The Investors Housez – Your Calgary Real Estate Information Site

This particular post could have also been titled “Google Knows All”, but it does revolve around tenants, so I thought I would share. Hopefully there are a couple lessons and some laughter for everyone in this.

Around mid December I received an email from a lady named Marla for my mixed residence shared accommodation property, it looked like this;

What is ur address? I am looking for a place
temporarily. I am a non smoker and very quiet..

Other than bad spelling it looked acceptable, perhaps she just texts a lot which accounts for the “ur”?  I responded by provided the district (I don’t like to give out the address until I can confirm it is worth my time) and at the same time asked when she needed a place.

She replied back as early as the upcoming Friday and asked for the address and inquired if she could see it first. We passed a few more emails back and forth and then I received a call from a private number the next day from a lady asking the same questions. I asked if the lady was Marla and she said yes (should have been a sign that she didn’t mention it first!!) and we set up a 2:00 meeting on the Friday at the property.

As is my practice, I asked her to give me a call about an hour prior to the meeting in case something came up and to verify I wouldn’t get stood up. She immediately said no, she couldn’t. Ok, that should have been warning sign number two, but we had a couple vacancies, it wouldn’t be too far out of my way, so I said fine, no problem.

Now I had two lawyers meetings that Friday morning and late Thursday afternoon the second lawyer’s office called and informed me we would have to move the meeting to 2:00. This was a refinancing that had to be done before Christmas, so I had to accept the new time, but now I didn’t have a number to contact Marla, and she wasn’t going to call.

Fortunately I did have her email address, so all I could do was email her and hope she read it prior to leaving to meet me. Luckily enough she did receive it Friday morning and called me. I explained the situation and we rescheduled for Saturday at 1:00. Being the “nice guy” I am, I explained it’s for reasons like this I like people to call an hour prior. Since the Saturday stop was semi on my way home from other rent collection it would work.

Anyway Saturday rolls around, I complete my rent collection early, get to the property about 45 minutes ahead of schedule and start doing some work while I wait. This property has an onsite manager, but he had to work the Friday and the Saturday, otherwise he normally would have met and shown the property.

So it is a few minutes before 1:00 and Dave the manager suddenly appears, he ended up not having to work that day, so I said perfect, he could hang out and meet Marla and show her the place. So I packed up, headed home and then checked up with him about an hour later, Marla never showed up.

Here I had worried about her the previous time, made an exception and strayed from my system of calls an hour before and in the end it just wasted my time and Dave’s. This however is where it really starts to get interesting, or should I say fun?

I festered over it the remainder of the weekend and Monday morning I sent an email off to Marla that read like this;

I hope you can understand now why I ask people to call an hour prior to the viewing, it saves the hour plus of wasted time I had sitting at the property only for you to not show up. Just another reminder to me why I shouldn’t make exceptions.

Merry Christmas

Well my new best friend Marla took exception to this and later in the afternoon I received this back, just without any asterisks in it;

F**k you you Canadian  scum. I don’t know you and don’t bother me again  or my boyfriend and his buddies will punch your f**kin head in .

Oh my gosh, did I hit a nerve?!!! A threatening email, what should I do? At this point I had a couple of options; drop it in case the threat was real, or push buttons. Since I am a natural button pusher I went that route.

There is where the “Google knows all” comes into play. I simply plugged her email address into Google and did a search and lo and behold I had pages and pages of links with her email address in it. **For you landlords, this is a great way to find out more about your potential tenants as well, think of it as a unique screening technique to acquire additional information about your tenant.

From the web search, I was able to ascertain the following. She had a history of placing ads in the Rossland, Kelowna, Trail, Selkirk and Nelson areas offering to housesit. She offered excellent references and would also pet sit. As I looked through more of the ads, she also rented out furnished rooms in properties, hmmm.

Now I am only assuming this, but from what I could see she was getting free places to stay, then subletting rooms out and making some quick cash, nice little scam. Flipping through more of the ads she had posted, she was now offering to housesit in Calgary, Canmore and Vancouver in separate ads over the holidays, so I am sure she was just between places when she found me and was waiting for an “opportunity” to open up.

It only became better the more I looked as I also found her putting ads out as a qualified legal assistant experienced with family law, personal law and litigation and as a medical records assistant with plenty of experience. and as a housekeeper, also with plenty of experience. The kicker was when I found one of her ads renting a place out in BC with her BC phone number. This led to me sending out the following email back to her;

I thought with your background you would have been slightly more eloquent? The problem with the internet is that is makes a wonderful shield for threats and bravado when in reality it just makes the threatener feel better about themselves. Maybe you need to go back to all your old haunts like Rossland and Nelson and continue with your house sitting program. After all with your excellent references you should have no problem finding a place outside of Calgary to housesit over the holidays.

Don’t threaten to send your boyfriend after me, if you have one, I don’t live at the property which is why I originally asked you to call in advance. If you want your boyfriend to come find me, call an hour in advance! With your previous litigation experience ( or could it pertain to personal injury law? Definitely not family law?) you should be well aware this email you sent me wouldn’t help your case. Anyway, I am done with you, unless you want to push it, so remember the internet offers only partial anonymity. If you do want to push it you can reach me at 250-308-XXXX, ooops sorry, that’s your old number.

Merry Christmas

My wife particularly liked how I ended by my emails to her with Merry Christmas. Oh and I did include her phone number without the XXXX’s as well.

Strangely enough that was the last I heard from her? So a couple lessons to be learned from this. 1) Don’t stray from your systems, in my case if I would have stuck to my guns and demanded the call an hour before I would have recovered some of my time and never had to deal with this. 2) Google Knows All, if you don’t want your information on the internet, don’t use it, otherwise be careful what you say or do, Google your name someday to see what comes up, you may be surprised. It can also be a useful tool for checking out potential tenants.

The positive part of all this is one more chapter in a potential book, so thanks for that Marla and thanks for providing what I hope was an entertaining post. If you have some fun tenant stories I would love to hear them!