Christian OsgoodCEO, Multifamily Strategy · CEO at Multifamily Strategy

Do your tenants pay LATE? Listen to THIS

19 Dec 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:59

A landlord explains how he handles late rent: he enforces late fees from the lease, points out that paying a week late compresses the next month's timeline, and sometimes serves eviction notices to help tenants access relief programs. He makes exceptions for genuine hardship but says 15 past conversations with struggling tenants never resulted in them paying late again.

Chapters

When you become the shoulder to cry on. They get me every time. Every time. I've done 15 non-COVID evictions. Every single one of those that I evicted was somebody that I did a special favor for, helping them out with something.
Any time a tenant reaches out with the reason why they don't want to pay, I point out 3 things. First, it's in the lease. You can pay late. This is how the late fees work. Second, the math of time. If you come a week late, you only have 3 weeks for next month. Normally it takes the average person 4 weeks to get their rent together. And the third thing is, if it's due on the 1st, late on the 5th, on the 6th. So this is the tenant asking for it to be late. On the 6th, I tell the tenant, as a favor to you, I'm going to serve you an eviction paper because there is rent relief programs out there that will not talk to you until you have those papers in your hand. I've had many tenants reach out and ask, hey, I've got this thing going on. And if a tenant had like a death in the family, sure, I can be flexible and I can understand. But if it's just like, I don't have enough money to either pay my cell phone, my car bill, my internet, and maybe the landlord will let me slide. I've had that conversation and I've not had a tenant make a late payment. Wow.