Jennifer L. Johnson, Crystal Lake Lawyer answers the following question regarding Landlord/Tenant Law: “Evicting a Tenant, How Long is it Going to Take?”
Hi, my name is Jennifer Johnson and I’m a partner here at Zanck, Coen, Wright and Saladin. I’ve been with the firm since 2005. I concentrate my area of practice in landlord-tenant law, real estate, general civil litigation, construction litigation and I also handle some traffic offenses.
First of all, I wanted to start out talking today about landlord-tenant law.
So if you’re a landlord and you’ve got a tenant that perhaps isn’t paying rent, or a tenant that’s violating portions of the lease, et cetera, then I would be able to assist you in evicting that tenant if it were to be the case. One of the most frequent questions that I get asked is, if I need to evict my tenant, how long is it going to take?
The answer is it depends. Sometimes it depends on what type of lease that you have, it depends on if they’re paying rent, it depends on if they’re violating the lease.
There are different time frames for notices in Illinois. If you get a tenant that’s not paying rent, you have to give a notice that is called a five day notice. If you get a tenant that’s violating the lease, it’s a 10 day notice and if you get a tenant that has a month to month lease that you just want to terminate the lease and be finished with that particular tenant, then you just need to do a 30 day notice.
Depending on what circumstances you’re dealing with as a landlord, you may be able to evict your tenant sooner than later. If it’s a non-payment of rent, once the five day notice is served then five days after service of that notice, we can proceed to file a lawsuit. Once a lawsuit is filed, then typically you have a court date within 7 to 14 days, provided that you can get service on your tenant and go through the required protocols under Illinois law. Then if your tenant agrees or doesn’t appear in court, then we should be able to have an eviction order within two weeks of that date, hopefully seven days of that date.
After that is done, then we may need to schedule the sheriff for an eviction. Long story short, if you’ve got a tenant that’s not paying rent, I typically advise clients that it’s anywhere from four to six weeks to have the final order of eviction entered.
Jennifer L. Johnson can be reached at (815) 459-8800 ext 652 and [email protected]
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