Using an unlawful detainer action to evict a family member from your home
Attorney Tom Olsen: Chrissy, listeners may know that we videotape each one of these radio shows and then every Monday I cut them up into short videos, one legal question, one legal answer, and I always monitor and by the way, through our YouTube channel, LawTube channel, on there we have over a million views and a thousand subscribers, so I'm very pleased about that and I get to monitor what videos people watch the most over the history of all the videos and people might be surprised that the number one video watched over all time is something like, how do I make a family member move out of my home?
Attorney Chris Merrill: Yes, wow.
Tom: Apparently it's a problem out there. It's called an unlawful detainer is what you have to do, so it's not a tenant eviction because if your son or brother or sister or niece, nephew is living in your home, they're not necessarily a tenant. You can't just follow the landlord tenant laws to evict somebody. It's called an unlawful detainer and we can do that here at our office through Attorney Caleb Maggio.
Chris: Absolutely. Thank you for saying that, Tom, because of course I'm sure our listeners out there may be surprised to hear again of all the thousands of videos that we do and again, these are real people with real legal questions and we prepare videos of each one of these. That again is very interesting that the number one is about how to get the family member out of the house and in addition to though, the unlawful detainer, we also have the ability where we can do evictions.
As landlords out there, if you are in a situation where you're having a tough time getting paid rent from a tenant or there's any issues with your tenants, you can give us a call 407-423-5561 and we have the attorneys here to be able to help you to take care of those issues and potentially do an eviction for you.
Tom: Chrissy, it's not unusual for us to have somebody call us and say, yes, I've got a family member living in my home and I can't get him to move out. I think I'm just going to call the police or call the sheriff's office and get them to make this relative move out and no, they're not going to do that for you. There's nothing automatic about it as people might think. You've got to go through a legal process and the end result of that legal process, whether it's a tenant eviction or an unlawful detainer action is that you will get a court order and that court order will order that person to move out and within 24 hours.
Then in that situation, 24 hours later, if that relative or that tenant has not moved out, then the police or the sheriff, they will assist you not to literally pick up furniture and put it on the curb, but they will stay there, keep the peace while you bring in your locksmith to change the locks and while you bring in your people to put the tenants and the relative stuff out on the curb.
Chris: Exactly.
Tom: Occasionally you might be driving down the road and you'll see a pile of stuff on the curb and you go, well, that looks a little bit too good for somebody just to be thrown away. It's probably just because they evicted somebody and it's that when you evict somebody, when you evict a tenant and you change the locks, it doesn't mean that the tenant's possessions belong to you. Your obligation is to put it out on the curb and what happens to them from there is not your responsibility. That's good news.
If you need help to evict your tenant for nonpayment of rent or if you've got a tenant who's not complying with the terms of the lease, they got a pet in there and your lease says no pets, or if you got a family member that's living in your home and you want to know how to get them out or start the process to legally get them out of your home, Olson Law Group can assist you with that here in Orlando. Call us anytime, 407-423-5561 or go through our website olsonlawgroup.com. Hey folks, we're going to take a break. We'll be back in just a few minutes. You're listening to Olson Law on News Radio WFLA.
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