Evicting The Tenant From Hell!

Costa Rican tenancy law dates from 1995, and at the time it was a great advance towards a more balanced approach to the rights of the landlord and the tenant, whereas the previous law (from 1939) greatly favored the tenant against the landlord.

One of the advances of the law was that once the eviction process begun, the tenant was under the obligation to deposit future rent with the court, and failure to do so meant he would not be heard, no evidence proposed by him would be received, and thus the case could end very quickly.

Unfortunately this well intended idea lasted about as long as a puff of smoke!

Our Constitutional Court declared it was against the Constitution to deny any citizen the right to defend himself in court, just because he did not have enough money to deposit the rent …

This brought the situation back to the old regime.

We had a case in which the tenant of a commercial property stopped paying rent, and it took us four years to finally evict him.

Four years in which the tenant from hell was using the property, four years in which the owner could not collect rent nor use his property for which he was paying taxes and four years of rent that were never recovered.

We later discovered that the tenant and his attorney had an interesting agreement: The tenant would pay his attorney the equivalent of half of the monthly rent for as long as the attorney managed to keep him in the building.

This situation got so bad in San José that there are people who made a living out of these loopholes in the law. They would rent an apartment, a house or a business, pay the first months’ rent and the deposit, then stay for free for as long as they could.

Right now we have a client who rented a business in downtown San José, for $1,400 a month. The owner of the property only ever received two months’ rent and we have been fighting for two years now to get rid of the thief he has as a tenant.

So apart from the legal fees, our client has lost $34,000 (how did you calculate this?) that will never be recovered, a loss that the law imposes on the landlord and graciously gave to the tenant from hell.

The good news is that on the 5th of September 2013, a new law to correct this legal horror was published, it is law #9160, called “Ley de Monitorio Arrendaticio“, one of those names given by technicians to impress their audience.

This law is applicable only when the eviction is based on the lack of payment or the expiry of the term of the contract.

When the tenant has stopped payments, the landlord now has the right to file the claim before specialized courts (which have yet to be created), in a process that will be mainly oral, not written as it is now, with no appeals, and in which the only defenses allowed to the tenant will be –dah– payment, or the statue of limitation having passed.

The judge will order the tenant to make all future payments into the court’s account, and the lack of any such payment will mean the immediate eviction.

Thus, there are people thinking a bad tenant would be out in one month if he does not deposit the next month’s rent after the order of the court.

The law also allows the landlord with the initial petition to request the right to freeze some of the tenant’s assets, so he could not take them out of the rented premises to try and recover the unpaid rent.

Since the law has to go through a process of adaptation and practice, it will take some trial and error for the courts to fine tune its application, but it should definitively stop the horrendous damage the previous situation was causing to the economy.

We have just filed our first lawsuit under this new law and will let you know how it goes…

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Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.