PITA tenant: Rental Arrears: Anyone experience of using a County Court Judgement?

[MrPickles73]

Hopefully nearly at the end of the saga..

Tenant has been in my property for 2.5 years (in Wales). Has been a nightmare from the start and broken various parts of the contract. Nightmare at paying rent.. lots of long emails from him re her personal situation (she was on her own - no children under 18 etc).

Working full-time. For various reasons (to be nice to her and COVID etc) I didn't visit the property for 2 years.. so when a workman went in Q1 this year it wasn't a pretty sight.. she took badly to this and got very weird about how unpleasant this guy was etc. I did my best to mitigate this.. anyhow. She said she would move out hurrah!! I gladly accepted.. To be sure this happened I served 2 months notice.. time went by, she did not pay her rent and did not move out. I got increasingly stressed.. She tells one lie after another..

Anyhow after 6 months she has finally gone. Happy days. However the house is a mess and she owes 4 months rent...

Has anyone else had success at using a county court judgement to get rent arrears back? She works full-time. Is it worth the hassle?

Irrespective of them being 'scared of a CCJ' or not, I say do it.

MoneyClaimOnline may well be an option, depending on the circs.

To do any sort of claim (in this case you'd be doing it outside of the realms of MCOL) you need to serve a Letter Before Claim as well as the Claim Form (when it eventually gets to it).

Obviously because you haven't got a new address for them, the 'last known address' is this address (your house) - in these situations you can use any other place where you know they are likely to be/ recieve it (such as a place of work etc).

As an alternative, you can serve by email - from what you say it seems you've got the email address for the tenant.

Eventually when the case progresses and a copy of the Claim Form is sent to them, they will have to provide their current address when filing the Acknowledgment of Service/ replying to your claim.

Others have mentioned the CCJ being set aside, again if the facts are the facts then eventually they will always end up with a CCJ. (Set aside is unlikely tbh - particularly if they are being emailed correspondence by you)

If they still don't want to budge then quite frankly I'd go the whole hog to enforce it - bailiffs/garnishment etc if necessary.

F'ck them. They cannot go around theiving off people and trashing other people's homes. It's never been right and that form of entitlement has never been right in this current climate either.