Late Rent Notice

Do You Provide A Late Rent Notice To Tenants?

If you don’t you should! A late rent notice doesn’t have to be an eviction notice, it can simply be written notice to the tenant that rent is overdue and needs to be paid.

This notice should have the date, the address, the tenant’s name(s), your name and contact information and a warning that if it isn’t paid promptly, you will take the necessary steps required.

Sounds a little heavy handed doesn’t it?

Well, it isn’t especially if it requires you moving forward with an eviction and here’s why that late rent notice becomes so important.

A Late Rent Notice Can Become Evidence

Evidence! Yes, that’s really what you’re creating, evidence and a paper trail.

Hopefully the warning notice works on it’s own and the tenant pays up or at least contacts you with a plausible explanation, but in some cases it’s just the start of the problem.

Late rent once can become habitual or a sign of financial issues, neither of which works out well for a landlord and which is why it’s important to create that paper trail.

Landlords typically don’t start the day looking to evict their tenant, but at the same time they also need to be prepared to do it if the situation warrants it and evidence is key to successfully evicting someone.

With evictions currently taking between two and four weeks just for a hearing not having a proper paper trail or backup evidence when you start an eviction, many landlords find their eviction thrown out or delayed even longer.

I know, my tenants would never do this to me. Or at least that’s what many landlords think and by the time they find out otherwise it’s too late.

Granted it may be a one off, it might have been an oversight and it wouldn’t matter whether you provided a late rent notice or not. You would simply get paid once you reached out to the tenant.

But what if you didn’t get paid, or what if it happened again the next month and the next month and so on? You can’t back date late payment notices, you need to do it when it happens so you have the proper paperwork if the situation goes downhill.

We don’t put seatbelts on after the crash, we put them on to protect us from the potential crash and that’s how you should be thinking about notices that you provide to your tenant about late or unpaid rent.

They’re simply there to protect you in case of a crash!

If you’re considering providing an actual eviction notice to tenants Alberta uses a 14 day eviction notice for non-payment. To purchase one of these forms or for more information about eviction notices visit these links 5 Reasons Not To Use An Eviction Notice and  Why Free Eviction Notice’s Aren’t What They’re Cracked Up To Be