In the rental business, you sometimes can’t avoid problem tenants. Even if you exert a lot of effort in screening applicants and maintaining a good relationship with your tenants, some of them simply wouldn’t care about you or your business.

Tenants are considered as problem tenants when they are constantly late in paying their rent or they are disruptive to their neighbors. But there’s a worse kind: tenants who abandon your property; like they disappeared into thin air.

This is a huge dilemma to any landlord because tenants who abandon their rented units usually have unpaid rent, have caused great damage to property before taking off, or have stolen appliances or furniture. What’s worse is that the security deposit they gave you is not enough to cover everything.

This is a loss to your business on so many levels. You have to deal with the sudden vacancy, loss of income, and repair costs; plus the mental and emotional stress you have to go through.

In most cases, you can no longer find the tenant and he would no longer be reachable through calls or emails. So what can you do?

Accept that this is unavoidable.

You already have to deal with financial loss, and that’s part of the risk you took when you entered into the business — you’ll lose even more if you let emotional and mental stress get to you.

Evaluate the severity of the situation, then decide a course of action.

When a tenant abandons your unit, it might bring you a slight loss. If there are zero or minimal unpaid rent or damage, and you still have their security deposit, what you will be dealing with is a vacancy.

Given the nature of the rental housing business, a vacancy is not an alien concept to a landlord. It’s a normal part of their business and the basic solution to it is to find new tenants.

In this digital age, finding new tenants has been made easier through property listing platforms like Padleads.com. By creating attractive listings and publishing them on Padleads, you can reach hundreds of home hunters ready to fill in your vacancy.

There are severe cases of property abandonment as well. The ones that cause a financial strain on you. You have the option to take the matter to court, to at least try to get some justice. You have to remember, however, that this can be a stressful and costly process.

Even if you hunt down a missing tenant, chances are, they have no money to pay you back even if you sue them. Another way to somehow get justice is to file an eviction. An eviction will go on the tenant’s credit report and will stay there for many years. An eviction in your tenant’s record will make it difficult for him to find a new place to rent. You might not get money from it, but at least you didn’t tolerate a bad deed that easily. This can save another landlord from dealing with your missing tenant.

Related article: Effect of Evictions on Tenants and Landlords

Move on.

Don’t let one circumstance of tenant abandonment discourage you from continuing your rental business. When you have exerted all efforts to deal with a tenant that left your property without notice, regardless if it pays off or not, the only way to get past it is to move on. Who knows? Maybe it might be good for you in the long run that the tenant left and it could drive you to improve aspects in your business operation to prevent it from happening again.