Episode 202: Barking Dog Nightmare Case Study - When your Code Enforcement Does Nothing with Mike Daniels
Summary
If you close your eyes and think of what gets your anxiety up, instantly, I bet that doesn’t feel very good. But what happens if what triggers you and your family is a bad neighbor and your landlord will do nothing about it. Even worse, what if the trigger is a constantly barking dog on your neighbor’s property….and what happens if this is going on both sides of where you’re trying to live? My guest today is a long-time tenant and has a case study to share with us on what happened when his related-to-him landlords worked to protect his quiet enjoyment, all with code enforcement not acting. Mike Daniels gives us the goods.
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This Week’s Blog Post:
Welcome to My Life As A Landlord, where we educate curious US and Canadian landlords, answer rental questions, and clear up confusions about all things housing. I'm your host, Doctor Jennifer Salisbury. Today I'm excited to have Mike Daniels on the show with me to talk about triggering events as a tenant. Full disclosure, Mike has been our mentee for a long time, he's been our tenant multiple times, and he's our current tenant now.
The Barking Dog Situation Begins
Two days into Mike's current tenancy, there was a barking dog behind our house here, and it totally triggered him. Mike was fresh off of a situation that he dealt with pretty extensively at another rental when he was back in Michigan visiting family. Once he started hearing the consistency and the cadence and the pattern, he went into operation mode, thinking about how early in the morning it was, how late at night it was, how consistent it was. It brought about this doom and gloom moment where he was wondering how he was going to change someone's behavior when he has a hard enough time changing his own behavior, let alone their dog.
Michigan Rental with Five Barking Dogs
The house in Michigan was with Cameo's parents, a single family home they picked up as a foreclosure in 2011 in southeastern Michigan in Oakland County. It's a beautiful area around a lake, but there was no fence on their lot, and neighbors had fences on both sides with two dogs on one side and three dogs on the other side. Mike works from home, Cameo is a stay at home mom and homeschool teacher, and they realized they had a situation on their hands where these dogs were barking all day long at everything. Mike politely introduced himself to the neighbors, saying if his dogs were ever barking to let him know, and initially it landed extremely well with one neighbor who actually put barking collars on her dogs. But then there was a night they had a bonfire and were making noise until midnight, and after Mike asked them to take it inside, the relationship totally fractured and the debarking collars came off the dogs.
When Code Enforcement Fails and Things Escalate
Mike reached out to animal control for the daytime stuff and Oakland County sheriff for the evening stuff, but it was incredibly difficult to get good traction because one of the neighbors already had a relationship with the code enforcement officer and actually already had his number in her phone. Calling the police on somebody takes things so far past reasonable so quick because you have uniformed agents outside their home knocking on their door, and there's a stigma when neighbors see other neighbors call the police on each other. Mike went from having one person he lost a relationship with to two, and then quickly that was like 3 or 4 in short order because they all kind of knew each other. He tried anti-barking devices from Amazon, setting up a perimeter along the fence, which knocked the barking down maybe 20 or 30%, but the neighbors thought they were game cams and that Mike was recording them, so the cops got called on him.
Property Lines, Surveys, and Escalating Costs
The situation escalated to having a survey done because the neighbors were questioning what was Mike's property. The survey was $4,500, and they realized that one of the neighbors had encroaching structures and their fence was actually on Mike's property. They had to have a fence crew come through and remove the neighbor's fence, set up their own fence, and the neighbor had a temporary structure and a whole garden that had to come up. The chain link fence just around the three sides was around $12,000, plus the anti-barking devices, ring cameras with motion on all sides, and all these numbers added up pretty quick. One neighbor, Stacy, was eventually served a trespass warning for taking pictures of Mike's backyard and his kid, which completely broke her desire to keep fighting. The other neighbor, Haley, continued with barking dogs even up until the point Mike moved, and the code enforcement guy was nowhere to be seen.
Lessons Learned and Moving Forward
The main takeaway from all of this is that it comes down to ownership and accountability. Mike became very good at using AI like ChatGPT and Grok to aggregate information regarding his specific location, who to contact, and the best way to handle things. He realized that sometimes taking things into your own hands is not a bad thing—you always start off with a neighborly conversation, and if things don't work there, then you go to the formal channels, but ultimately he was going to contact a lawyer and serve a demand letter citing those ordinances and take it civil. Quiet enjoyment of a property is implied, and pursuing that is a noble pursuit. As landlords, if you still can't enjoy your home as a quiet place that you can actually live and function, then what is it that we are offering? Real estate takes you places. Where do you want real estate to take you?