keys on top of a lease agreement

As a landlord, evicting a tenant is both stressful and financially painful. You’re spending a lot of time and money to resolve a situation that’s largely out of your control. To make matters worse, you still have to pay your mortgage every month, but you’re not receiving rent from your tenants.

If your tenant offers to make a payment (even a partial one), it can be tempting to accept the money and think, “Receiving some money is better than no money at all.” While receiving a payment may temporarily make you feel better, do not do it! Here’s why not and how you can stop payments from a tenant.

Why Shouldn’t You Accept a Partial Rent Payment During an Eviction?

In most states, if a landlord accepts a payment from their tenants, they are acknowledging a new agreement has been reached with the tenants. This will void the evictions proceedings.

This means that to actually evict the tenants, you’ll have to start the process all over again.

How to Prevent Partial Rent Payments from Tenants

If you collect rent payments through Avail, then you can accept or a deny a tenant’s payment — which is extremely important in the case of eviction. Here is a step-by-step walk through on how to prevent a rent payment from tenants in Avail.

  • Click on the “Payments” tab
  • Select which unit the payment is for
  • Click on “Settings” to enable the “Stop Payments” button 
stop payments feature in Avail

The “Stop Payments” prevents any new payments from being scheduled by your tenant, which should only be used in the case of an eviction. If your tenants already have future payments scheduled or AutoPay activated, then please contact our Customer Care team at [email protected] for assistance. 

Screen Tenants to Help Avoid Problems

As with most things, your best bet is to try preventing problems before they occur.

In the case of evictions, you can help prevent these situations by following a thorough tenant screening process. To limit the chances that you’ll have to evict a tenant, you always want to require a rental application, credit and background check and eviction report.