The Iced Coffee Hour - California Lawyer Breaks Silence on Nightmare Squatters, Lawsuits, & $50,000 Evictions

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

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CBC News. Is there a good reason why the rent hasn't been paid? What your fucking cameraman out of my face? The tenants from hell are back. They move in, but then they won't pay and they won't leave. What's the most difficult part of being a landlord? The reality is it's gotten so bad in California

that any mistake can cost you a property. How would you like to live in a beautiful home without ever having to pay rent or a mortgage? Sounds pretty good, does it? I've seen renters live on the property for years and not pay a single dime. Hey, Barb, can we talk to you about why you guys have so much lawsuits against you guys don't touch me this is not an accident the system is

designed to make you fail I would describe them as people who have a system figured out so is the eviction system intentionally designed to fail yes the entire market is broken and most people just don't realize it yet people who benefit from this really are institutional landlords big corporations and mom-and-pop landlords lose everything a hundred percent they have to sell it's another option if you wanted to be a tenant and exploit these laws as much as you could. How would you do it and how much money do you think you could make?

Something I really haven't talked about a lot lately is that I am selling off all of my real estate in California. Things have gotten so bad. I see the writing on the wall and I just want to get out. And I want to say the straw that broke the camel's back is you. I found you on Twitter. We had a good talk. You are an eviction attorney.

You look into real estate. We had a great talk. And I want to say within 10 minutes, you convinced me to not have anything to do with Los Angeles, California. Yeah. Being a landlord. So if you want to introduce yourself. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm Avi Sinae.

I'm an eviction trial lawyer in LA. The ward is out for a lot of these professional tenants. And you see them again and again and again in the courtroom. They're represented by the same lawyers, evicted by the same lawyers. And they understand how to game the system, right? They know that if they go to the property owner and then they just stop paying rent. And then they come and say to, I know, look, it's going to cost you $20,000 to evict me.

Once you give me $10,000, I'll leave. And half the time it works. And if it doesn't work, they just know how to stretch a case for six to nine months. And they stay there. And then they leave and they find an expectation. See, this is where I saw really common when I was working in real estate. I remember the first career tenant that I met seemed like a really, really, really nice guy. And he showed up and he was an attorney. He was making a few hundred

thousand dollars a year. He had a wife. He had three kids, religious. And they met with the owner and they got along so well. And they rented this house in Beverlywood and it was $12,000 a month. Paid immediately, paid the security deposit. And then it was like the next month that the rent was due, he started saying, oh, there's problems. There's water intrusion. There are rodents. There is this thing wrong, this thing wrong. I'm withholding rent until you fix these things.

And the owner fixed all the things. And then the tenant said, no, no, no, you didn't fix the things properly. We're getting asthma. We have these issues. Could you fix it again? Delayed it a few months. Fixed all the things. And then the tenant said, hey, listen, I wasn't a woman.

where you're not current with your mortgage. You're behind because this was back in 2011. He was trying to do a short sale and showing financial hardship. And he says, well, because you're behind on your mortgage, I legally don't need to pay you rent. Now, this guy put his life savings in this property and wasn't receiving rent for it. He was hoping he could keep the property, do a, do a short sale, be able to work up something or just be able to refinance his mortgage. This tenant drew it out for like three years before he had to leave. But he got three years of free rent in a place that was $12,000 a month. And he picked up and he did it again.

You know, this story is insanely similar to a case I just finished, right? A family that would on the outside look completely normal, right? And I get a call from this property owner, $6 million house in Beverly Hills. And they say, look, I mean, they stopped paying rent. we need to evict. So I do a quick search and all of a sudden I see all these lawsuits from these tenants. And I recognize a friend's name that they were in litigation. So I called this friend. I said, hey, like, do you know these tenants? It's like, yeah, well, you know, they moved in four million dollar house. They immediately threatened to sue me for habitability. They stopped paying rent. I had to evict them. I had to pay them a fortune. During litigation, we found out they did it five times. And it was from $4 million home to $7 million home to $5 million home. And it was very hard to evict them, but we did it. So for those who aren't familiar,

describe what a habitability lawsuit is and why tenants are taking advantage of it. Yeah. So under California law, landlord is required to give every tenant a habitable space. The kicker is, is the legislator passed all these laws that if you have a certain code violation and it's not cured in 35 days,

The tenant can sue and not just get their damages and a rent back. They can get statutory fees and attorney's fees. So attorneys can easily pick up the case and let's say there are $20,000, $40,000 in damages. They can collect attorney's fees. So they're incentivized to continue full force in litigation and demand very, very high settlements at the beginning. There are also some local rules, like for example, in L.A. San Monica that related to harassment, that you're able to get attorney's fees on that too. So a code violation will make it really, really bad.

And injury will make it really, really bad, but not necessarily. What does harassment mean? Like, how have you seen harassment applied in your own practice? Yeah. So it could be very mundane things. Like, for example, offering a tenant to buyout too many times, not making repairs, giving notices that are considered bad faith. What's the most difficult part of being a landlord?

It's the unknown of regulatory environment. What's going to come next? In the last five, six years, we've seen moratorium after a moratorium. restriction after restriction. And there's this unknown of what is city council is going to do next? What are the people in Sacramento going to do next? How are they going to restrict our property rights further? And, you know, real estate, you have thin margins.

It just makes it harder and harder. So it's very hard to plan ahead right now for landlords. This episode is in partnership with Airbnb. So Graham and I just wrapped up a trip. We were in Austin for a few days. We filmed episodes with Togi, Chris Camillo, and Caleb Hammer. And honestly, every time we're on the road, we're staying at homes on Airbnb, it's just become the default.

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I would actually recommend this to anyone out there that wants to make a little extra cash on the side. It's honestly phenomenal. If you're thinking about hosting but want some help getting started, find a co-host at Airbnb.com slash host. Now, you said on Twitter that Los Angeles landlords are the most discriminated class in our society. How would you explain that to the average person who hears that and thinks that sounds insane? Yeah. So obviously, it's kind of a half joke. But objectively speaking, if you look at who city council are targeting, it's property owners, it's housing providers, right?

Just this week, they passed... Huge restriction, cutting in half the amount of rent increases, landlords can pass to rent control residents. It's almost like they have this emergency button. And anytime their constituents or tenant rights groups say, hey, listen, we need some aid, we need some relief. They just pass another law. I think you can make the argument. Property owners are considered bad and renters are considered good. And if the city council can do something for their constituents, they're just going to do it. So do you see this problem just continually getting worse? And if you kind of expand this out in like a five to 10-year window, 20-year window, what do you expect to see if there's already

20% of places in Los Angeles are completely vacant? Yeah. How do you imagine this looking? I'm already seeing consolidation. So if an apartment building goes on the market, it's most likely going to be purchased by a larger property owner with a lot of units, right? These are skilled operators. They know what to do.

They're much better equipped to deal with a tough regulatory environment. I don't know how the story is going to end, but we're clearly in a downward trend. Another Santa Monica story. This is interesting. I remember in 2014. or 2015, I was looking to buy a place for myself. And there was a condo that came up on Montana and Ocean. Fourth floor, it's across from the beach.

And they were asking $450,000. Oh, wow. A really good price for a one bedroom. Yeah. Here's the catch. It's tenant occupied. The tenant was paying like $600 a month for this place. She was over the age of 62.

She made several hundred thousand dollars a year. And she was extremely healthy. And the HOA was basically what she was paying in rent. And so if you were to buy this place, you couldn't kick her out because she's a protected tenant. And your carrying costs would be the property taxes, HOA, insurance, maintenance, all these things that are several thousand dollars while she's paying $600. And so you have to carry the loss of $1,500 to $2,000 a month, potentially for 30 plus years. Absolutely. Until she passes away.

Yeah. The other issue I remember with this, why no one wanted to touch that, even though its value was like $900,000, was that in addition to her, her son was on the lease. Oh, my God. And apparently no one could contact the son. Like, no one knew where the son was, how old the son was, where he was. And so there's a chance that, let's say you wait 30 years and then she passes away, all of a sudden the sun comes out of the woodwork and they're like,

Well, actually, I'm on the lease, and I am, you know, 45 years old, and I'm entitled to this place for the next 50 years. Yeah, the sign. And then it's like, it's married, yeah. What do you do? Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot. You're buying a liability.

But I remember this guy took such a huge loss on this place. Like, he lost $500,000. He even offered her, like, six figures, one, $200,000 to leave. She wouldn't do it. Yeah, of course. So you can't evict someone if they're paying rent. No. Unless it.

is there are considered a nuisance, or unless they're somehow in violation of the lease, or they're trying to do, like, cosmetic repairs that you don't approve of, all of those can be cured, though. Like, let's say she moves in her friend, or she sublats it. You can't just say, all right, well, now you're out. You got to give her a notice to, what is it, a notice to... It's called a notice to cease.

Yes. A pre-pre-eviction notice first. Then you have to give an eviction notice with an opportunity to cure most of the time. And then if they don't cure and they don't leave, then you can file for eviction, which of course is going to take forever. What is the argument for investing in Los Angeles now? Very easy, right? I mean, we have 300 days of sun. All the problems in LA could be easily solved, right?

It's mostly crime and homelessness. And historically, we've had incredible rent growth, incredible property appreciation growth, which if we don't have in the next 10 years, it's probably going to be the first time in forever that we didn't have it. I was just speaking with someone the other day, a big investor in a big fund, and he believes that Southern California has a huge opportunity, right? He sees this is the same condition I've seen in 2012 when nobody wanted to touch anything. If you would have told me three years ago, you can buy an apartment building at a five or six cap in L.A. I would think you're crazy, right? But you can buy that right now in L.A. What's the biggest misconception the public has about evictions?

People think about evictions and they think about this horrible process that the, the evil landlords and the system are oppressing the tenants. In reality, it's completely the other way around it. Every law in the book, every process, every step of the way is for the tenants. It is incredibly easy to lose an eviction in California, right? One misstep, one mistake in the notice and you're gone, right? And you have to restart all over again. Over the years, the time that it takes to evict someone has exponentially grown, right? And that's for many reasons. The loss change, times got extended, but you're just, it cuts, not enough courtrooms, jury trials, but the restrictions became even harder. So what do we have today? Right. I was about to go to trial just this week. And an hour before trial was supposed to start, the tenant defense lawyer files a motion to dismiss on a technicality that could have been filed on the first week of the case. That lawyer is not getting paid by the tenant. That lawyer is hired by a nonprofit that's being funded by taxpayers. And the taxpayers are footing the bill for these kind of strategies.

I had that almost exactly happened to me. There was a tenant who left a property and then moved back in when it was listed for sale. Oh my God. Sent me rent. And I had to return the rent to her. And I was told by the person I was working with, yeah, if you take the rent, now you've created another tenant. So I sent back the rent and I sent her some sort of notice.

I had another company handling. It was a property management firm at the time who was handling it. And they did not include, and this was like 2023, by the way, a one-page COVID disclosure. That was it. Everything else was perfect, but the one-page COVID disclosure. And as we were getting closer to the court date, I had another company look through and said, who served this. And I said, I had the property management firm.

Never have them do this. They missed this one form. And we have to start over again by issuing her. new notice. And of course, she had the free legal assistance, apparently telling her, yeah, don't mention this. We're going to use this at the last possible minute. Yeah. And yeah, we caught it before then, but it did cost us several months because we had to go back. You have to post the RSO notice informing the amount of their RSO rights. You have to post an LHD notice in foreign the of their tenant rights. And then you have to now post a third notice, which is the notice for

right to counsel. And if you don't have one of these notices posted on a common area, that's an affirmative defense. So who's going to help the landlord? What if the landlord can't afford to evict their tenant and they just don't have the money? What do they do? Like, let's just say someone inherits a family property. It's breaking even every month, but it means a lot to them. And over time, they're going to pay it down. And they have to evict the tenant. And they say, I don't have $20,000. What do they do? They have to sell. It's no other option. There's some cheap services out there for eviction, but that's still going to run you four or five grand. If you can't afford four to five grand, you've got to sell the property.

My philosophy has always been this, and this was very unpopular for people to hear, and it worked well for me up until recently. I'd never raise the rents. I hated raising the rent because I'd get really great tenants that would stay like eight to ten years. Wow. They were awesome. And I had zero hassles, zero headache. They always paid on time. If there was something you need to be fixed, of course I'd do it because I don't want them to leave. And from my perspective, too, when a tenant leaves, my overhead is really high. Like, let's say on a unit, I might profit in a year, like net, net, net, $15,000 in a year for one unit. Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice.

I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. Adviser creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IDPrivatewealth.com. If they move out, I repaint it. That's $4,000. It's usually maybe two to three months where it's empty where I'm fixing it up and thinks that's another few thousand dollars and lost rent. And then there's another few thousand dollars in random, miscellaneous things to get a tenant back in there.

So it's basically when they move out, I miss almost a year's worth of profit. And so I think, well, instead of just having a year's for the profit and turning the unit over, I may as well pass their savings back onto the tenant and just not have them leave by not raising the rents. But when the city comes in says you cannot raise the rent, well, then jacking up the cost and everything else, that to me is a red flag that all of a sudden the city says it's mandatory. But they don't do that for groceries. They don't do that for insurance costs. They don't do that for car repairs.

They don't do that for just about anything else. And so now I've gotten to a point where I have to raise rent every year because if I don't do that, I end up losing out so much more money. Of course, you have to raise it. And so now I'm at a point where I've had to, and I hate doing it. But it goes to show it's one of those things where if they didn't do that, I wouldn't be raising the rent. But recently what they said is that you could only raise rent up to a certain amount or 90% of CPI. So if inflation comes in at 2%, you could only raise underage. inflation basically. So every year you have a tenant, you're going to be making less and less and

less and less. Exactly. If you wanted to be a tenant and exploit these laws as much as you could, how would you do it and how much money do you think you could make? I think that I would find the highest rent apartment, probably complaining about mold, having brain fog and stop paying rent. You can probably stay there for nine, ten months if you know what you're doing. And then you could pick up and do that again. Yeah. And there's plenty of people who are doing that. So, and there's, I'm guessing, there are laws against creating a registry where you say, oh, this tenant's yeah, you can't do that. Why not?

Because why can't you have a Yelp for tenants? Why can't you do that and say, hey, here's the person's name, you're a problematic tenant, because on the flip side of that, you could also in the same registry say, this was a phenomenal tenant. Yeah. This tenant, I didn't want to move. So I think there's two problems with that. Number one, eviction cases are sealed by law.

The documents are not available to the public. These are not secret proceedings, but the documents themselves are protected. And I think that someone tried actually to do that and they got sued. So can't do that. What's the lowest rate you've seen a tenant pay? I've done a very, very hard eviction in L.A. The tenant was paying $250 a month. She lived there for 20 years.

When I came in, she had a seven-figure lawsuit against the landlord. No eviction attorney would take the case. But we filed an eviction. We took a risk. we offered her $75,000 in the hallway to leave right before trial. And she said no. And we took a risk in trial. I mean, won in trial.

And she got evicted. And then she proceeded to call her city attorney's office. She called every member of city council, said that I cheated in trial, and then she filed a barra complaint against me. We didn't do anything wrong, so there was nothing to do about it. we she got evicted because she didn't pay the rent and she violated the rules but that was great for the property owner but there's a much easier way to avoid these kind of tenants I tell this to all my clients I post on Twitter all the time I took the 20 worst tenants that I evicted and they're horrible

and I said what's the common denominator with all of them and in 95% of cases if you run a name search and you look for litigation history they have a long litigation history not necessarily just for evictions, collections, they sue people for personal injury, for employment. The vast majority renters are decent people. Nobody wants to go to court, right? Just insane people want to go to court. But something happens when you go to court a lot, you get comfortable with it. And the fear just kind of goes away.

So in 95% of the time, if the property management or the owner just did a simple litigation search on the tenant, a ton of cases would have come up. If you see someone with a lot of litigation history, more than two or three lawsuits, just denied them immediately. Are you allowed to deny people? We had Jason Oppenheim on here. You was saying that it's even hard to say no

if you had an applicant to rent your land. Yeah, he gave an example of a house that he knew where they had multiple applications and the landlord just picked the person who was the most qualified. And then one of the people who was not the most qualified said, Oh, you're discriminating against me. And that was the reason why I'm going to sue.

So you have to be very, very careful, right? I would recommend hiring either a property manager or a lawyer to be kind of like a middle ground between you and the tenant, right? And always give an allowed reason of why you're rejecting a tenant. Some cities even have income source as a not allowed reason, right? So you can't discriminate based on their profession. Right now, a hot topic is Section 8 denials. So there's this new scam going around. I don't know if you guys heard of it.

You list your house on Zillow or Craigslist and you get a text. It's always a text or email or you get it through the app. And someone asks you, do you accept Section 8? I got those all the time. Yes. So when you get that, you say yes immediately and nothing else. If you say anything other than yes, you're going to get a lawsuit. And that's based on federal and state housing discrimination laws.

And again, just like habitability, they carry attorney's fees provision on them. So these lawsuits now are all the rage. I had a Section 8 tenant. She was fantastic. Section 8, on the other hand, was not. She was the loveliest person, and we got along so well. And I'd bring her food all the time. But Section 8 would come in and do these annual inspections, and they would say, hey, this carpet's dirty.

And you've got to replace the whole carpet. Well, that's going to be $5,000. The tenant didn't take good care of the carpet. She walks in with her shoes. It's raining outside. She's stopping on the carpet. Now there's mud tracks through it. She'll drop something on the carpet.

Now it's stained. Section 8 says, I got to replace it. Well, she damaged it. You got to replace it. There was another one where I had to replace a whole vanity for some reason or another. Maybe there's something where it was like wear and tear. Yeah. Not caused by me.

It was brand new when, anyway, I had to replace that whole thing. And they withheld rent because I was remodeling the exterior of the property. And I had a painter there at the same time the inspector came. And the painter was chiseling off paint to repaint it. And they said that's potentially lead-based paint. And because of that, a child could come into the property and put that in their mouth. And that's a hazard. So until that's all cleared up, we can't remit payment.

And I said, she's in her 70s. No kids are around here. No one's eaten the paint. That doesn't matter. No one's around. Nope. Withholding the rent. And then getting them back at the time wasn't as difficult as it is today, but I still

remember like going through the whole ordeal of having them to be called back to just look and see, okay, no paint chips. And they could see the guys there like peeling the paint away. Like it's not a thing that's been sitting there for weeks. So it's dealing with Section 8. I also had another one where there. There was a tenant on Section 8, and it was a seven-unit apartment building on LaBraya in Los Angeles, and the tenant always had issues with cockroaches because they wouldn't throw away their food and they were a hoarder.

And Section 8 would come in and require the landlord to clear out the unit and then fix everything. And next year, he had to fix everything. And it was every single year he had to basically remodel this unit because the tenant wouldn't throw away their trash. It created roaches, just all these issues. But he would remodel the unit every year. And the tenant, I think, was paying $400 or $500 a month. And so it costs more to remodel the unit than the tenant would pay in rent to destroy the unit. And that's Section 8.

That's why I'm just selling everything. Because I'm looking at the numbers of these. And I get this emotional attachment to the properties because I remember every moment, like, saving up, binding it, looking at it, fixing it up, putting my own touch on things. selfishly too like financially i got a low property tax basis on all of these and so i'm not paying much a property tax but the insurance the utilities the overhead has gotten to a point now where i could say i could to sell it and make more money doing anything else other than keep these properties and so i may as well financially it's just i kind of i have to it just it makes sense so it seems to me like los angeles in california kicking out what i would call small mom and paup

landlords who own one to five units and who else buys it. I guarantee the people buying my places are not going to be mom and pop. They're going to be probably developers who will go in, kick out the tenants, put a six to eight unit building in there and they're going to flip it or they're going to sell it. That's who's going to do it. Exactly. So what's keeping Los Angeles real estate high? Because it seems like the prices are still relatively expensive compared to other places like you're in Las Vegas or just nationwide. If it's such an undesirable place to own property. It's an undesirable place to own property as a business. It's gotten worse recently. Single family homes are at an all-time high on the west side of Los Angeles. If you have money,

a lot of money, you come to Los Angeles. How much money do you need to live in Los Angeles? You need a lot of money to live in Los Angeles, right? A lot of money. If you want to own a house, if you want to live in the good neighborhoods, you have to make, in my opinion, at least three to $350,000 a year. So I got a call about a tenant that was struggling with the rent, and I look him up, names sound familiar, couldn't afford the rent. How much was the rent? It's like $20,000 a month. So why? Would someone that can pay $20,000 more? I guess I can't pay it, but they got on the lease. Yeah. Not like, how do you miscalculate so far? Hey, get a place that's $10,000 a month.

15 instead of going for 20,000 when you can't afford it. Help me make that make sense. Hello, I'm Patricia Kossim, Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, and I host Info Matters, a podcast about people, privacy, and accessed information. Each episode features conversations with people sharing real stories and perspectives on the access and privacy issues that matter most to them. You can listen in at a lot. IPC.on.ca or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, here's my theory, right? If you are in the business,

right? If you are representing famous people, if you're an influencer, you have to live a certain lifestyle. But all of a sudden, your expenses catch up to you. And all of a sudden, you have a couple bad months and you have no savings, right? And that's usually how it happens. The biggest thing is private education. When I see people who cannot afford their mortgage and they're about to lose their home, every single time they tell me, my kids' private education killed me. How much is private education costing? Depends where you go. The best private high schools are about $30,000, $40,000 a year.

Plus, there's extracurriculars. You can't just send your kid to school and pay $50,000 a year. You also have to send them on the trips, all the bonuses, all the this and that, and the, you know, tutoring, too. So those kids, they'll spend $50,000 a year on the school. They'll spend another $30,000 a year on extra. extracurriculars, like you want karate lessons, or you want music lessons, and then there's tutoring on time. They're probably spending about $100,000 a year per kid to go to that school

if they want them to be a top student. And I see it all the time. All the time. That's common. And that's the reality in LA, right? You have to drive a certain car, right? You wear a nice watch. You have to live in a certain neighborhood. You send your kids a private school. It catches up to you. And what about the insurance charges also in California? Because that seems to be an issue also that went into my consideration of selling is every year I don't know whether or not I'm going to get an insurance renewal. And what was funny is that it was two years ago, I wanted to lower my home insurance. And so I wanted to put everything under one bundle. And I went through a really well-known company and it's like the best of the best insurance.

And they say, okay, we could do all of this, but nothing in California. I was like, okay, maybe it's just them. So I started calling around every single insurance company. This is pre-fire, by the way, said, we're not insuring it. And I called my rep at farmers. And he says, yeah, actually, you're really lucky because your current policy is renewing, but they're not accepting any new clients. So you're umbrellaed in.

And then I was like, well, what is someone to do if they buy a house or need insurance now? Where do they go? The problem I see is in multifamily, an apartment buildings. because now if you're lucky to get insurance, you get exclusions on habitability lawsuits. And there is a high chance that if you get sued today, you're not going to be covered by insurance. You can see how one lawsuit and no insurance coverage can just absolutely decimate you. So why are small landlords disappearing? It's a lot easier to make money if you have a lot of units.

You can have an in-house legal team. You're up to date with the law. You have good advisors. It costs per unit a lot more if you have just like a small property. Avi, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. I'm going to link to all of your information and your Twitter, by the way, in the description. That I really enjoy.

I have notifications turned on. So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for watching. Hope you enjoyed this. And until next time.