OKLAHOMA CITY — Malcolm Hill’s 9-year-old daughter uses a nebulizer and takes Flovent twice daily for her chronic asthma. Hill knows the conditions of his Del City rental house exacerbate her health problems. Mushrooms grow from the carpet of his twins’ bedroom. The family’s bathroom can’t be scrubbed clean of the moldy grout and rotted drywall.
Hill and his wife have requested maintenance from Oakwood to remedy the hazardous health conditions for months. Tired of waiting, Hill had a company assess the damage. In June, GraceF Construction gave Hill a bid on the repairs that totaled more than $5,000.
Hill said the repairs still haven’t been properly made.
Despite the company’s apparent maintenance neglect, Oakwood has filed evictions against Hill and his wife, Laquita, seven times since April.
“They don’t want to fix anything,” Hill said. “Instead, they want to take me to court every month.”
Hill was among about a dozen Oakwood tenants in eviction court on March 25, many of whom also have been repeatedly evicted by the company.
One tenant takes a ride service from her Midwest City rental house to the Oklahoma County District Courthouse almost monthly. This month, she faced her 22nd eviction from Oakwood.
“It’s like I’m forced to stay,” she said. “What else am I going to do? I’m probably not going to be able to get anyplace else with these evictions on my record.”
Her adult daughter was also evicted this month, though the two signed an addendum in August removing the daughter from the lease.
In 2024, Oakwood Property Management led the state in evictions, filing more than 550 cases against tenants. Oakwood also has the distinction of being the state’s most prolific serial evictor.
Oklahoma court records show Oakwood has a passel of more than 100 tenants who were repeatedly evicted last year – some were filed on almost every month.
Property managers such as Oakwood use evictions as a rent-collection tactic, filing month after month against the same behind-on-rent tenants, burdening small claims dockets with dozens of eviction cases that will be dismissed when tenants make payments.
Tenants who experience serial eviction often can’t get caught up on rent and the extra fees assessed with each filing. The tenants are stuck; with a record full of eviction cases, they are unlikely to be approved to rent elsewhere.
Serial evictions an unexpected trend
Eviction Lab researchers spotted the trend while analyzing 80 million evictions in 2014.
“We found that nearly one-third of households facing eviction in 2014 were filed against repeatedly at the same address,” Eviction Lab wrote on its website. “We also show that these serial eviction filings were more common in mid-range rental markets – areas with rents between $1,200 and $2,000 per month – and in counties that made the legal process of eviction fast and cheap.”
Data from the Oklahoma Policy Institute shows that in 2024, 3,831 Oklahoma tenants were evicted two or more times.
Oklahoma Policy Institute and Legal Aid Services Oklahoma regularly scour court records, collecting data on which landlords file the most eviction cases and which tenants are being serially evicted.
“Filing multiple times against a family usually indicates that landlords are using the eviction process as a debt collection tool,” said Eric Hallett, a staff attorney and coordinator of housing advocacy at Legal Aid Services Oklahoma.
Some serial-evicting landlords profit from their tenants’ inability to pay, collecting eviction fees prohibited by the Oklahoma Residential Landlord and Tenant Act.
The Oklahoma City Housing Authority, which owns and manages 2,700 public housing units, filed 194 eviction cases in 2024, landing at sixth-highest in the state. But OCHA only filed repeatedly on one tenant.
High numbers of eviction lawsuits don’t always indicate aggressive eviction practices; some landlords own more units than others, so more evictions are necessary.
Oakwood Property Management, for example, manages hundreds of low-income rental properties, including about 20 apartment complexes and an unknown number of rental houses. Oakwood Property Management and the rental properties are owned by Isaac Williams, who did not respond to Oklahoma Watch’s repeated calls and emails.
The number of rental properties Williams owns is obfuscated by the fact that, according to the Oklahoma secretary of state, Williams owns more than 40 limited liability companies. The Oklahoma County assessor’s website shows that those LLCs own about 15 rental houses each.
To make tracking Oakwood’s eviction activity trickier, the cases are filed using company name variations. The Oklahoma State Court Network website requires users to input exact names to return results, so unknown naming variations effectively hide some public records.
“The plaintiff in an eviction filing is typically not the landlord (property owner), but instead a limited liability company owned by the landlord that is unique to each property,”
Oklahoma Policy Institute Research Director Anthony Flores said. “These LLCs act to both limit the landlord’s legal liability and hide their identity.”
Little recourse outside of court
Legal Aid Services Oklahoma is working a case in Tulsa County for a tenant who has been charged a $250 eviction fee more than 10 times by her property manager. At a hearing, LASO argued that the court should count those fees toward prepaid rent, but the judge sided with the landlord. The tenant is appealing.
The legality of the $250 eviction fee is questionable, Hallet said, but Oklahoma’s lack of oversight of the state’s low-income housing rental industry allows landlords to operate autonomously.
“It’s just part of the current climate in housing, where in places like Oklahoma, which have such poor tenant protections and no real oversight on these debt issues, landlords can get away with it,” Hallett said.
A section of the Oklahoma Residential Landlord and Tenant Act outlines fees that can be charged to evicted tenants: eviction filing fees ($58 in Oklahoma), court fees (about $10), the cost of serving notices and attorney fees. Most Oakwood eviction cases investigated by Oklahoma Watch were filed and settled without the assistance of attorneys.
Tenants can be ordered to pay costs incurred by plaintiffs bringing eviction cases, but prohibits further fees.
Hallett said many property managers include lease clauses about additional eviction fees, like those the Tulsa tenant was charged.
“Unless they choose to bring a lawsuit, most tenants are without any recourse,” Hallett said.
“You know, when they get hit with these fees, they either can accept them or they can move out.”
Oakwood tenants said they pay $103 for each eviction, plus a $25 late fee. Without an online portal or app to view their accounts, the renters say tracking the charges is challenging.
Oakwood tenants pay rent by money order, often in person at the northwest Oklahoma City office, though about half of Oakwood residents live in other cities. Several tenants said they can pay by mail but are told if they do, to add the late fee because mailed payments take up to two weeks to process.
Oakwood tenants’ only records of their payments and fees are generic handwritten receipts and copies of money orders.
Serial evictors have an oversized impact
The 15 top-evicting plaintiffs in Oklahoma County filed 2,744 evictions in 2024. In Tulsa, the top 15 filed 2,180 evictions that year. All of those plaintiffs filed multiple evictions against 20 or more tenants that year.
“You’re allowed to sue for eviction anytime anybody’s late on rent,” said Katie Dilks, executive director of the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation.
The serial-eviction model works, she said, because Oklahoma’s eviction timeline is fast and the filing fee is low. Landlords who assess even meager eviction fees can significantly boost their profit margins.
Dilks said serial evictions most often happen to people on fixed or unpredictable incomes.
“Their check just doesn’t line up with the timing of rent,” she said.
Ideally, a tenant in this situation could change the due date for their rent.
“When you have a landlord who has figured out that they’ve got this little honey pot they’re sitting on, why would they, right?” Dilks said. “There’s no incentive to do that.”
The Oklahoma Residential Landlord and Tenant Act states that landlords must bring actions such as evictions in good faith. A tenant could argue that serial eviction actions don’t meet that standard, but Dilks said she doesn’t think that argument has ever been successful.
An uncommon management style
Most Oklahoma landlords rarely evict and only do so as a last resort. Others, particularly large corporate owners and managers, use eviction as a first resort, according to The Network for Public Health Law.
Many of the 5,460 plaintiffs who filed evictions in 2024 in Tulsa and Oklahoma County were the same groups operating under various company names. Consequently,, the numbers of evictions and serial evictions each landlord or management company could be much higher than scrubbed court records suggest.
“This small number of serial evictors are really having an outsized impact on our court system and on the lives of the tenants that they have decided to trap and exploit,” Dilks said.
Republished in partnership with Oklahoma Watch under a Creative Commons license. Free Press publishes this report as a collaborative effort to provide the best coverage of state issues that affect our readers.
Heather Warlick is a reporter covering evictions, housing and homelessness for Oklahoma Watch. Contact her at (405) 226-1915 or hwarlick@oklahomawatch.org.
