How to Deal with Tenants and Tame Tenant Turmoil
by Julie Broad
"I hate it! I absolutely hate it. I just don't know why he would do it that way. Now when my garage door is
open I have to make sure my child doesn't wander into the alley and get hit by a car. It's just not safe now. I
feel so exposed. I don't know why you didn't consult with me about it. I have no privacy now. It's totally ruined
my back yard."
I wish that were the entire diatribe but it wasn't. It went on and on. I tried to patiently let her finish but I
eventually felt my frustration rise and interrupted with "I thought you were only going to use it to store a
boat - I didn't realize your daughter would be playing in the garage every day."
Which just caused the above sentiments to be repeated with more detail as to what the garage would now be used for
in addition to storing the boat.
I realized I was letting my emotions get in the way of this conversation and forced myself to shut up and
take a deep breath.
What had happened was our tenant had moved into a home of ours that had a garage off the back lane way that was
fenced off. When she moved in we acknowledged that if she wanted to use the garage for something other than just a
workshop (which is what it had been used for to date) we would put a gate in the backyard for her.
Turns out creating a gate was not going to be as simple as we thought. The driveway was upward slanting toward the
garage (making inward opening of a gate challenging), the fence was not a good size to be easily hinged and turned
into a gate, and there were posts in all the wrong places. It was basically going to require a rebuild of the back
fence to make it work and the purchase of a gate. If you're going to go to all that trouble, to me, you should put
in something that will be easy to use not something you have to get out of your car and drag open manually whenever
you want to go in and out. And, we weren't going to spend the thousands and thousands of dollars that it would cost
to do that.
After looking at what other folks on the lane had done, I decided to simply move the fence to open up the
garage.
The whole thing took our carpenter half a day to do and less than $100 in materials. And I thought it looked
great.
Our tenant, however, did not.
But by the end of the conversation she had calmed down and was thanking me for getting her access to the garage so
quickly and she apologized for freaking out.
So how did that happen?
 I have to thank some precious advice I
took from Dale Carnegie's book "How to Win Friends and Influence People".
In his book he says "I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get
the best of an argument - and that is to avoid it."
So how do you avoid an argument?
It's not easy - believe me - every bone in my body was getting defensive, my temperature was rising and I was
feeling myself change from a calm state to an agitated one. And, like I said, I actually did have an uncontrolled
outburst but I quickly got myself under control and remembered the lessons I've been learning from Dale Carnegie,
Brian Tracy and Robert B. Cialdini and others. I bit my tongue and let her speak.
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