Personally I think it is going to be mostly a slow burn.
It depends on who is your land lord and the individual in question.
There are good people that got put into a bind for one reason or another. And there are certified assholes that took advantage of the situation and they need to be punished one way or another.
If things get real bad well depending on the state it might be a write off as an expense, which I believe that is going to be the case for many large property corporations/investors.
What hurts are the small guys like me that are not as big as those property management companies and need that lost revenue to survive.
Because of how I dealt with my lease holders early on, spending the thousands of dollars doing back ground research on my potential occupants, has saved me tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss in payment/destruction of property.
And a lot of headache and misery, I don't have to go through this mess of sending out eviction notices and all of the stress involved. And I am so damned happy about it.
My approach is a long term foundation of successfully having positive revenue. My leases are 20 to 30% of what the market will bear. I have very good tenants because on how I approached the matter years ago and because of that, everyone is happy.
My prices are fair and there is no stress of going through the eviction process.
However for everyone else it just depends on a case to case situation.
If I was in that situation, yea as me being a very vindictive man I would do a similar thing.
I hope your friend gets his sweet revenge.
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