My rented property was turned into a Cannabis Farm

[LumpyandBumps]

I’ve just posted a reply on another thread about Cannabis Farms and wondered if anyone had any questions.
I rented a substantial semi detached family home to what I thought was a family.
They always paid rent on time, gave access to engineers for statutory checks, and never asked for repairs.
After nearly 2 years they abruptly stopped paying rent. I couldn’t get hold of them and a visit to the property gave me the information from a neighbour that the house had been raided as a Cannabis Farm.

Blimey, didn’t the neighbours notice anything? Where were they growing it?

Was your property damaged.

You never checked on your tenants in 2 years to see how the property is being maintained?!

I saw a property that had been used as a cannabis farm and it was a right mess. Completely unlikely property too an end of terrace. Neighbours said the raid was like breaking bad. Hope yours is faring better!

There was some damage; mostly due to condensation, holes in ceilings for pipes, but more seriously they had removed some of the roof supports, presumably for easier access and sealed part of the chimney either expanded foam.
There were also burn marks where we could see the outlines of rows of electrical sockets. It could have been much worse.

Life is a learning curve.
This was fairly early on and I was very naive.
Only one of the tenants spoke English and was always ‘working in London’ or ‘visiting family in China’ and I was not persistent enough.
I used to see the house when driving past and admire the sparkling white net curtains and immaculate garden and think all was well.

And as much as tenants moan about it, this is exactly why property inspections every 6 months are so important.

The house upstairs was a real mess. The ground floor mostly untouched.
I found out later that there had been a huge police presence, an evidence tent in the front garden ( which coincidentally I had seen from a distance, thought it was roadworks and gone the other way to avoid them).
There were 8 van loads of stuff removed over several days - which was nothing compared to the amount left.
The whole of the roof space, garage and 2 large sheds were full of sacks of rubbish, mostly ‘fan’ leaves.
It sounds odd but the very worst part was that the electricity supply had been cut off a few weeks before ( I only found out about the raid weeks later) and the jam packed contents of the fridge freezer had been festering in the heat and the smell was horrendous.

Did they settle their electricity bill or did you have to sort that out?

It was a semi detached house. The attached neighbours never noticed anything. In fact they had made several complaints about the previous tenants about noise (and over the years made complaints about neatly every occupant). It seems that mostly Cannabis Farmers make quite acceptable neighbours as they are quiet and keep themselves to themselves - unless of course their dangerous overloading of the electrical system causes a fire.

a property on my street was rented out and used as a cannabis farm.
we could smell it.
they had installed the fan wrong apparently!
They had bypassed the electric and every room apart from one had the grow in it.

That aspect was a great worry. There was a pre payment meter, and it was part of the Tenancy Agreement that they had to put the supply in their names. They never did.
What they did do was bypass the meter.
The supply was from British Gas, with whom we had the gas service contract, and the annual boiler service had been completed around 3 months before the raid.
Whilst they estimated the amount stolen which was around £36,000 nearly 10 years ago, and made noises about me possibly being liable eventually it was written off.
The police had someone in custody.

Did the police contact you about it?

This seemed to be quite a professional operation. They had put fans in the roof, cutting the roof felt to allow vents to open.
They only used the loft and bedrooms. Downstairs the lounge/ bedroom area and kitchen were quite normal. Presumably that was where the ‘gardener’ lived. None of the neighbours had seen him until he was arrested.
The police removed 200 live plants.

Were you covered under your buildings insurance? Or did you have to fund the renovation or sell the house?

@LumpyandBumpsours was a terrace house.
they had a full crop worth 250k in there .

That is the strangest thing. The police never spoke to us. They didn’t ask any details about the tenant, or to look at the copy I had taken of his passport for ID.
One of the neighbours told me that the police had locked the front door when leaving ( tenants had changed lock, but fortunately not the back door so I could still gain access), and I contacted them to ask for the keys.
They just let me collect them at the police station. No one asked anything. If it hadn’t happened to me I wouldn’t have believed it.
It obviously never occurred to them that I could have been involved. It was a bit disappointing that they made no real effort to try to trace anyone further up the line. The gardener took the full blame but he was ‘disposable’ yo the overall operation.

This was the lounge when the police raided it .
this picture was in the local press

What a shock that must have been. Was it your family home at some point?

Interesting! Yes I would have thought they’d have investigated you to see if you were in on it, or from a human slavery concern.

I wonder how long they’d have kept the keys for if you’d never contacted them.

We didn’t claim on the insurance. We had thought that we would be covered under malicious damage by tenants, but made some general enquiries online, etc and as they do some insurance companies were claiming that trashing a property to turn it into a Cannabis Farm wasn’t malicious, merely a consequence of their activity.
Also, as has been previously mentioned I had been naively lax regarding inspections, so I didn’t think a claim would succeed.

OMG
Ours was in the local news too. I live about 30 miles away and didn’t see it. I found it via online search later.

I used to work for a debt collection agency we could tell the cannabis farm bills we had to make an effort to collect but if the owner showed proof of it being a farm and not under there control we dropped it and advised the client to do the same

It was a shock. More so because we only found out weeks later.
It was purchased to let so fortunately there was not a strong emotional tie to the property. It would have been heartbreaking if it had been our family home.