Just as with other areas of life, even property owners and the inhabitants of their properties do not always agree upon rental agreement contracts, living conditions, rent payment amounts, and what constitutes a violation of the lease agreement. When landlords and tenants find themselves unable to agree about a situation, they may seek the courts or may first try alternative dispute resolution services with a mediator and sometimes even private investigators and process servers to help them.
All these legal professionals can offer invaluable services which can prove helpful for both property owners and tenants involved in disputes over both rental properties and those with mortgages. While the primary focus of this page will elucidate upon mediation services, we will also explore how process servers and private eyes play an integral role in helping to resolve these types of complex disputes.
Mediators are a nice alternative to civil litigation for eviction cases. Instead of having to spend time, money, and effort on hiring a process server to serve a tenant or property owner, our mediators are here and ready to help people wanting a method of alternative dispute resolution that does not involve judges, bailiffs, process servers, etc. This is a terrific way to help both sides come away as winners, with both parties compromising and getting stuff they want while helping the other side(s) get things they want as well.
Assuming both parties in a landlord-tenant dispute are voluntarily willing to come to the mediation table and try to work things out, it will give both sides the opportunity to speak and have a neutral third party hear them in a nonjudgmental way. This person helps guide them through the alternative dispute resolution but allows both parties to make all the decisions about the outcome.
Alternative dispute resolution personnel have special training in areas like family and divorce mediations, civil and business mediations, etc. This helps give them the skills they need to conduct mediation services for clients in a professional, knowledgeable, helpful manner. Without this training, it would be like the blind leading the blind.
Some mediators are also attorneys, therapists, social workers, and private investigators, but when in the role of an Oklahoma mediator, they put those other roles aside and do not engage in multiple roles at once. This would make the person ineffective at all the multiple roles she/he/they tried to engage in simultaneously, because doing so creates a significant conflict of interest that would render the individual completely ineffective.
Property owners and tenants can sometimes get into heated disagreements over a wide range of topics. The following is a partial list of topics that our mediators in Oklahoma City often oversee when dealing with landlord-tenant dispute cases:
A professional mediator can help property owners and tenants work out the details about what each side will do, pay, how long the tenant shall continue to stay, etc., so that they may continue in the rental agreement or can at least find a suitable path for both parties to have a cleaner ending. This is done via via a document the landlord/tenant dispute mediator will provide them. It is called a Memorandum of Understanding, and they can, if needed, show this to a judge later during an eviction or other civil lawsuit process if one or both sides fail to follow the agreement. Otherwise, both parties can do all this without official court records, the need for process servers, skip tracers, judges, bailiffs, etc.
Sometimes our clients find they need more than one mediation session to fully help them resolve their disputes. This can be especially true in complicated cases involving multiple parties and more than one issue. Keep in mind that needing more than one session is okay and can indeed be a normal part of the process. Indeed, some clients might even agree on everything in one session, but then later they may decide they want more alternative dispute resolution services because additional issues arose and/or one or both parties failed to fully live up to the terms of the first Memorandum of Understanding.
Process servers come into play during disputes between property owners and their tenants, when things go south and one side needs to locate and/or serve the other with court papers, demand letters, and/or requests for mediation services. We will discuss these as follows:
Most of the time, when people hear the words “process server,” they think of someone who delivers court documents. These individuals are correct, because Oklahoma process servers deliver demand letters, notices to pay or quit, formal eviction documents, and all other kinds of legal paperwork to other people. This is their primary job, and when issues come up between property owners and their tenants, they can help relay messages and other important documents that come with the standard legal process.
A licensed process server can also run a skip trace service to help locate a fleeing tenant or other individual. They take information about the person, such as the individual’s name, date of birth or age range, Social Security Number, etc., and runs it through a special system that helps locate and track people down. Our private investigation agency can even find someone’s driver’s license number, full date of birth, and Social Security Number, if needed. That is how adept we are at skip tracing.
Most of the time, skip tracing works well and can pull up the most current address and phone number for an individual. However, if the person just moved or the newest, most up-to-date address has yet to show on it, our legal firm will happily re-run it for free once a month for the next five months without charge, if our clients just e-mail or text us a request to do so. This is the level of quality we strive for and always do our best to offer our clients. But wait, because it gets better!
Our process servers can also run nationwide civil and criminal background checks on new tenants. So, before you let anyone rent your home or office setting, our private detective agency can help you find out if they have had evictions, bankruptcies, liens, judgments, or if they have big criminal records like murders, rapes, fraud, forgery, etc. Indeed, spending some money upfront and taking the time to do proper due diligence can potentially save you big bucks and future headaches in the years ahead.
Many people do not know that the best process servers offer invaluable advantages over other methods of process service, because they lack experience with handling disputes between property owners and tenants. Since our private investigation agency in OKC has decades of experience offering a wide array of legal services, we are particularly privy to what all goes into it, what works well, and what fails miserably.
A process server offers the best alternative to the use of a sheriff or certified mailing with a return receipt, because we are faster, more accurate, make more attempts than sheriffs, do not go out in a recognizable uniform, and can also go at nighttime and on weekends. No one must sign any of the documents we bring, which is helpful because most people who receive a certified mailing from a court never sign for it. Thus, it just wastes valuable time and money and delays the court process.
Digital private investigators have many ways they can help landlords and tenants, both before renting occurs and even during mediation sessions. From social media scans to surveillance and more, the sky really is the limit!
A private eye can also run social media scans for both landlords and tenants alike. These can help both sides find out what the Internet and other social media websites have to say about an individual. Our social media private investigator is very adept at finding jailhouse photos online that can detect criminal activity, even when the person has had the records expunged from public view in court records and private databases.
Social media scans complement national civil and criminal background checks, because the two work together to provide the clearest picture of someone’s background. They take a bit more time to for our digital private detective to complete than a comprehensive civil and criminal background check does, but they are well worth the wait and help both tenants and landlords cover all their bases more thoroughly.
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