Sean Hannity owns an impressive portfolio of apartment buildings in working class neighborhoods in Georgia and he is a slumlord, par excellence. He grinds the money out and cuts no slack whatsoever. Washington Post:
“I was told that if someone’s rent was short $2, I couldn’t accept it,” she [property manager] said, recalling an issue that arose with a particular tenant. “I thought it was ridiculous.”
You can’t be a dollar short, and they’ll come after you long before you’re thirty days late.
… a Washington Post analysis shows that managers at Hannity’s four largest apartment complexes in Georgia have taken an unusually aggressive approach to rent collection. They have sought court-ordered evictions at twice the statewide rate — in a state known for high numbers of evictions and landlord-friendly laws — and frequently have done so less than two weeks after a missed payment.
Among the tenants Hannity’s property managers sought to evict, records show, were a former corrections officer and her wife, who fell behind while awaiting a disability determination; a double amputee who had lived in an apartment with her daughter for five years but did not pay on time after being hospitalized; and a single mother of three whose $980 rent check was rejected because she could not come up with a $1,050 cleaning fee for a bedbug infestation.
St. Sean is running a ship this tight to gouge extra money out of his tenants. It’s not enough that he makes $36Million a year as a talking head on Fox News and gets a fair return of return on his rental properties by anybody’s standards. He wants more.
Told of The Post’s findings, three experts said the pattern suggests that the threat of eviction is being used not just to remove tenants but also to generate revenue.
“When they are serially filing against the same tenants, they are using the courts as collection agencies,” said Susan Reif, head of the Eviction Prevention Project at the publicly funded Georgia Legal Services Program. “It appears they are just trying to increase their profit margin by demanding fees under the threat of being evicted from your home.”
In conducting the analysis, The Post consulted with Matthew Desmond, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” and head of the Eviction Lab, a project at Princeton University to build the first national database of evictions. Court actions against tenants at Hannity’s properties stand out, Desmond said, and at one property, they were “orders of magnitude bigger” than what researchers have found in any county in Georgia.
Slumlord Sean didn’t respond to the Post’s request for comment and a spokesman said that evictions were only filed for when there was a material breach of the contract, bla bla, but you don’t have to read very diligently to get what is hidden between the lines. Greed, plain and simple.
