A landlord's 2-year, $80,000 effort to evict a non-paying tenant

Peter Avitabile sat in his pickup truck outside his Rockland townhouse — a place he hadn't set foot in for two years — fuming about the tenant who refused to pay rent and refused to leave.

“God forbid someone pay to live in their property,” Avitabile said, staring at the front door of the apartment he first rented to the tenant in November of 2020.

 “I paid for this woman to live there for two years now, on my own dime, and I'm probably never going to see that money again.”

With sky-high rents and a lack of affordable housing, it can be hard to have sympathy for landlords.

Massachusetts has instituted strong protections against unscrupulous property owners, but it can feel next to impossible to reclaim an apartment from a tenant who won't follow the rules.

(Peter Avitabile's townhouse on Boxberry Lane in Rockland. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Avitabile, 34, has felt the weight of the system ever since his first go at being a landlord.

He was living in that Rockland townhouse, south of Boston, when he met his future wife.

They decided to buy a single-family home, where they’d raise the baby that was on the way.

And they’d hang on to the townhouse as an investment.

"We'd either rent it out, or we could sell it later on down the line," he said, "obviously hoping that it would appreciate in value."

At first, everything went as planned. They leased the apartment to a local hospital worker, Cassandra Schnider, with decent references.

 But in late 2021, she started missing rent payments, and by July 2022, Avitabile was out five months rent at $2,100 a month. And he couldn’t get Schnider to respond to calls or emails.

He went to housing court to get Schnider evicted.

It took Avitabile nine months of legal proceedings and lawyer’s fees to win an eviction. Then, Schnider appealed.

But less than a week before the scheduled move-out, an appeals judge put the eviction on hold. Schnider had 10 days to start paying rent.

Those 10 days went by with no payment, and yet the case lingered for another seven months.

Finally, in November 2023, the appeals judge ruled in Avitabile's favor.

Ref: A landlord's 2-year, $80,000 effort to evict a non-paying tenant (wbur)

Photo Credit- Jesse Costa/WBUR