My attorney goes to eviction court on my behalf. There are a couple levels. One of them is the first cause of action. That is where I get possession of the property.

I have had a tenant in the house, they aren't paying. I go to eviction court to get my property back and get this asset working again. The other cause of action in the state of Ohio comes 28 days after this. You have the opportunity to go back for damages.

If I run out and get a judgment on the deadbeat tenant and they file bankruptcy, it's bad news. They can wipe out their problems. No guarantee you're even going to get your money then.

So the collection agency wants to get the deadbeat on the phone so they can use a scare tactic. They let the deadbeat know that they will mess up their credit.

This scare tactic is designed to get the evicted tenant to step up and start paying. So when I outsourced my collections, I was told not to go after the collection myself and not to go after the judgment. The people I was outsourcing to would do it. The agency that I was doing business with had its own attorney. What they will do is file the judgment. My attorney will go to court. I will not go to court. My staff will take the pictures in and will show the lease. They show them when the tenant moved out. The court then garnishes the wages.

This company had a nice flow of checks coming in for me. It was all money that I never thought I would see again.

The longer you pursue the collection the less likely you’ll be able to end up with the weight to pursue the collection. This means that it’s less likely that you’re going to end up with money. Thirty days is an ideal target. If you wait a few months before you go after them the odds of collecting decreases rapidly. Every day it gets colder.

I cannot say it enough. Be disciplined with your collections.

There are times when the collections agency locates the person who owes you money. The person’s unwilling to setup payment arrangements. Our agency then takes them to court and that’s the info that they use to get the judgment.

What they found out is a lot of times people will cough up the money to pay you back rather than to get the judgment. Sometimes they won’t. When there is a hearing, one of my staffers will show up and a lot of times the tenants do not. So it’s a slam dunk. They no showed and you win.

We walk in with the copies of the contractor invoices, payments that we made and the pictures. Always remember the pictures!

After the hearing we receive a judgment and we file a wage garnishment. That takes 10 percent of the tenant’s paycheck. I don’t know if that’s nationwide, it might be, but it is in the state of Ohio.