Eviction judgment enforcement case study: From good to meet you to 5 star review -

Sit back and enjoy a story of unpaid rent, evictions, and judgment enforcement spanning 3 years.

For many of our landlord clients, they've never collected on their eviction judgments before hiring us. They might have only had one or two evictions ever. We wanted to write out the details of this one case as an illustration. This isn't a "Look at our $125 MILLION DOLLAR!" case. This is about a landlord that has only one rental property. The landlord only ever evicted a single person.

Key facts (slightly edited to protect confidentiality):

• 10/10/2022 - Eviction law firm secured eviction including a judgment for $6300 in unpaid rent plus costs for a total of $7,700 at 12%

• 12/29/2022 Landlord hires Garnishment Gurus Law Firm to enforce the judgment.

• 12/30/2022 first garnishment created.

• June 2025, final payment received. Case closed!

  
  

Total payments (roughly):

• $12,000

  • $2,700 in "costs" including $2,100 in additionally awarded attorney fees

  • $1,600 in interests

What happened? The tenants began refusing to pay rent. From the time of initial rent payment being missed until the time that the eviction Court was able to hear the matter a few months of rent accrued. A relatively quick unlawful detainer proceeding secured the possession and the judgment.

The landlord contacted us at the recommendation of his eviction attorney. The landlord had never gone through the collection process and wasn't quite sure the best way to go. Considering the debtor was a tenant with, at best, moderate income the only viable economic means to recovery was wage garnishment

The first writ of garnishment went out at the end of 2022 once employment was located. The employer had a professional payroll processor. Things went smoothly enough, but a payroll processor does not guarantee correctness. About $1280 was recovered on around $80 of costs.

Numerous other writs followed. By the time the case concluded in mid 2025 a total of 8 garnishments had occurred. Significant time between each case resulted from the employer changing its internal policies and requiring extensive coaxing and numerous corrections. On average each garnishment recovered a bit under $1,500.

By the time it was all over, our landlord-client's $7,700 judgment took almost 3 years of collecting. We recovered approximately $12,000 with approximately $600 in hard costs such as mail and court costs. After attorney fees, the client was made effectively whole.

If you are a landlord that has an eviction judgment that remains unpaid, then contact us today. Let's see if we can collect it for you. You can also call us at 253-212-0353.