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Author: Mark Ainely | Partner GC Realty & Development & Co-Host Straight Up Chicago Investor Podcast
I get this question every single week. Sometimes it comes from a brand new investor who just closed on a two flat. Sometimes it comes from a guy who has owned buildings for 30 years. The question is always the same and it always shows up with a little bit of anger behind it.
"Mark, the tenant has not paid me in two months. What am I allowed to do?"
Here is the honest answer. You are allowed to follow the written law. That is it. Nothing else.
I know that is not the answer anyone wants. So let me walk you through the questions I actually get asked, what happens if you do those things, and then the four moves you can make that really do work.
Key Takeaways
You cannot force a tenant out on your own in Illinois. Only a sheriff with a court order can remove someone.
You have two legal lanes. Follow the court process, or negotiate the tenant into leaving on their own. A deal is usually faster and cheaper than the courthouse.
Shutting off gas, electric, water, heat, or air conditioning is illegal even when the tenant owes you thousands of dollars.
In Chicago a lockout can cost you a fine for every single day it continues plus two months rent or twice the tenant's damages, whichever is bigger, plus their attorney fees.
Under state law, if you cut utility service to an occupied unit, the tenant can get a 100 percent rent credit for the whole time the service was off. You just wiped out the money you were chasing.
The four things that actually work are an early expectations conversation, a properly served 5 day notice, a lease release, and cash for keys.
Do not let "principle" make your decision for you. Paying a tenant $1,000 to leave when they owe you $3,500 is often the cheapest outcome available.
The Short Version
Illinois does not allow what lawyers call self help eviction. That means you cannot do anything yourself to push a person out of a unit they are living in. You go to court, you get an order, and the sheriff handles the removal. There is no shortcut, no loophole, and no clever version of this that works. The closest you can get to a loophole is investing in Wisconsin or Indiana at this point.
There is one other option and it is the one most owners skip right past. You can negotiate them out. You can talk to the tenant and get them to agree to leave on their own. That is not a loophole, it is not a workaround, and it is completely legal because the tenant is choosing to go. In my experience it is also faster and cheaper than the courthouse almost every time. There are Chicago landlords who have been doing this for 30 years and have never evicted a tenant, and it is not luck. It is because they got really good at this part.
So you really have two lanes. The legal process, or a deal. Everything else on the list below is going to cost you money.
Before I go any further, let me point out the obvious. The best way to win this fight is to never be in it. Almost every nonpayment nightmare I have watched an owner go through traces back to a screening decision that got rushed. If you screen right, you never have to worry about the rest of this article.
Download our free Chicago Tenant Screening Mastery Guide. It covers the legal updates, the application fraud and professional squatter scams we are seeing right now, and the step by step checklist our team uses on every single applicant.
Every idea below has been pitched to me by a real owner. Some of them more than once.
"Can I Turn Off The Gas And Electric?"
No.
The Chicago Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance makes it illegal to interfere with services to a unit. That covers electricity, gas, hot or cold water, plumbing, and heat. A landlord found guilty gets fined between $200 and $500, and every day the violation continues counts as a separate offense with its own fine. On top of that, if the tenant proves it in a civil case, they get their unit back and they collect either two months rent or twice their actual damages, whichever number is bigger.
Suburban Cook County has the same rule. The county anti lockout section applies to every residential rental unit with no exceptions, and it specifically names cutting off heat, utility, or water service.
Then there is state law, which is the part most owners have never heard of. The Illinois Rental Property Utility Service Act says a landlord cannot cause utility service to be interrupted in an occupied building. The penalty is a 100 percent abatement of the rent obligation for every month, prorated for part of a month, that the service was off, plus consequential damages.
Read that again. You shut the gas off for six weeks to squeeze $2,400 out of somebody, and the law hands them a free six weeks. You did not collect anything. You created a claim against yourself.
"What About Squatters? Somebody Told Me You Are Not Supposed To Do It Even Then."
Correct. Do not do it even then.
Squatters are the one place where the rules did change recently. Senate Bill 1563 was signed in July 2025 and took effect on January 1, 2026. It draws a clear line between lawful tenants and unlawful squatters and allows Illinois police to enforce criminal trespass against a true squatter instead of forcing the owner into a long civil eviction. The law confirms that officers can remove unauthorized occupants when a criminal trespass has happened, without the owner filing an eviction case.
That sounds like a big win. In practice it has been uneven. A report published this month looked at the first six months of the law. A representative from the Lake County Sheriff's Office said essentially nothing had changed. A source working with the Cook County Sheriff's Office said Chicago is still getting the same volume of squatter calls, while suburban municipalities have been better about getting people back out.
So here is how I treat it. If someone broke into a vacant unit and has no lease and never had permission, call the police, bring your proof of ownership, and let them handle it. If the person has anything that looks like a lease, a rent receipt, mail, or a claim that you let them in, you are back in eviction court. And in either case, you still do not touch the utilities or the locks. Turning off the power on a squatter is a great way to turn your trespasser into a tenant with a lawsuit.
"Can I Have The Water Shut Off?"
Same answer. Water is named right in the ordinance and it is the one that gets you the fastest habitability complaint. In Chicago you also have a heat requirement running from September 15 through June 1, so cutting heat in the winter adds a code violation on top of the lockout claim.
There is one more wrinkle owners forget. If the water account is in your name, shutting it off can put a lien or a bill on the property, not on the tenant. You are punishing your own asset.
"It Is 95 Degrees Out. Can I Disconnect The AC And Sweat Them Out?"
I have been asked this in July more times than I care to admit.
No. Pulling the AC is interfering with services and rendering the unit less habitable, which is exactly what the ordinance prohibits. And this one carries a risk that has nothing to do with money. If a senior, a child, or someone with a medical condition is in that unit during a heat wave and something happens, you are no longer arguing about a $500 fine. You are in a personal injury case with a document trail showing you did it on purpose.
Do not create a paper trail proving intent. That is the whole ballgame in these cases.
"Old School Guys Used To Remove The Front Door Until The Tenant Paid. Can I Do That?"
They did do it. It worked at the time because nobody enforced anything. It does not work now.
This is part of the reason why the Chicago RLTO was put in place for these bad actors. The ordinance was passed by City Council in September of 1986 under Mayor Harold Washington, and the biggest rewrite of it came in 1991. Pulling a door off a unit with a family living inside is exactly the behavior it was written to stop. Every one of us who owns rental property in this city lives with those rules today because a handful of owners decided that was an acceptable way to collect rent.
Removing a door or a window is spelled out in the ordinance right next to changing the locks and blocking the entrance. Plugging locks, adding locks, hauling the tenant's belongings to the curb, pulling the stove or the refrigerator, all of it lands in the same bucket. Only the sheriff's office can enforce a court order to evict a tenant.
And in Chicago the police are required to investigate a lockout complaint when they get one. So the neighbor with a cell phone camera is not a small problem.
What You Can Actually Do
Now the useful part. There are four plays. I have used all four.
1. Have The Expectations Conversation Early
The best tool you have is a conversation on day 6 to day 10, not day 60. Give the tenant a little grace first. Rent is late on the 1st, people have direct deposits that hit funny, and nobody needs a phone call on day 2. But once you are a week to a week and a half in with no money and no explanation, that is your window.
The script I use is simple and it never changes:
"I can work with you. Tell me what is realistic. If you can get me half by the 15th and the rest by the 30th, I will hold off. But I need you to hear the other part. If we hit the 30th and there is nothing, I will serve you and I will follow the legal process. I am not going to threaten you and then not do it."
Two things happen when you talk like that. Some tenants pay, because you gave them a plan instead of a fight. And the ones who are not going to pay tell you early, usually by going quiet, and you stop burning months hoping.
Put whatever you agree to in writing, even if it is just a text message. Keep it friendly and keep it specific with real dates and real dollar amounts.
2. When That Date Comes, Serve The 5 Day Notice The Right Way
The 5 day notice is your notice for nonpayment of rent in Illinois. The form matters, but service matters more.
Before I get into how to serve it, let me say something about the clock. We always hear that evictions take 9 months in Cook County. I hear it at every meetup I go to. But that same investor forgets to mention that he waited until day 90 to serve the 5 day notice. He spent three months sending text messages, accepting promises, and hoping it would work itself out. The court did not take 9 months. He took the first 3 and the court took the rest.
Your clock does not start when the tenant stops paying. It starts the day you serve. So serve on the date you told them you would serve.
Under state law you have these options: hand the notice to the tenant, leave it with a person age 13 or older who lives on or is in possession of the premises, send it by certified or registered mail with a return receipt from the addressee, or post it on the premises only when nobody is in actual possession.
Two corrections to what I hear repeated at meetups. The age is 13, not 14. And certified mail with a return receipt is on the list, though I still prefer hand delivery because the green card coming back signed is not always something you can count on.
Posting on the door when someone is living there is the mistake that forces eviction cases to get dismissed and makes the landlord start over and pay more court fees. Under the door does not count either.
So hand deliver it yourself as the owner, or hire a process server. In Chicago a server runs around $95. That is the cheapest insurance in this entire process. Whoever serves it should complete and keep an affidavit of service with the date, the time, and who they handed it to. Also check your lease, because some leases specify a service method and the judge will hold you to it.
If the tenant pays the full amount inside those 5 days, the lease continues and you move on.
3. Offer To Let Them Out Of The Lease
A lot of tenants who stop paying already know they cannot afford the place. They are staying because they think leaving early gets them sued.
Take that fear off the table. Offer a mutual release. They give you a firm move out date, they leave the unit broom clean, they hand you the keys, and you release them from the rest of the lease term. In a lot of cases I will waive the outstanding balance as part of it.
You are giving up money you were probably never going to collect anyway. What you get back is a unit you can rent again in weeks instead of months.
4. Cash For Keys
This is the one that makes owners the angriest and saves them the most money.
You hand the tenant a check to leave. Yes, the person who owes you money. Yes, you pay them.
Run the math instead of running your emotions:
Cash for keys
Out of pocket: $1,000 to the tenant
Balance owed to you: $3,500, likely uncollectable either way
Additional lost rent: roughly 2 to 4 weeks
Condition of the unit: usually better, because they cooperated
Your time: a few conversations
Full eviction
Out of pocket: attorney fees, filing fees, and service fees
Balance owed to you: $3,500, likely uncollectable either way
Additional lost rent: often 2 to 4 more months
Condition of the unit: frequently worse
Your time: court dates and follow up
Paying $1,000 to somebody who owes you $3,500 feels like losing. It is not. Handing back the keys three months sooner on a $1,600 unit is $4,800 of rent you get to earn. The $3,500 was already gone the day they stopped paying.
I will say this as plainly as I can. Do not let principle cloud your thinking when you are trying to get someone out. Principle is expensive. I have watched owners spend $6,000 proving a point about $2,000.
A few rules I learned the hard way, and I wrote a whole article about the $2,500 version of my own lesson:
Get the agreement in writing before anybody moves anything.
Never hand over physical cash.
Pay after the unit is empty, after you have walked it, and after you have the keys in your hand. Not before.
Confirm every person on the lease is signing off.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I file the eviction myself without an attorney? You can, and small owners do it all the time. I still recommend an eviction attorney in Cook County. The notice and service rules are technical and one small error sends you back to the start.
How long does an eviction take in Cook County right now? It moves in stages and the total depends on the court calendar. One source working with the Cook County Sheriff's Office recently reported that overall filings are down and the time from an eviction order being entered to the actual lockout has improved from 6 to 8 weeks down to 3 to 4 weeks. That is the last step only, not the whole case.
Can I keep the security deposit and apply it to the unpaid rent? Deposits come with strict rules in Illinois and stricter ones in Chicago, including timelines and required itemization. Do not treat a deposit like a rent payment without getting the accounting right first.
Can I refuse a partial payment? Be careful here. Accepting rent after you serve a notice can undo the notice depending on the circumstances. Talk to your attorney before you take a partial payment in the middle of the process.
What if the tenant has an emotional support animal or a Section 8 voucher? Neither one changes the nonpayment process, but both add rules layered on top of it. Voucher cases in particular have extra notice requirements to the housing authority.
Is any of this different outside of Chicago? Yes. Chicago has its own ordinance, suburban Cook County has its own ordinance, and many municipalities have licensing rules on top of that. The anti lockout rules are the one area that is consistent everywhere. You cannot do it anywhere in Illinois.
Don't Go At This Alone!
At GC Realty & Development we manage roughly 1,500 units across more than 100 municipalities in Chicagoland for over 500 private investors. That means our team has sat in these exact conversations hundreds of times. We know which judges want what, which process servers show up, and when cash for keys beats a courtroom.
Our mission is simple. We help investors buy their time back and lower their risk so owning rental property feels like an investment instead of a second job. You do not have to figure out notice service or squatter law by trial and error. That is what we are here for.
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The information provided here is for informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney about your specific situation.
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