macarre

Hi there,

My tenant in Alberta appeared to have moved to the UK now (he is not British though), and left this month's rent (last one) unpaid.

Is it possible to collect the money now, since he's is probably living in the UK? I believe certain countries have debt collection agreements between them, but I do not have a lot of info on that.

I currently live in UK, and could potentially track him down here to determine where he lives / works.

Any advice appreciated.

mikelincs

Did you not have a deposit from him? if so just keep that as the last month payment..

scrubbedexpat091

If the deposit is 1 months rent. I don't know what the rules are in AB, but a deposit in BC is only 1/2 month rent, so landlord would not get the full amount owed if a tenant skips out early from the deposit.

Beaverstate

Call ahead and screw up his credit, small victories, otherwise collecting from another country would not be worth the effort for such a small amount (as compared to attorney fees).

themajor

Use the small claims court. I did and the nice thing was that my ex tenant was a Volvo Dealer. I won my case and he lost his dealership.

Jericho79

What?

Tirytory

Potentially tracking him down sounds slightly illegal? How? Either try and find him and claim through the proper channels or chalk it up to the downside of renting a property...

BritInParis

Did he not pay his rent one month in advance?

Stinkypup

I would set bats on him-in the "Crazy ideas when young" on the Maple Leaf forum- you put a contract out on him. You won't get money back but justice will be served. I'm not sure she is up to working transcontinentally quite yet, I think that she would probably want to practice locally to get her hand in before moving to bigger/ more distant jobs

BristolUK

Beat me by 6 minutes

Pulaski

What on earth would be illegal, "slightly or otherwise" about tracing somebody?

Depending on how much you know about where they moved to country? city? street? and how unusual their name is, it might mean nothing more than using Google or Whitepages. There are other publicly available services that tap into the same sort of publicly available records that banks use, such as court records, property records etc, for which you pay a fee to the company that collated the data into a searchable format (I suspect that less data is available in the UK than in the US).

Personally, I would write it off to experience, unless your ex-tenant had rented a mansion from you it is undoubtedly more trouble than its worth to try to collect it. I doubt a collection agency would be interested in buying a one-off debt from you, and if they did it would only be for a few cents on the dollar.

Aviator

Me too. I doubt a collections agency would take it on. Small claims is not worth the hassle.

BritInParis

https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/

Aviator

This is not worth the hassle though. Even if one gets a favourable judgement, which means proving the debt, so assuming the other party does not deny the debt, this does not ensure collection of the debt. The successful party then has to enforce the debt, with more time and expense and no surety of success. If the debtor has no assets, or moves on and is untraceable, it means starting over or giving up. For the sake of principal and if the claimant has the time, maybe worth a shot. Personally, I would not bother.

I have just finished a significant counterclaim, I was successful, it took 4 years and lots of hassle and time, as well as a year to collect. I was only successful in collecting because the guy wanted to sell his house and I had a lien on it otherwise I would still be waiting.

Had the other party not sued me in the first place, I would not have bothered pursuing it.

BristolUK

Well...not using the proper channels.

Like persuading or bribing a social security employee to do a computer search. That's a common one.

Impersonating an official or relative to get information. Fairly common too.

Dodgy people do this sort of stuff routinely. Maybe hacking too?

Did you never watch The Rockford Files? Or Public Eye

Or even Pulaski?