Our Newcastle based Landlord client had a property portfolio that included a number of varying-sized residential properties throughout the region along with some commercial units. At one of his fully furnished residential properties he was reaching the end of his tether with his tenant, a female in her late twenties that we’ll call ‘Carol’.

‘Carol’ was behind in her rent by months and starting to ignore our client’s attempts to get in touch with her and facilitate payment. Things had reached such a point that an eviction notice had been served and ‘Carol’ was required to pack up and leave.

Two weeks before ‘Carol’ was mandated to leave, our client was contacted by one of his other tenants who held a property in the same stretch as ‘Carol’. They reported that the door to her flat had been open for two days and it didn’t look like it was occupied in any capacity anymore. Our client attended, pushed open the door and could see that the property had been vacated by ‘Carol’…

… And not only that but she had taken all of the furnishings that came with the flat with her. Completely. Everything – beds, wardrobes, kitchen fixtures and fittings, paintings off the wall, the lot! The flat was barren and ‘Carol’ was nowhere to be found. The police were informed, a report was taken but it went nowhere.

We were contacted by our client and asked to trace ‘Carol’, to try and gain any understanding of whether the furnishings were still in her possession or whether they’d been sold on and to establish enough secure intelligence on her current location in order to begin legal proceedings against her.

Electronic tracing gave us an immediate location to complete enquiries upon and we were quickly able to establish that ‘Carol’ did indeed live there. We completed a period of surveillance, capturing her coming and going from the address and then facilitated invited entry into her address whilst a covert camera filmed our interaction.

We then reviewed the footage we had captured and compared the recorded surroundings against the list provided to us by our client of the goods and furnishings that belonged to them. We were able to account for the presence of a large swath of it through our recording.

We provided a report and the footage to our client which was then passed onto the police who decided to act upon our findings. ‘Carol’ was visited within 48 hours of the police receiving the evidence and subsequently arrested.

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