Landlords say they are at their wits’ end when faced with cases of abusive tenants, often forced to undergo lengthy legal proceedings and face exorbitant expenses to evict tenants who are breaking their contracts.

Sergio Scopazzi, a landlord who, together with his wife, rents out an apartment in Marsascala, told Times of Malta of how he amassed over €1,000 in legal fees after he took to the courts to evict tenants who stopped paying their rent.

Scopazzi says that the tenants - a couple with a young daughter - moved into the apartment in September 2023, only to stop paying rent the following April.

“Eviction is the only tool I had at my disposal,” Scopazzi says, describing how he took the case to the rent regulations board, a civil court that decides upon rental disputes.

The tenants eventually vacated the property in mid-September, just as the court case was getting off the ground. By that point, they had effectively lived in the apartment rent-free for five months, Scopazzi says, although they continued to pay their utility bills.

Upon re-entering the apartment, Scopazzi says he found the apartment in disarray.

“There were no damages, but they left all manner of items behind – from clothes to children’s toys, cleaning items and household goods. The legal advice I got was not to throw the items out.”

Scopazzi says he dutifully packed the items into 20 bags that he is storing in his garage.

€9,000 out of pocket

Glorianne Bonello, who rents out a studio apartment in Swieqi, faced a similar conundrum when her tenant refused to move out after being notified that the rental contract wouldn’t be extended.

Bonello says that her tenant stopped paying rent in December 2022 and lived rent-free for 13 months, until January 2024, until they happened to misplace their keys and found themselves locked out of the apartment.

Meanwhile, Bonello took to the courts to resolve the impasse, with proceedings dragging on for the best part of 15 months.

Bonello estimates that she is almost €9,000 out of pocket in unpaid rent, legal fees and repairs to the property.

Court cases drag on

Several other landlords who spoke to Times of Malta on condition of anonymity shared similar stories.

One landlord, who asked to go by the pseudonym Isabelle, told Times of Malta that she rented a Buġibba maisonette to a family of four, only for them to suddenly stop paying their rent after a dispute over who should pay for broken lightbulbs.

Isabelle opened legal proceedings to evict them, but proceedings were delayed when court officials were unable to present the tenants with court summons, with Isabelle claiming that she believes the tenants were intentionally avoiding court officers who showed up to notify them in an attempt to delay proceedings.

She later found out through her lawyer that the same family had previously been evicted from another property for similar reasons.

“They did it before, so they knew how the system works,” she says.

She estimates that she lost some €12,000 in unpaid rent and utility bills, as well as over €2,500 in legal fees.

Meanwhile, Karl, who also asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, says that his tenant started falling behind on payments for a St Julian’s apartment that he was renting. After three months of unpaid rent, Karl visited the apartment only to find that the tenant had packed his belongings and moved out two days earlier.

When he visited the gaming company where the tenant worked, Karl was told that the tenant had left his job and moved to another country, leaving Karl €3,000 out of pocket.

These incidents shed light on a system that is seemingly struggling to keep up with the changing face of Malta’s rental market.

Eviction process ‘a slow ordeal’

Malta’s rent laws, revised in 2020 after years of discussion, attempted to regulate the rental market but generally shied away from tinkering too heavily with the eviction process.

Malta’s civil code says that a landlord can start eviction proceedings by serving the tenant with a judicial letter and demanding rent payment within a fortnight. If this fails, legal proceedings kick in, often ending up as summary proceedings in court (more commonly known as guillotine cases).

These guillotine hearings are meant to provide quick and pain-free resolution to civil disputes, within a few weeks of the case being opened and without having to resort to lengthy trials.

But landlords say that incessant court delays and backlogs mean that disputes over unpaid rent and eviction are often resolved long after the damage is done, if at all.

A recent report published by the Housing Authority said that Malta’s eviction process “remains a relatively slow ordeal”, despite some progress in recent years.

It found that eviction cases took an average of almost six months to be decided in both 2021 and 2022. The delay, it said, was largely driven by “the manifest difficulties” that the court faced in notifying tenants of legal action against them.

This is not helped by the fact that “judicial acts were served in Maltese despite the tenants being foreigners who could neither speak nor understand the language”, the report noted.

Vigilante landlords and failures

The situation has led to some volatile disputes.

Some abusive landlords have decided to take the law into their own hands, such as in the case of a couple who were locked out of their rented Siġġiewi home when their landlord cemented the front door shut, claiming they owed him €3,000 in unpaid rent and electricity bills.

But landlords argue that these cases are the exception, not the rule, pointing to how the Housing Authority’s enforcement powers are one-sided.

“The Housing Authority has the power to enter a property accompanied by police if the landlord hasn’t registered a contract or in cases of overcrowding, but not when it’s the tenant that abuses, such as staying against the landlord’s wishes. In these cases, it’s a matter for the courts,” one landlord said.

The profile of both landlords and tenants has changed over the years, landlords argue, with the rental market now dominated by individual landlords hoping to supplement their income through an additional property, rather than large-scale developers who manage multiple properties.

Housing Authority data suggests that most landlords now only own one or two properties, with a fifth of them having bought their rental properties through a buy-to-let scheme.

Meanwhile, 2021’s census shows that foreign tenants generally pay a higher rent than Maltese tenants, at €750 per month, compared to €645 for Maltese.

This, the census says, “suggests that the rental payments made by non-Maltese individuals are less uniform than those made by Maltese residents”.

In practice, this means that rents paid by foreign tenants are more likely to range wildly from the lower rents paid by low-income foreign nationals to higher rents paid by wealthier foreigners often working in gaming or financial services.

This also raises questions about how the law protects lower-income foreign tenants. While low-income Maltese tenants benefit from a safety net through social housing or housing benefits, these are not available to low-income third-country nationals, making them more likely to fall through the cracks.

Landlords say that they are inadvertently being forced to step in to carry the load, in the face of institutional gaps and poor enforcement.

“The reality is that most abusive tenants are far from social cases, and if they were, it shouldn’t be the landlord’s responsibility,” one landlord argued.

“Landlords or property owners are not charity organisations. We have worked hard for our investment. Banks will not think twice if we don’t pay our loans.”

A blacklist of bad tenants and landlords

A series of proposed changes to Malta’s rent laws are set to introduce a blacklist of tenants and landlords who have been found to have broken their rental contracts.

Landlords say they are unsure whether this will help solve the problem, although they admit that it can prevent stop repeat offenders.

But ultimately, one landlord says, “the only real solution is effective and timely action by the authorities so that the landlord can take the necessary action to curb the abuse”.