Wouldn't have worked in NY. I know, I used to have tenants on my property.
If you, the landlord/lady as much as touch their posessions, let along throw it on the street and if you lock them out - you'll be arrested. Pronto. And they have law on their side if they break in back.

To expel the tenants legally, you are supposed to serve them with a warning letter first - not you personally, but your rep (preferably your lawyer or US Marshal) - in which you give them a month to correct their ways. After that month has passed, you have a right to file an eviction case in court. And when your turn comes for the judge to review it, be prepared he more likely than not will declare you, not them, the offending party.
In a meanwhile (about 3 YEARS, on average) the tenants have a right to continue their evil behavior (not paying rent, destroying your property, having loud parties, etcetc).
And then, right before the hearing dat is set up, they'll just move out. You can, of course, go into expense of finding them and hiring yet another lawyer, but then you realize your life is not worth this plague and there is no justice in this world.

Phew.
[it was compressing for 5 years, people! I had to let it out!]

"They smoked indoors, and left hairs in the bathroom."

After thisyour story lost all credibility.

dwyer

Do you mean you don't believe the facts as described, or do you believe that landladies shouldn't be allowed to make their own rules?

If the former, those are the facts, as related to me by someone I believe.

If the latter, why not? It's her house.

Well, any landlord who did something like this to me, would suffer the full consequences of the law. Getting him or her to suffer the full consequences of the law would probably require an unreasonable amount of effort and expense and months of time on my part, but I would push the issue to the point that if the option of having the landlord sent to jail for this existed (and it probably does), I would do everything I could to make it happen. Why would I do this? Well, quite simply, I would like the message that "Nobody ever does this sort of thing to me and gets away with it" to be loud and clear. Of course, this would be a simple demonstration of power. It has nothing to do with whether the law is right or wrong. (Or perhaps, to put it a different way, it is forcing someone who is not civil to me to face the consequences).

Of course, I am someone who is scrupulous about paying the rent on time and a reasonable tenant. And at the moment I am suffering from a situation where I have a very bad landlord that I did not choose. (The building was sold subsequent to my moving in). This landlord is so bad that he has made it extremely difficult to pay the rent on time (Yes, it is as bizarre as it sounds) and is hopeless about maintenance issues. Yes, I realise that the correct way to respond to this is "Move somewhere else" and I will do this as soon as I am reasonably able to. For the moment, though, I am peeved.

When I left London I stopped doing what I tried my hand at property management for a while. I HATED it, but that is besides the point.

I had to evict a number of people a number of times, takes about six weeks here in Oz. The laws are more on the landlords side than other places I guess.

Michael : The key phrase in the article here is: "Despite being warned". One also has to remember to make extensive footwork and research before finding a place to live, instead of grabbing the first good offer (which is what happens all too often). The part of the article I found interesting/amusing was how some bureaucracies (tenant legislation, legal costs, redtape) can cancel each other out.

Conrad: Oh yes, sure. The point I was simply making is that a tenant having a delinquent landlord is just as bad as a landlord having a delinquent tenant. I think this is more about contractual law than property rights. Both sides have to keep their side of the contract. In the event of a serious breach of contract, there is no reason why remedies should not be quite severe, either way.

Pursuing the legal case to its logical extreme so as to make the landlord suffer is perhaps not much different than locking the tenant and his possessions out in the middle of the night, in truth. In both case it it a matter of being quite severe so as to make a point.

Yeah, I think she's bloody lucky that at least one of those 36 tenants hasn't done something legal about being unceremoniously chucked out, as described.

She'd probably be liable for any damage to the (ex) tenant's ejected property, too.

A risky strategy for the landlord in these entitlement-mad times.

An absolutely fantastic lady!

Michael, aren't you embroidering the story a little? There was no mention of locking tenant and his possessions out "in the middle of the night'.
What was in the story, however, that the tenants were warned in advance.

So I take it some sort of contract existed (either written or not), where the sides were informed of consequences to their actions.

About your own situation: imagine yourself buying a rental property that you have plans renovating, using for a different purpose or may be you even want to move in yourself. And unfortunately, there is a leftover tenant there, rendering your plans impossible. What would you do?
Let me say, I know only what you let us, so there might be complicated details, but from your description I think the landlord is trying - within the limits law allows - to make you to move out.

"So I take it some sort of contract existed (either written or not), where the sides were informed of consequences to their actions."

Informing someone that you intend to take certain actions if they continue to behave in a certain way is not a contract. It is a statement.

There was a contract between the landlady and her tenant. It was the tenancy agreement. Unless her 'warnings' formed part of it, then they did not form part of the contract between them.

It was only reasonable for a tenant to assume that the tenancy agreement was intended to work in conjunction with statutory law in order to give a fuller view of their rights and responsibilities, and those of the landlady.

Warning someone that you intend to act in an illegal fashion does not make it any more legal, as you seem to acknowledge in your first comment, Tatyana.

The law may well be wrong in the protections it offers tenants, but her tenants have every right to expect her to act legally, as she has a right to expect the tenants to. The tenants entered into a contract with an assumption of certain statutory protections. The person playing fast and loose with the implicit terms of the contract entered into is the landlady.

I own rental property in South Dakota. I can evict in nine days. Never had to do it.

Might I suggest that if she has had to eject thirty six (36) lodger, either her criteria for choosing lodgers needs review, or she's a bit of a nutjob.

The landlady's name wasn't Verity by any chance?

(Does anyone know what became of her, by the way?)

Giddle,
She now hangs out at Devil's Kitchen.

About your own situation: imagine yourself buying a rental property that you have plans renovating, using for a different purpose or may be you even want to move in yourself. And unfortunately, there is a leftover tenant there, rendering your plans impossible. What would you do?

Either wait for the lease to expire and then not renew it, or don't buy the property.

When Tenant Adam executes a lease with Landlord Baker, Adam acquires the right to occupy and use the property for a period of time stated in the lease and subject to terms and conditions typically contained in the lease. If Baker sells the property to Charles, this does not automatically affect Adam's right to use the property. If Baker wants to negotiate an early termination with Adam so that Baker can convey the property to Charles without the encumbrance of a tenant, that's for them to work out. Otherwise, Charles is buying a property with strings attached.

Note: this is in the USA. The UK may be different.

I hate landlord-tenant disputes. I always have to tell them "It's not a police matter. If you feel you have a legal dispute you need to pursue this directly with your landlord/tenant through the county court." And there's never a polite way to say so that doesn't waste an hour of my day.

Tatyana: Ok, "the middle of the night" may qualify as an embellishment. I interpreted the "warnings" as requests not to smake and/or to change behaviour - not warnings that the tenants would be locked out.

As for my situation, if you buy a building (in my case an apartment building full of tenants), it is perfectly reasonable to request that the tenants move out (once you have honoured any contractual obligations they are due ie allowed their leases to expire), but that is not what has happened here. I would of course have honoured any such request if one had been forthcoming. I n retrospect I wish one had. tIt's merely a case of a landlord with all round breathtaking incompetence at managing a property and whose behaviour makes no sense at all. I have aired too much of my dirty laundry in public already, however, so I am not going to give any more details.

Did she return any of her lodger's deposits?

If not, she is nothing better than a common criminal.

I tend to agree that, while it's her house and property, she can't violate those tenancy contracts (i.e. the leases). She can offer to pay the tenants to end their lease early or she can wait until they expire, but she cannot just throw the tenants out if she's signed a contract that allows them on her property. Now, if the contract specifies that smoking, leaving hairs in the bathroom, etc. is grounds for eviction, fine. If it doesn't, what this woman is doing is illegal and wrong. And by illegal, I don't just mean the nanny state has a problem with it; I mean it's fundamentally wrong.

It goes without saying that in a free society, contracts of tenancy could be as sensible/silly as anyone wants. End of discussion.

Part of the reason why I have a mortgage is my annoyance at having to knuckle under to some complex tenancy agreement. As a leaseholder, I still must pay things like ground rent, but it is still preferable.

Brian,

I don't know how the law for this works in London, but in Florida I've found that many apartments have replaced the various deposits a tenant would pay with the first months' rent with similarly-themed "fees" that the landlord may keep regardless of when the tenant leaves, voluntarily or not.

Blacksmith,

More or less the same thing happens here. It's called 'Larceny' but the sum involved is never enough for it to be worth the costs of litigation.

She sounds like a witch. Maybe her scam is to rent rooms to poor tenants, then find excuses to kick them out and keep their deposits. It would help if they were foreign too, as they would be less likely to seek legal redress (or even be aware of their rights). Alternatively she's just a mad old sociopath.

Either way, one can only hope that one day she meets a tenant who will stand up to her, either via the police, or via a lump hammer and her front door.

It amazes me how many people can come to such sweeping conclusions with so little information.

I will give the poster the benefit of the doubt, as he may know more than he chose to record, but wow, either the rest of you are physic, or you can glen all the information you need from the labels on the roles:

tenant=good landlord=bad,
landlord=good tenant=bad,
twolegs=good fourlegs=bad

all equally irrational.

Good point, Rich. Brian's original point still stands, though: it's her property, so she can do whatever she likes with it, however unreasonable, and however nasty she herself may or may not be.