You make it very clear to the tenant that rent SHALL be paid in all conditions, regardless if they have a job or not. They are bond by their rental lease to pay you. Any leniency from you will cause you big trouble down the road.

I expect they won’t pay you next month. Here is what you do. After 5 days, write a letter and warn them about the late fee if they missed the payment on the 10th of the month. (if your lease doesn’t have late penalty written, then you may not ask for late fee). After the 10th if rent is still not received, call them and demand their rent to hand delivered or Fedex to you immediately and must be received in ONE DAY. By the end of 11th, you must be ready to go to court on the 12th to file a complaint for non payment of rent.

Once the complaint is filed in court, you will receive a date for court appearance about 3 weeks later. No need to talk to the tenant any more once the complaint is filed. Wait for the court date, most likely the tenant will not appear, then you will win the case. Even if the tenant show up, most probably you will win because they don’t have much execuse for not paying rent. Once the order is signed by the judge, you wait for 5 days to apply for Writ to evict. You may receive it on the same day and contact Police (or marshall or Constable) to schedule eviction date. Never tell tenant about it. Give them a surprise eviction with police presense. In many cases, the tenant will pay you the back rent and you can stop the eviction and drop the suit.

As soon as they stopped paying you again, follow the same process and start the whole process over again.

A brief introduction of how to evict bad tenant

First answer your confusion. Your Writ that was issued by the court has legal power to evict the tenant. Issuance of Writ means that tenant is in fault for whatever reason that caused you to sue them in the first place. Most common cause is non payment of rent. If that’s the case, the ONLY recourse for tenant to avoid being evicted is by paying the owed rent to you before the actual eviction. Once they paid in full, you can call the Marshall to stop eviction immediately.

In your case, it was YOUR MISTAKE to not arrange Marshall (or police) to start eviction process. That was your lack of understanding legal process. Please contact the police immediately. The court can privide phone number for Eviction department of your local Police. Usually, police will set a date of eviction about 3 weeks after the Writ order was issued. Therefore it’s your responsibility to call them as early as you can to schedule it. The later you do this, the longer the tenant stays in your house, the greater the financial loss you suffer.

In the case of non payment of rent, tenant cannot stop eviction by starting a new suit in court. The only saving action by tenant is paying you the rent, late fees and court awarded fees in full. No other measures by tenant can stop you from evicting them.

At this stage, please don’t worry about their suit, they may not have merit anyway. Focus on scheduling the Marshall to come ASAP to evict them. Remember, never tell your tenant when the Marshall will come, even if you know the prescheduled date. You want a surprise eviction on that date, so that tenant doesn’t have time to get mad and potentially damage your house.
Never perform self-eviction. Police presence is REQUIRED by law.