him more than a week to call me to discuss the letter and ask if he could stay. “No,” I told him. “This is now an issue where I have an employee who feels as though he cannot do his job properly. He feels threatened. So, no, I can’t allow you to stay when your lease ends. You will need to find a new residence.”
“Okay,” he replied. He is now looking for a new home. I don’t feel bad about it either.
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