The Landlord Lens - Why Evictions Can Take 2 Years in New York City

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Why does it take over TWO YEARS to evict a tenant in New York City?In this video, we break down the legal delays, tenant protections, and bureaucratic backlog that make NYC evictions painfully slow and why every landlord in America should be paying attention. From rent strikes to court bottlenecks, this isn’t just a New York problem. It's a warning.

So that's two years of no rent. Could you survive that? The sad part is her story is not unique. When we started investigating and researching, the numbers are staggering, and this is impacting way more people than just Sandra. In the future, New York City is going to be populated 90, 95% by corporate landlords. Hey, everybody. Welcome back.

We are joined by Seamus Nally, our CEO and Landlord Extraordinary. I'm going to use that one again. Hey, Seamus. John, thank you for the energetic intro. Well, I'm excited to have you on because we're talking about your home state, New York. Yes, we are. And we're going to head south from where I grew up and where I own some rental properties to the Big Apple, New York City. And we're going to talk about what it's like to be a landlord in New York City.

And just a little teaser, it's awful. Let's roll the clip. You can see the frustration in Sandra Clackson's eyes. She worked as a nurse for decades to buy her retirement. home in the Bronx, a home she's now afraid of losing. I didn't expect this. Her home has a second floor apartment she's been leasing out to help cover costs. The last receipt from two years ago.

But says her tenant hasn't paid in more than two years. She took her to housing court and won, but the tenant is still living above her. The warrant has not been signed by the judge, so they cannot. You do anything about it. She had to wait for more than a year after winning her case for a judge to to sign off on the eviction warrant, she's now waiting for a marshal to execute it. After I finished paying the mortgage, I hardly have anything left. Meanwhile, she's responsible for paying all the bills and utilities, or the tenant could take her to court.

She's the one who not paying, but yet still she gets a free pass. How many other sandros are there out there? Oh, it's hundreds, hundreds. So that's two years of no rent. Could you survive that? No, and I hope I never have to. It's absolutely incredible what Sandra is going through. And the sad part is her story is not unique.

When we started investigating and researching what's going on in New York City, the numbers are staggering, and this is impacting way more people than just Sandra. Absolutely. And let's quickly review the timelines that are being experienced right now in New York City. So how long does it take to, on average, have an eviction from filing all the way through to the sheriff's getting dispatched. New York City right now is on 24 months. The average eviction takes. And then there's a six month wait between the eviction being granted and the sheriff actually going out and moving a tenant. Insane. Almost three years. Yeah. It's absolutely nuts how long it's taken. And it hasn't

always been that way. When we actually look at the data, if you go pre-COVID, right, it was around three to four months, which also a long amount of time, if you're not receiving rent that whole time. But in comparison, that seems like the blink of an eye compared to the 24-month-long process that landlords are experiencing in New York right now. 24 plus six, right? Good point. I mean, that's eight times longer than before COVID. Now, there's reasons why this happened. The first is the pandemic. Because you actually had some, did you experience moratoriums in New York State?

Yeah. For 101 weeks in New York City, there were. pauses on any evictions, right? So if you had an eviction that you filed before the pandemic started, that wasn't being processed. Anything being filed during the pandemic was not being processed. And so you can imagine what happens when you have a place like New York City, all those individuals backing up the courts with eviction files, filings that just aren't being processed. In a lot of cases, landlords knew they weren't going to be processed, so they weren't even filing them, right? Oh, yeah. Gotcha. So they weren't being processed.

They're stacking up. They're stacking up. And presumably most of these were still eviction cases when the moratoriums disappeared. So they just suddenly there's this wall of cases they've got to work through. Exactly. The lived experience by many landlords during the pandemic was not that rent assistance kicked in and helped turn what were eviction cases into paying tenants, right? So a lot of those evictions did just back up, right?

They didn't move through the system. them, they weren't resolved. So the hope would have been that New York City staffs up their housing department, gets all the lawyers on board and ready to go as soon as those moratoriums are gone so that this crazy backlog gets solved. Is that what happened? Yeah, it looked a lot like a Walmart entrance on a Black Friday, right? Just that mad rush of craziness. Yeah. No, that's not what happened at all, John. New York City is still experiencing a judge and staffing shortage, and so they're not moving through the backlog fast whatsoever. And from an outsider's perspective, someone that doesn't have rentals and isn't going to this process in New York City, it looks like they're not prioritizing it.

Because New York City is one of the most incredible cities in the world. And certainly if they wanted to prioritize moving through this backlog, they absolutely could. And they're just not making it a priority, which is leaving landlords like Sandra, right, in a terrible situation. And at the risk of on the brink of bankruptcy as she waits for these things to get processed and then for the sheriff to come out and actually even serve the warrant and remove the tenant. Yeah. And I think let's talk about that. Why bankruptcy, right?

So 24 months in an average American home, if it's $2,000 is something around 50, $50,000 maybe. In New York City, that's totally different. The median studio rent in New York City is $4,184. So 24 months of that is almost $100,000. And that's just for a studio, 400 square feet. And then you add in the carrying costs, which are also extraordinarily high in New York City.

You taxes interest, heat average, is $2,100 a month. And so this is all just going out of the wallet of this landlord, the small landlords like Sandra, right? And so these types of bankruptcy situations, especially for small landlords, are much riskier in New York City. Yeah, and Sanders in a situation, like so many, landlords out there that use the house hacking tactic, right, to get into being a landlord. So you buy a multi-unit, whether it's a duplex, maybe it's a quad, and you rent out part of

your own primary, right, to help pay the rent. It's a great way to start off as a landlord, right, and start to build your portfolio. But in this sort of situation where Sanders actually relying on the rent of their tenants for her to pay her mortgage, she's not just risking bankruptcy. She's risking her own primary. She's risking where she lives. And so I think that video does a really good job narrowing in on kind of the lived experience of a landlord going through this and how high the stakes are. Absolutely.

Well, okay, so kind of grim, sort of a grim topic here. But there are some solutions, landlords in New York City and landlords nationwide turn to in these kinds of situations. Can you talk a little bit about cash for keys? Yeah, absolutely. So this is a very popular tactic. It's one that I've used myself and actually using today. with a tenant, which is you pay them to move out. You pay them to meet you on the out front of the property and hand you the keys.

The reason you do this is because, A, evictions take a long time, right? And evictions are expensive. The reason I'm actually engaged with one of my rentals is we plan to sell that rental. And so as part of that process, we know we have a tenant today that is not routinely paying on time. There are a couple months behind in rent. and we can't sell that property and disclose that to the next purchaser, right? Who's going to want to move into Sandra's place if she puts it on the market, knowing that she's got years of owed rent, you know, living underneath?

And so it's super important that as a landlord, if you are going to sell any properties or if you're going to buy properties, right, that you ask about the rental history of any of the existing tenants. So cash for keys, you can bundle up a handful. of things. What we actually do is it's not only cash, we also offered a return the full security deposit. We also provide moving services to help them move out to really make that process as smooth as possible. It's something that a lot of landlords had to try for the first time during COVID because there was a lot of eviction moratoriums. And so that was a less friction path

of going forward. There's huge downsides to that, though. Not only is it expensive as the landlord, but the tenant also doesn't have an eviction on their record after it. And as a result, the next landlord, right, another tool we're going to talk about on how to avoid these situations is proper screening. That screening report's not going to come back with in eviction history. And so there's also this really weird situation where a landlord desperately wants a bad tenant to move out of their place. They will say anything to the next landlord that calls, right, for a reference check. If they even do, many landlords skip the reference check altogether to get that person out of their property into someone else's, right?

Push the problem on. And so that is one of the downsides of cash for keys. And it's one of the downsides of the system being so clogged out that landlords have to take other, you know, go unofficial routes like the cash for keys, legal, but on official routes, it doesn't create a record that helps the next landlord to better screen. That makes a lot of sense. Let's move on to the screening question. Because I, you know, I've talked to a lot of our users in particular and I hear I trust my gut. Way too much. So talk us through what we should be doing to screen our tenants.

Yeah, I mean, guts lie. Have you ever grocery shop, until you're hungry, right? The best way to avoid the situation that Sanders in and anyone going through the eviction process is in is like, just don't put a bad renter in the property in the first place, right? Much easier said than done. but there's things you can do to really protect yourself. So you mentioned screening, right? Make sure you're getting credit, criminal, and eviction background checks if available in the location of your property.

Some local laws, right, allow or don't allow some of those data points. If you use a tool like TurboTenet will only send you what is legally available in your given area, so you don't have to worry about that as a landlord. But then do things like call references, right? follow up on W2 documents to make sure that the people are gainfully employed, right? Don't just get the last paycheck, ask for history, right? You can't go get a mortgage for a property or a loan without giving two years of W2 history, right?

And so you're allowed to ask for those sorts of documents to just better understand the individual's ability to pay. So, okay, so we can screen and we have this cash for key situation, which honestly feels like the tenant one. You should be the one handing the money over. Yeah, right. It sounds that way. It's kind of a brutal solution.

It wounds the pride a little bit, right? But like how, it's still a grim situation. This is brutal for small landlords that are managing this as a personal finance project, right? Yeah, absolutely. And the result is going to be that the small landlords move out. The corporate landlords continue to fly. flourish and move in even deeper, right? Because if you are a large corporation,

large institutional investor, you can afford to have the lawyers on staff, right, to navigate these situations. You also have the money to float, right? Float through multiple properties and multiple pockets and multiple pools of capital to make sure that this situation doesn't cause bankruptcy, right? What's incredible, too, is a corporate landlord. let's say you do have to write down a property, you're actually writing that loss off against business expenses somewhere else, right? So the dynamics are just completely different for corporate

landlords navigating these sorts of systems. And so I don't know if they're happy about this situation, but they're definitely not in the same position that Sanders in and they're likely looking at it as an opportunity similar to how they did after the great financial crisis when there is so many foreclosures on homes and the institutional's went through and bought up large amounts of rental properties. Yeah, there's a future if this legislative ball keeps rolling and the staffing issues around the legislation that they passed keep being so shortages, right? It's just a horrible always say that. And staffing keeps really low that in the future New York City is going to be populated 90, 95 percent by corporate landlords. Absolutely. And it's not going to be primary homeowners, right? That's the misconception. It's like these things will make it so there's going to be more primary homeowners. That is not the case. As you are, as you often remind us in these conversations, John, we need more supply to create opportunity for more primaries. The corporate landlords are going to own the rental markets in these cities. Sad. It's terrifying. I don't think it's good for landlords and it's not good for Dennett. No, it is not.

All right, well, thanks for coming and learning a little bit more about New York City's special situation. Share your horror stories below. How long did your case take if you've been involved? And what are we doing next week? Next week, we're talking about what states are the worst states to be a landlord in. And as you can probably imagine, New York is pretty high on that list because of stories just like today. So if you want to see if your state makes the list, or maybe you want to tell us that we're absolutely wrong in terms of our list, please stay tuned. Stay tuned.

Comment, smash the subscribe button, and we'll see you next time. TurboTenant is the all-in-one platform for landlords to manage their rental properties. From vacancy to tenancy, we have you covered with industry-leading tools and expert advice. Landlord better from anywhere for free at turbotenant.com.