I'm in Dade County Florida

I have a tenant who apparently is incapable of paying rent on time or even mailing a payment to the agreed up mailing address. In the interest of not going to court, I've accepted his late payments on his first 3 months and allowed him to deliver a cashiers check in my name to the front desk of the building.

He personally has actually never payed paid his own rent, so far it's been his cousin, his mom or his lawyer who has paid for him.

On all 3 occasions, he has repeatlied lied about the check being ready and he is always just about to pay rent when we threaten to go through with the eviction process.

It's now his fourth month. We left a 3 day notice 5 days ago, and he said he never got it. He has now said the check is ready or on it's way at least 5 times and never delivered.

It's now 11:55, and he said the check would be in the lobby at 11:30. So I've got all the eviction paperwork ready. It's the 16th and rent was due on the 1st (with 5 day grace and 3 day notice expired of course).

If I file for eviction and will cost me about $300 in fees and he may not be served for a good 10 days or called to court for another 30 days. If he pays, can I cash his check and still have the courts charge him the court fees? I need his check to pay the mortgage on the unit.

Also If I file now, when can we expect the courts to serve him and when can we expect to go to court?

Many Thanks for any help or information.

Do not accept any funds and follow through with eviction

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Have you browsed through the information in LawInfo's Free Legal Resource Center to learn more about your issue yet? See: http://www.lawinfo.com/consumer.html and http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/index.html. You can certainly try to speak to a lawyer to determine what legal options may be available. In the meantime, you may be able to learn more on your own. Search the "Free Legal Resources" tab, or browse the Consumer Resources. Good luck.

So an Update.. we are going through the eviction process now. It's painfully slow.

Took the sherrifs office to 5 days to post the 5 day noice. Then of course you have to wait 5 days before you can proceed to the next step. Thankfully our tenent never responded. When we got the notice in the mail, all the information was wrong and it had to be corrected. When we called the court 5 days later they said papers had not been proceeded it an it may be another week (two weeks to log the notice and submit it to a judge????) So they finally logged it and are submitting it to a judge and we are bing told that might be another 3 to 4 weeks before the judge signs it and send it back to the sherrif to post the 24 our order to vacate and that it might take the sherrif 2 weeks to post that.

All I can say is get ready for buracratic BS. And this was the optimal situation where the tenant did not resopnd and get a court date. It looks like it will easily be 2 months from the day I filed to the day he's evicted without a court date. With a court date, It wiould have been 4 months easy I suspect.

Discusted with the process. We will opt to pay a $185 fee to expidate the sherrifs 24 hour process to 1 day or so. But why on earth it takes a judge 4 weeks to sign a piece of paper is beyond me.

I'm going to easily lose 3 months rent, plus a $1200 commision and we had to pay about $600 in fees and this is doing it myself . I figure it's going to cost me about $5500 pllus many hours of running around. And I'm not even sure the eviction process will have any impact on the tenants credit or ablility to rent again.

Lesson: Make sure you know and trust the agent who's going to rent your unit. We did it blind and they did not do a credit or background check. He lied to us about the tenent and his income source. Don't surrender control - it will cost you much more in the end.

I am sorry it is so frustrating for you. Thank you for the update.